Disruptions of Post-Qualitative Education Research: Tensions and Openings

Disruption: A Thesis Needs to Follow a Linear Pathway to be Scholarly

I am looking through this (thesis) chapter and pause to play at the current title: An Introduction. The portion of the word “duct” acknowledges the movement I want to write with. I see the word “into” Oh, I have omitted the letter “r.” Where has it gone? Is “r” suspended on a river, washing wayward in the rain, swallowed up by Lawson Street as it stretches out the kitchen window toward the ocean? Or perhaps the “r” has transformed along with the emerging research? (Crinall, 2016)

There is a dominant thesis structure in qualitative education research that can be difficult to bypass the linear pathway of expectations and rules. The number of “how to” write a thesis books in the marketplace is a testament to this. Honan and Bright (2016) note prior to 2001, there were no templates for writing a qualitative thesis and now library shelves full of “how to guides” are peppered with neoliberal thinking, focussed on outcomes. As post-researchers search for theories and practices of inquiry that expand poststructuralist notions of the social toward material and more-than-human agentic realms of existence (Barad, 2007; Latour, 2014), it is inevitable new ways are being sought. This requires continuous balancing so that post-qualitative inquiry does not become “another isolated fortress of righteousness” (Rautio, 2021, p. 228).

Qualitative inquiry was invented, as social and humanist scholars conjured qualitative styles of research to disrupt neopositivism’s grasp on research when it was dangerously informing education policy with rigidity and generalization (St. Pierre, 2021). Post-qualitative research is also invented. Designed to dissipate the rules and structures that were beginning to make qualitative research itself now rigid. Philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze at this time were already findings ways to decentre the human, when scholars Lather and St. Pierre (2013) contributed to a special issue of Qualitative Studies in Education where they wrote of the imperative to disrupt the rules and structures of qualitative research with a term for research beyond the bounds of human-centered inquiry.

This post-qualitative movement emerged at a time when it became difficult for postgraduate students to reconcile “post” theories (poststructural, postcolonial, posthuman) with qualitative methodologies “because the epistemology and ontology of the ‘posts’ simply do not align with a humanist methodology” (St. Pierre, 2014, p. 3). Lather, MacLure, and St. Pierre (2013) distinguished how the tensions surrounding research with post theories and impending qualitative research structures came at the expense of theoretical work. St Pierre (2014b) argued it was not uncommon then to examine social science doctoral thesis that had little or no theoretical content or analysis. Post-qualitative research is therefore deeply theoretical, and philosophy central. Post-qualitative research disrupts normalized binaries that separate ontology and epistemology as theory is worked to force multiple understandings. Complex ideas, concepts, and practices are plugged into research inquiries (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). Post-qualitative research prompts the researcher to read more and not relegate theory and literatures to thesis chapters where they may not be revisited, take theoretical and methodological risks, use inventive methods or processes, and adopt emerging concepts as ways to think/sense/flow with the inquiry. The arduous academic work of reading and interpreting theory—a key part of the study of philosophy and the philosophical process of doctoral work—is laid out by the post-qualitative philosopher for the reader to become involved in. Reading this, new research understandings are taking place. “If we’ve done our reading, I wager we cannot not put it to work. It will have transformed us—we cannot think and live without it. We will be living it” (St. Pierre, 2015, p. 92).

Disruption: Post-Qualitative Research Rejects Qualitative Methodologies

Narrative inquiry as a qualitative methodology in education research is useful to uncover nuance and detail human thought, previous experience, behaviour and human relation. When I tried to apply this logic to human-animal relations I was confronted with ethical issues that arise between participants, researcher and material environments. There is a photo of a huge, once wild sea perch in a tank, in a garage, that still haunts me. It would have changed the story that threads across three generations of a family if I hadn’t undone the qualitative method of restorying. I can’t restory the children’s actions to their parents or teachers. I just didn’t know how I would do that. I wasn’t ready to create narratives in that reporting way. How do you restory complex ideas and ethical experiences you are still thinking and living with. I didn’t know how to, and I still don’t know how to do that. More importantly, the animal gets taken out of these stories and they were already there—in the middle, front and centre. I didn’t ventriloquise these animal lives. I had to make sure they were known as participants of the story, so this fish was not removed from the narrative with human justifications for acts of capture and control.

