Poststructuralism and Post Qualitative Inquiry: What Can and Must Be Thought

A Note From Special Issue Guest Co-Editors

This article is derived from a webinar series conversation titled, “Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry,” cohosted by Candace R. Kuby and Viv Bozalek. The webinar sessions ran from August 2020 to September 2021. This webinar series was made possible by a research collaborative partnership between the University of Missouri System in the United States and the University of the Western Cape (or UWC) in Cape Town, South Africa. During the webinar sessions, the panelists were asked to respond to four questions:

We are grateful for James Salvo’s invitation to publish the webinar in a special issue and to Erin Price who assisted with technology, logistics, and the art for the series. To learn more information about the webinar series, please locate the guest editors’ (Kuby & Bozalek) introduction to the special issue on the website for Qualitative Inquiry.

Each panelist in the webinar series suggested several readings to accompany their talk. To access the recorded webinars and suggested readings, please visit https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4P_GUK6QV2Wp_OAWEpw87Q. For more information about the webinar series, visit https://education.missouri.edu/learning-teaching-curriculum/webinars/.

I’ll begin my response to your first question, “How does your philosophical approach influence your ways of doing inquiry,” by explaining where my work comes from because I think it’s important to provide the historical background of how we come to academia as doctoral students, what’s there when we arrive, who we study with, what we read, and how all that disciplines us for the rest of careers, because, as Foucault (1975/1979) taught us, we are always already disciplined. Looking back now, I believe post qualitative inquiry was inevitable, given my early engagement with poststructuralism.

I began my doctoral program in 1991 at Ohio State and was lucky to study with Patti Lather and Laurel Richardson who were brilliant feminists inventing/promoting qualitative research methodology and, at the same time, making the postmodern turn. Those two projects—poststructural/postmodern theory and qualitative research methodology—were separated in my doctoral program, and their very different and incommensurable ontological descriptions of human being and being more generally became the provocation for my career, as I’ll explain.

Philosophy

First, I’ll discuss the theoretical work that drove my doctoral studies. I read and studied the second-wave feminists whose work remains powerful and who set the stage for much of the feminist work that followed. Remember that Judith Butler published Gender Trouble in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins published Black Feminist Thought in 1990, Haraway published Simians, Cyborgs, and Women in 1991, Sandra Harding published Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? in 1991, and Spivak published that famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in 1988. So those were some of the texts I read my first year as a doctoral student. It was an exciting moment to begin a doctoral program because the social movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had, by then, enabled a rich body of theory based on identity and identity politics—race theories, queer theories, all kinds of feminist theories, and so on. And epistemology was key in that work—what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts. Feminists and other Others were brilliantly defending their right to know and the knowledge they produced. Ontology, however, which has our attention now, was seldom discussed in my doctoral program.

A particular description of human being based on the concept identity—a personal, human identity that could be divided into identity categories—was front and center in that epistemological work, but that description was being critiqued by postmodern and poststructural scholars who argued that it could be oppressive. I was especially attracted to feminists who were taking up the different description of human being offered by the French continental poststructural scholars, including Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and so on. Of course, their individual projects are very different, and it’s always dangerous to group people in the same category (e.g., postmodern) without attending to their differences. As Butler (1995) warned, we need to read and read carefully so we’re attending to the specificity of a scholar’s work.

So I began my doctoral program reading feminist theory, and feminist theory took me to poststructural theories, which were very provocative and productive for me because they are so open and they offer analyses that not only enable but also demand we think and live differently. For example, Foucault offered genealogy, archeology, and power-knowledge; Derrida, affirmative deconstruction; Deleuze with Guattari, rhizoanalysis and schizoanalysis; Lyotard, paralogy; Lacan, nonsubjective psychoanalysis, and so on. I was stunned and thrilled by the power and brilliance of that work. I was also intrigued by postmodernism’s ontology of immanence, which was and remains difficult, but which is absolutely necessary for the “new” work coming out of the ontological turn now.