Young (2019) adopts the term “territorial diplomacy” to balance the demands of the academy, finding an opening that acknowledges that deconstruction does not always reject what it deconstructs. Troubling the power and processes that shape the structures of linear models of humanist research helps to free the field of possibilities, enabling the unknown to assemble. From this perspective of territorial diplomacy, the concept of unlearning is important here; however, there is no desire to shred past learnings, for an act of methodological destruction is not helpful when the legacy of these practices hold meaning for many. Finding a detour of deconstruction to procure travel to a different destination came in the form of post-qualitative approaches that take up a philosophy of immanence, of immanent discovery, that enable the desires of the researcher and the needs of the academy to appear together in negotiated spaces of internal relations. Diplomacy is the employment of tactful respect for those who have come before, but not becoming immobilized by the rules that have bound them to humanist ideals.

Education has been focussed on the human project and without rejecting the human is now doing more to open up. Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) contend that the spaces of education are “already so covered with pre-existing, pre-established clichés that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred” (p. 204). While we do that, we are always still here. The human writing these words is herself and more. Post-qualitative researchers contest the rules of quantitative and qualitative research as they call into question the humanist origins and purpose of these methodologies, seeking to become attuned with relational semiotics and not being bound by social and material worlds. This means that “post” ontologies are useful for exploring more-than-human relations built on response-ability of the precarious times of the Anthropocene as they generate possibilities for response-ability and ethical renewed futures. The Anthropocene, a time recognized by human colonization of the planet requires educational research to pay attention to earthy relations that embrace human and more-than-human entangled networks, so we can revise our understandings of human relations to the planet with what Malone (2016) refers to “an ‘unlearning’ of anthropomorphic ways of educating about the world” (p. 3). Post-qualitative research design opens different points of intervention where researchers attune to many possibilities that play with boundaries and borders, linear time, discipline thought, and the boundaries like those of qualitative research that we forgot we invented (St. Pierre, 2021) and are now emerging other ways.

Disruption: Education Research is Narrowly Defined

During a recent PhD milestone panel with a student adopting post-qualitative research with multispecies ethnographies with young children the feedback included: “The panel suggests that promising areas to focus on in both studying and influencing the development of young children are analogical or metaphorical reasoning and the construction of narratives. As far as practical outcomes are concerned, the student alluded to a tangible outcome for early childhood educators and she should consider producing a handbook that could inform the type of engagement activities she intends to undertake with the children.”

For many within and outside education, educational research is viewed within humanist paradigms situated within classrooms, curricula, teaching and learning outcomes, and practical applications. And yet, education has always been broadly associated with social issues and changing society. Education research that calls into question human exceptionalism agitates for a different future that expands beyond the human with philosophical, literary, and artistic responses to the art of living on a damaged planet (Tsing et al., 2017). To follow the “old” way back to rigid linear social science just to “get the job done” might draw you and the work away from the openings that are precisely where education needs you to be. The post-qualitative movement endeavors to imagine and accomplish experimental processes in educational research that meet the shifting demands of the Anthropocene. Teaching and learning will require different foci and “social science researchers may well need to refuse conventional humanist social science research methodologies created for the problems of previous centuries” (St. Pierre, 2021, p. 1).

Disruption: Research Must Use Reflexivity

Such a useless word “reflections”—what would you use? How can w-e write about the experiences, the senses of the data maybe-event? W-e use the “event” and word “haecceity” as a platform from which to playfully leap from our own specific latitude / longitude . . . W-e attempt here to wrangle and mangle the language of data, to express data as “non-representational, non-interpretive, a-signifying, a-subjective, paradoxical and embroiled with matter . . . ” and to read “data as sense-event” (MacLure, 2013a, p. 663). One might use the practice of “plugging in” within a writing assemblage. W-e just write whatever, whenever, no policing, no border patrols saying this is acceptable or this is not. No word limit, no style guides! And no authors. The text is produced by the assemblage (author et al 2015; author 2016; authors 2018). So have a go! (Charteris et al., 2019, p. 573).

W-e are a few writers who played deliberately as writers experimenting in an article for Qualitative Inquiry in 2019. The writing here is made with the movement of what is acceptable and what has traditionally not been accepted. There is a liveliness or an aliveness now to what is qualitative research, and some research writers are “plugging in” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) to other researchers, theory, and the world through the experimental writing space and publishing papers as exhibitions of experience. This means research in the qualitative realm is no longer always being reflexive or tending to validity. This means individuals are not always taking sole responsibility for the production of what emerges on the academic paper page. That is beside the point.

Openings: Be/Coming and Writing With Porosity in the Anthropocene

St Pierre is telling us to look again at the rigor around a predictable process that is making you do things. Does the word “data” still get associated with inertia (human imprinted objectifications) but it is not known this way by post-qualitative researchers anymore? For us, data are now moments of transformation and interaction that met each other and changed each other. They will continue to iteratively do so, on and on, whenever our attention looks there. How could research writing be/come porous? Is not porous and entangled writing impossible to follow? Can the argument be constructed, and mediated to the reader? Does not the reader get lost without borders and structure? Is there even any recognizable argument at all in post-qualitative writing?

The Anthropocene has become a “discursive development,” an unsettling ontology that problematizes a humanist narrative of progress that has essentially focused on the mastery of nature and the domination of the biosphere placing God-like faith in technocratic solutions. Through my storying of the Anthropocene, I am wandering through landscapes where assemblages of the living gather with the nonliving, where particulate things are actively coconstituting human bodies and their relations with otherworldly things. Ecological communities are “beings” with objects and subjects in common. This means we cannot—as “human”—be exempt from the consequences of being in a common world with others. We/I/she/he/they can no longer as a White privileged human consider myself/ourselves as the master of a destiny we have solely designed. Marisol de la Cadena’s (2015) book Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds alerts us to a world that has what it needs to colonize. And now to decolonize and live beyond a nature-culture divide that was solely ever sketched (though she points out we forget and cannot see the markings and shadings now), we can know the world in another way if we see ourselves in relation to those we live with.

Porosity is the measure of the space in/between—a fraction between 0 and 1. Effective porosity is when flow between particles and gases is lively—ineffective porosity, fluidity and flow are troubled, the ability for a substance to flow is hindered—disrupted. Once ascribed agency inorganic matter has a certain efficacy that defies human will—what Jane Bennett (2010) names as “vital materiality.” During my research with children who live close to the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, in the “Steppes” or plateau region in eastern Kazakhstan, I come to know, be, and coexist with a world of lively radiation.

Atyem, aged 12 years, brings to the classroom a photograph looking down from his window. “I live on the 10th floor. He tells me ‘It is very dusty and dirty. There is no light, I would like to go outside but it scares me. I might become sick. We need things to change.’” Children say they would like more grass and trees so it can freshen up the air. Scientists used to claim humans were biological islands. Humans were viewed as exceptional creatures exempt from the consequences of lively matter and entirely capable of regulating our own internal workings. The specialized cells of our immune system taught themselves how to recognize and attack dangerous pathogens while at the same time mostly sparing our own tissues. Just as we have come to see we are not exempt from the Anthropocentric impacts we are have unleashed on all the earths systems we are realizing the human body is not such a neatly self-sufficient island after all. It is, like the planet, a complex ecosystem—an assemblage—containing trillions of bacteria, microorganisms, and other matter that reside on our skin, mouth, and internal organs (Smith, 2015). In fact, there are as many cells in the human body, my body, as cells that are not human at all. Bacterial cells in the human body equate the number of human cells one-to-one (Sender et al., 2016). Haraway (2003) writes,

I love the fact that human genomes can be found on only about 10 per cent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body . . . To be one is always to become with many. (pp. 3–4)

When radioactive dust clouds turn into rain, the radionuclides become absorbed in the soil and, subsequently, the food chain. These invisible waves and particles of radiation flow as an assemblage like starlings in a murmuration.

This mixed community of microbial cells and other lively matter that seeps into my body such a radiation potential is collectively known as my microbiome. Individuals acquire their own colony of lively biomaterial from our surrounding environment. The body is the container for a lively assemblage of nonhuman matter providing a genealogy of my amorphous engagement with the planet. I chose vital materiality as a theoretical space for exploring these data on radiation as it acknowledges the aliveness of matter—active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable. Matter as alive in entangled bodies. I ascribe agency to this inorganic matter radiation to acknowledge it has a certain efficacy that defies human will.

My opening explores how I can research and write within my leaking porous body? In her book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett (2010) deployed the provocative strategy of anthropomorphizing materials to demonstrate the affinities between human and nonhuman matter and to challenge the anthropocentrism of humanist approaches. Bennett explains in an interview (see Khan, 2012) that she takes matter seriously. “By ‘things’ I mean the materialities usually figured as inanimate objects, passive utilities, occasional interruptions, or background context—figured, that is, in ways that give all the active, creative power to humans” (Khan, 2012, p. 43). Humans, Bennett argues, have had a habit of construing the world within two realms or binaries: passive matter (it/nonhuman) and vibrant life (us/human; Khan, 2012). The questions my porous body now seeks to explore are the following: What would the world look and feel like, were the life/matter binary disrupted? What if it they, the binaries, were instead translated into differences in degree rather than kind? And how would the writing of events change if material agency was distributed across bodies, human, and nonhuman? (Khan, 2012). To support this work, I also draw on theoretical approaches by Barad who considers—if all materials are equally recognized, then can humans be located with things in a “flat ontology”? A flat ontology emerges from understanding all entities (humans, dogs, rocks, mountains, trees) have ontological significance, and are always in nonhierarchical ways, mutually constituted in relation to one another. Being in the world is never separated from knowing the world.

Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither is reducible to the other. Neither has privileged status in determining the other. Neither is articulated or articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated. (Barad, 2007, p. 152)

A form of diffractive analysis as supported by the approaches supported by Barad (2010, 2014) makes me aware of our embodied involvement in the materiality of being with data. I am always implicated with my porous agentic body. I am sensing and knowing through my disruption of binaries. Bennett (2010) argues humanity and nonhumanity have always performed this intricate dance with each other. There was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity; today, this mingling has become harder to ignore.

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, masks became compulsory across the state of Victoria, Australia, where I lived. I was interested to consider the agency of masks, masking up changed how we connected with each other, they became entangled with our bodies. Metaphorically masking can be the means through which we can hide responses to our emotional experiences, to a difficult or challenging encounter. A human may not even know they are masking as the outcome can take many forms. They acted to shield my porous body from acts of contamination by an invisible virus. Poppy my dog barks at people and their acts of masking. Masks lay as debris tumbling down the street, washing up on the shoreline of the beaches.

Wren (my 4-year-old grandchild) asked me to today why people (humans) have to wear masks and animals did not. I explained that nonhuman animals could not catch the bad flu it only affected humans. She was clearly fascinated by this idea and kept asking me more information about how masks worked, what they did. She started experimenting trying on masks I had just brought. Do you want to make masks I ask her? Yes, animal masks—you can be fox and I will be a unicorn.

According to Bennett (2010) “vital materialists will try to linger in those moments during which they find themselves fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality that they share with them” (p. 17). A focus on the sense of the strange and incomplete, the coming together of awkward uneasy objects—animals, plants, earth, masks—and the pausing to notice more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically helps to dislodge and disrupt habits of anthropocentrism.

Opening/s: Reconfiguring Child-Animal Relations

During the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, my attention turned inwards to domesticity as Melbourne adopted a strict, grueling 15 weeks of lockdown. House plants became comforting kin whose numbers increased during this time as human kin were no longer present. Indoor plants are contained in pots requiring quality growing mediums to help them flourish in these compromised environments. I had not paid attention to incorporating something like perlite into the soil to promote aeration. Perlite is a chemically inert form of amorphous volcanic glass that enables the roots to hold air, leaving spaces for oxygen and nutrients to reassemble and water to flow freely through loose particles, keeping the plants from suffocating. Adding perlite to a pot plant is an example of what Barad (2007) might refer to as an agential cut that disrupts or moves matter around through the movements of diffraction. Diffractive analysis spreads alternative worldings or ways that things come together, that are not fixated on the story of a human sense of reality. The entanglement of human, plant, oxygen, soil, perlite, and plastic pot assemble in this contained environment for a South American tropical plant located to a house, in Australia that is always dynamic and moving as elements intra-act with each other. Tracing this interference in potting soil shows how air reinvigorates spaces and is open to a different way of knowing which emerges of how elements move and reassemble. Material effects shift and realign as the material (perlite), that originated in a volcano, disrupts the density of materials, minimizing lack of air, or anaerobiosis states in the same way that worms do in the soil outside with their burrowing bodies. These reconfigurings of matter in this process of anaerobiosis show how post-qualitative inquiry enables research to breathe, as passages open up with unknown elements that do not become boggy and dense, suffocated by rules or preconceived knowledge enabling ideas to flourish in unexpected ways.

Reconfiguring upholds a posthumanist politics of resistance to always revert to the human story and is central to the work of Haraway (2004, 2008) and Barad (2007) who prompt investigations into assemblages of relational entanglements to reimagine and expand imagination with the more-than-human who participate in the makings of shared relations. Reconfiguring takes place through movement and can be diffracted when elements intra-act as they are doing something that is already there and has been stirred up in coconstitutive ways with matter, discourse, materials, nature, bodies, for it is by attuning with the materiality of the world in this way that new ideas and relations are brought to light. “Hence, the diffractive apparatus is not about making analogies, or pulling together ideas in assemblages, but tracing some entanglements . . .” (Murris, 2017, p. 103).