Method

So theory was one focus of my doctoral studies, although I didn’t actually take theory courses—I did that reading on my own. The other focus was qualitative research methodology, which was being invented and formalized then but was still new and exciting—radical, in fact. There were lots of qualitative methodology courses to take, and I took them all. Even so, at that time, students who chose to do qualitative studies for their dissertation research believed they were taking big risks and scared each other by saying, “Oh, if you do a qualitative study, you won’t get a job,” just as students today scare each other by saying, “Oh, if you do a new material or posthuman or post qualitative study, you won’t get a job.” It’s important to remember that what was once radical becomes normalized—lodged on the strata, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987). Every generation that enters the academy has choices between the conventional—repetition—and something different that can and must be thought—the new. Importantly, resistance to dogma is always organizing itself.

I advise students not to scare themselves unnecessarily and to risk doing something different. I advise them to experiment and create. In the long run, it pays off. Why would you want your work, your career, to simply repeat that of your professors—to be the same as theirs? Aim for difference instead. That’s what will make your work important.

Although qualitative research was seen as radical then—its validity was roundly questioned—it was grounded in the humanist subject poststructural theories refuse. The researcher, whether qualitative or quantitative (mixed methods hadn’t been invented then), was front and center—the doer before the deed, the individual preceding interactions, a self-contained human with an identity who retains a separate existence throughout a research study. The ontologies of the confused combination of interpretivism and logical positivism that permeates qualitative research was/is not immanent. I’ve written a great deal about the incommensurability between what I’ve called “conventional humanist qualitative methodology” and poststructuralism. But, as a doctoral student, I studied them at the same time, although separately. They never came together until I wrote my dissertation—it was in writing that their incommensurability became apparent. In my coursework, methodology was mostly separated from theory, and that’s still typical in the social sciences. Oh, there might have been some nod to theory upfront in methodology courses, but we quickly shifted to the important topic—empirical methodology—what to do and how and when to do it. I believe a big problem then and now is that we don’t teach and study ontology. Epistemology remains dominant; after all, universities are big knowledge-production machines. Why do we need to think about the nature of being when the task is to produce another bit of knowledge to fill an imagined gap?

This is my 27th year in academia, and if you count the 4 years of my doctoral program, that’s more than 30 years. Once you’ve been around that long, you have a history and can look back over your career and see shifts and interventions—events in the world, like scientifically based research (SBR) in education—that have influenced your work. In addition, the “beginning” of your career becomes historical and thus contingent and not normal. You realize who you studied with and what you studied at a particular university at a particular historical moment is completely contingent—like the roll of the dice—yet all that has produced you and your work. I now understand that poststructuralism infected me early on, took me up, and profoundly changed me. As I’ve said, I read Deleuze too soon, so early in my doctoral studies that I couldn’t think or live outside his philosophical concepts. Methodology, on the contrary, actually had little impact on my thinking: I’ve never found it inventive, merely functionary, as it uses a ready-made process at hand.

As I said, the incommensurability between the poststructual theory and the qualitative methodology I studied separately finally became apparent in my dissertation study, which was a combination of an interview study with 36 older White women who lived in my hometown and an ethnography of their community. Qualitative methodology typically requires a realist ontology and a Cartesian description of human being. Although it claims to be interpretive, its empiricism leans toward logical empiricism. In the 1990s, and still, the big question for students was not which onto-epistemological arrangement but which methodology would guide their inquiry. The absolutely critical point that methodology might not even be thinkable in a particular onto-epistemological arrangement was never discussed. Methodologies were just out there, standing alone, ready to apply to any study. You might include some theory in your literature review at the beginning or “apply” some theory to your data at the end, but the idea of beginning with an onto-epistemology that would drive the study was barely thinkable then, and I’d argue, now. Methodology trumped everything else: choose your methodology and get going. I still find it very difficult to get students to understand that methodology is not a given, that it might not be thinkable in particular onto-epistemological arrangements.