Diffraction for Haraway (1997) and Barad (2007) is a practice of close encounters, not a distanced practice of reflecting from the distance of time or location, but of being ensconced in the world where the phenomenon of diffraction can be used as a conceptual and analytical tool for “attending to and responding to the effects of difference” (Barad, 2007, p. 72). Haraway (1997) affirms that onto-epistemological analysis is inconceivable without a multitude of relations to the worlds we think with for “nothing comes without its world” (p. 137). Diffractive analysis makes visible the in-between spaces and material-discursive aspects of data, so they become fractured into the active recognition of diversification, difference, the unspoken, and the layers of movement and affect (Lenz-Taguchi, 2012; Lenz-Taguchi & Palmer, 2013; Maclure, 2013b). The act of diffraction addresses epistemological problems of representation and knowledge claims that are saturated with humanist assumptions from the human container of the mind, that are mirrored in the form, function, and past experience with material worldings.

Controversially my opening to post-qualitative research came after completing PhD ethnographic fieldwork in family homes and an early childhood education setting (Young, 2019). Elizabeth St. Pierre (2014) ignited this desire when she presented an alternative to the rules of qualitative narrative inquiry at a conference, enabling me to integrate inventive methods and reconfigure the relations of children, families, and animal species. Some of the narratives I had already created from data events, interviews, and layers of concepts were adapted as speculative fiction to both tangle and untangle the desires and influences of education, family practices, and intra-actions among animals, environments, teachers, children, and families.

Speculative fiction in the inquiry moved between virtual and actual data (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2004), and because these stories take place in otherworldly settings or scenarios, spaces are opened to different perspectives. Hannah Arendt suggests, becoming speculative adopts an openness to the world with processes that “trains one’s imagination to go visiting” (Arendt, 1970/1992, p. 43). Writing speculative fiction in a (dis)connected state is one of the novel approaches taken in my inquiry that helped to decentre the researcher, child, and human. This way of losing self embraces materialism and multispecies relations in different ways as surprising forms appear in unpredictable ways, including the larvae of a steelblue sawfly moth, commonly known as a “Spitfire” who offers wise consult, a bulldog who refuses to be a research participant and is not swayed by my pleas of “being a dog lover,” a school tractor, and the blood-stained soil of the central dessert of Australia. They all help me to think and sense with ethical entanglements that show how to speak and name the unspeakable. By unspeakable, I refer to the thoughts, actions, and events of the data assemblage that venture toward troubling paths, becoming stagnated within sticky ethical knots. Srinivasan (2018) conceptualized this approach as “othered(wise) inquiry,” an insightful and creative tool for researchers to listen, sense, and entangle with “those who are seemingly rendered voiceless, powerless subjects. Such silenced speakers can be humans, animals and material, abstract, celestial and metaphysical elements” (Srinivasan, 2018, p. 12).

While this strategy of writing with othered(wise) guides may not regularly appear in an education PhD thesis, it is a common device in literature, cultural studies poststructural and posthumanist practices. Larvae became my constant companion, disrupting humanist storylines of nature education and harmonious relations with animal species to engage with curiosity, wondering how stories can inform the inquiry, while also leaving space for wise consult that is spontaneous, unsettling, and creative. In this way, Larvae joined multiple travelers during the inquiry, as companions, guides, and provocateurs. Larvae appears within real and virtual imaginaries that test the interplay between scientific theorizing of reality and virtual imaginations. Discourses about scientific, technological, and environmental change can be challenged by the posthuman configurations of myth, science fiction, and metaphysics to forge new considerations of immanence from the unseen flows of life and not only those governed by systems that can be measured and quantified? Larvae interjects at crucial points in the narratives making demands for what has been generalized, missed, or trampled, simultaneously reconfiguring child-animal relations. Larvae displace and disrupt alterity as the other “is always already there” (Braidotti, 2012, p. 53) with the polyvocal presence of the othered(wise) who is humble, ethical, and multiple, with forthright demands to pay attention. This process enabled my writing and thinking to open up. Being earth-bound, human-bound, and methodology-bound, I wondered what might flourish? If I could expand beyond being tied to a body, in one space and time as a kind of energy field, rather than being contained anaerobically within a PhD—what could happen?

Openings: Emerging Through the Rights of Bodies and Places to Write Research