It certainly never occurred to me as a doctoral student that if I began my study with the immanent ontology of poststructuralism I would not think or use a preexisting social science research methodology that is not immanent. If I had actually begun my dissertation research with poststructuralism, I would not have done that interview study at all. After all, in his Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault (1971/1972) wrote over and over again that he was not interested in the speaking subject—that he worked in the order of discourse instead. It is interpretive, not poststructural, work that focuses on the voices of people describing their everyday lived experiences. But I just followed the qualitative process I’d been taught like an obliging doc student. I went to the field and interviewed and observed and did all the “empirical” things you’re supposed to do as an empirical qualitative researcher. But the “empirical” I studied was limited to people’s words and what I “observed.” The richness of the empirical could not possibly be captured by qualitative methods.

In fact, the doing of my study was troubled from the beginning. For example, I couldn’t determine what/where/when the “field” was, nor could I fit the doing and thinking of the study into the increasingly inadequate categories of the preexisting methodology. I didn’t know what counted as an interview. I couldn’t decide what counted as data. To me, analysis was writing and thinking with the scholars I was reading, not coding words from interview transcripts and field notes, and watching themes somehow miraculously “emerge.” Nothing emerged. I knew full well I was making it all up. As Geertz (1973) wrote, it’s all fictio, made.

As I wrote Chapter 3 of my dissertation, qualitative methodology fell apart, its categories failed, and I knew it was ruined. The lack of fit between the onto-epistemological arrangement of poststructuralism and the confused combination of the interpretive/logical empirical onto-epistemology of qualitative methodology became obvious. It was too late to undo the study or start over—I wanted to graduate on time. So, in 1994, I wrote a conventional Chapter 3 (115 pages) describing the project as a typical qualitative study and then deconstructed that description, focusing on key social science methodology concepts that were especially problematic: process, data, the interview, method, the field, human being, and so on. The conventional description is titled, “Methods are Easy”: The deconstruction using Deleuze’s philosophical concept the fold to reorient my thinking is titled “Folding is Hard.” Near the end of the chapter, I wrote this sentence that pointed to what, years later, I would call post qualitative inquiry:

I believe that the persistent critique urged by post-structuralism enables a transition from traditional methodology to something different and am not too concerned at this time with naming whatever might be produced.

By 2004—10 years later—I had developed a doctoral seminar named Postmodern Qualitative Research in which we mostly deconstructed methodological concepts like validity, data, reflexivity, and the interview—endless deconstruction. We said we were working within/against the failed structures of humanist methodology, that we were “working the ruins.”

But Derrida explained that the work of deconstruction is not just to point to the contradictions and breakdown of a structure but also to open it up or overturn it, so that something different can happen. I believe we remained in the ruins of that within/against work for too long—deconstructing this and that. We were unable to take advantage of the opening, unable to just leave the ruins of methodology behind and do something different from the beginning, and unable to begin with philosophy and let it, instead of methodology, guide inquiry. It seemed we could not think outside methodology—and methodology doesn’t require much thought. The sheer boredom of that work and the increasing impossibility of combining qualitative methodology and poststructuralism finally became intolerable for me.

A few years ago, I talked with a scholar of my generation in another country about all this, and she declared, “qualitative methodology is dead.” It was hard to hear that statement, and I’m not sure I could have thought/said it at that time. But, since then, I’ve come to understand that, for me, it died in 1994 as I wrote Chapter 3 of my dissertation. It died the first time I used it although I was so well trained as a qualitative methodologist that it took me a long time to escape its tentacles. It was so easy, so clear, so accessible. It told me what to do and when and how to do it. I didn’t have to think. I didn’t need any theory at all, really. I could just get some data and then organize them into themes that appeared all on their own. All I had to do was follow the recipe and then write up my findings. So simple, really, to just be a functionary of the method. So dreadfully boring.

Enter SBR in Education: The Politics of Method

I don’t believe it would have taken me 10 years to develop that doctoral seminar if SBR in education hadn’t appeared and interrupted my work. In 2000, only 5 years after I began working at University of Georgia (UGA), the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was passed and, for the first time in U.S. history, federal law mandated social science research methodology. The NCLB and other federal documents stated that randomized controlled trials were the gold standard of SBR in education. Once again, logical positivism/logical empiricism, pushed aside for a time by the ascendency of interpretive qualitative methodology in the 1990s, assumed a dominant position. Qualitative methodology was dismissed as only descriptive and narrative and so not valid. In addition, postmodernism became the codeword for any theory (e.g., critical race theory, feminist theory, and any interpretive theory) that was not positivist. This political moment was one of those events that shapes careers, and it certainly affected my work.

Some of us who had been poised to refuse qualitative methodology and invent something different stopped that work to defend qualitative methodology against the positivist police, including the new U.S. Institute of Education Sciences that would no longer fund qualitative studies. Researchers writing grants to get federal money began to sneak a small interview component into big quantitative studies and, presto, mixed-methods methodology was invented and became popular. For 5 or 6 years, some of us spent our time writing journal articles and book chapters, organizing conference sessions, and editing special issues of journals that pushed back against the logical positivism of SBR. We may have had some impact, but I suspect not much. I spent about 3 years studying positivism so I could critique it, but the positivists I knew did not study poststructuralism. They just dismissed it out of hand as relativistic, nihilist, and deliberately obfuscatory. In discussions with powerful positivists, I was told that I worked in the context of discovery, not the context of justification (a positivist binary), and so my work was prescientific. There was no discussion of philosophy in those conversations. After all, positivism claims to be theory-free and value-free, and so methodology trumped philosophy again. One of my chief learnings at the end of that period was the danger of teaching methodology as a stand-alone subject separated from theory. In fact, I’m inclined now to believe that is unethical.

We have a very fine qualitative research faculty at the UGA, and one of our projects during those SBR years was to coauthor a well-cited article published in Educational Researcher titled, “Standards of Evidence in Qualitative Research: An Incitement to Discourse” (Freeman et al., 2007). That article was our political resistance to SBR. At times, it felt as if SBR had sucked up all my intellectual and creative energy, but grappling with logical positivism, which George Steinmetz (2005) called the “epistemological unconscious of the social sciences”—so normalized that it is unintelligible—was a good lesson. Later, it helped me understand how interpretive qualitative methodology that claimed to be “emergent” but had always retained the positivism it critiques had become formalized, scientized, and positivized because of SBR. After SBR, positivist qualitative research became common and, I think, qualitative methodology in general was overdetermined.

In 2008 or 2009, I invited Patti Lather to present a lecture at UGA, and I remember that she and our qualitative research faculty sat around a conference table one afternoon and talked about the politics of SBR in education and how it had affected qualitative methodology. We told our stories of resistance, talked about how shocked we were that some of those in power knew so little theory (how did they get PhDs, we wondered?), and argued that policy makers should have evidence to support their policies just as researchers have to have evidence to support their claims. We were tired and demoralized. We were bored with it all. Patti commented that we all seemed pretty crabby. I think my adjective was cranky. But that conversation was a turning point for me. I decided I was done with the positivists—no need to try to “talk across differences” with them anymore—and that it was time to get on with my own work that had stalled years earlier. It was time to continue the poststructural critique and refusal of the methodological project I had begun in my dissertation. During the SBR years, qualitative methodology had been formalized, scientized, and positivized—it was much different from what I had studied as a doc student. I also believed our 1990s poststructural project of working “within and against” its limits was impossible. I wanted to emerge out of that structure. It had become stifling, not just for me but also for my students who studied the “posts.”

About 2009 or 2010, Norman Denzin asked me to write a chapter for the fourth edition of the Sage Handbook of Qualitative Inquiry. I proposed a chapter about post qualitative inquiry—it was just a title at that point—and Norman accepted my proposal. In 2010, I presented my first conference paper on post qualitative inquiry at American Educational Research Association (AERA) while I was writing that chapter. Writing that chapter was quite a writing experience. I actually wrote a book instead of a chapter—about 125 pages—and then had to reduce it to an essay for the handbook. I realized I had a lot to say. Initially, I wrote sections that described each of those analytic approaches I mentioned earlier—Foucault’s genealogy and archeology, Lyotard’s paralogy, and so on; but I deleted them and kept only the description of Derrida’s affirmative deconstruction for the essay because, with Jane Flax (1990), I think poststructuralism is, in general, deconstructive. That is, it calls into question whatever structures—dogma—we create that become stuck, out of play, unavailable to continuous variation.

I actually thought about writing a book about post qualitative inquiry at that point, but it was too early. I had much more thinking to do. And, importantly, I needed to see whether/how what I proposed in that chapter would be taken up by others and put to work. In other words, I needed what I’ve called “response data” before writing a book.

Since then, I’ve written many journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers about post qualitative inquiry, inventing it as I think and write. My work has been profoundly influenced by my students whose questions force me to get smarter and push through issues I might not have addressed on my own. For example, I’ve stopped using the word research because I’ve learned that as soon as I say that word my students leap to methodology. They cannot think research without thinking methodology. And many of them are first- and second-year doctoral students—good heavens, they’ve already been methdodologized! Instead, and for now, I use the word inquiry. I get many emails from students and scholars around the world asking really smart questions that help me think harder. Too many students everywhere, I think, fret that they can’t do anything creative or inventive, that they’re forced to use the preexisting methodologies of their disciplines. I worry that we shut down our smart students before they’ve even begun their careers. Just a few days ago, a student emailed me that her adviser told her to forget using the concept becoming in her dissertation.

I do want to state clearly right here, that post qualitative inquiry is not a methodology nor is it a variety of qualitative methodology. It has nothing to do with qualitative research methodology. And you can’t do a qualitative study and then make it post qualitative after the fact. Post qualitative inquiry begins with poststructuralism and its ontology of immanence. So you have to read and study poststructuralism before you do post qualitative inquiry; you have to let it guide your inquiry. If you don’t want to do that, that’s OK with me, but then don’t call your work post qualitative. Post qualitative inquiry does not stand outside philosophy, as social science research methodologies seem to do, and I think that can be very confusing.

Post qualitative inquiry, because it is not a methodology, does not tell you “what to do,” and that worries some people, especially students who are so new to all this. They ask, “What do I do?” and my response is “Why do you think you should know what to do before you begin?” We don’t have to understand everything to do something. I’m fond of quoting Elliot Eisner (1996) who wrote that our goal is “to work at the edge of incompetence” (p. 412), not to know “what to do.” Likewise, Patti Lather (1996) encouraged what she called “rigorous confusion” (p. 539). This approach to inquiry, this embrace of not knowing and not understanding, is quite different from a methodological approach that prescribes what to do in advance of the doing. At this point, I am simply uninterested in the latter.

So this history I’ve described thus far, this “long preparation” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1997/2007, p. 7) for post qualitative inquiry and for, in general, a desire to think and live differently, is not only a preface to but also my response to the first question you asked me: How does your philosophical approach influence your ways of doing inquiry? I cannot think of inquiry outside philosophy. I don’t believe inquiry can exist outside philosophy. I hope I’ve been clear that poststructuralism has enabled me to think post qualitative inquiry.

The Subject

I think what attracted me most to the scholars we now call poststructural is their very different description of human being. Of course, this is an ontological issue. Human being and being in general, was the linchpin of poststructuralism for me, and once I began to understand its very different subject, it was inevitable that preexisting social science research methodologies grounded in the Cartesian subject would fail. Descartes (1637/1993) invented a human being who thinks and knows, a human being whose mind is separate from and superior to everything else (this is rationalism set in opposition to empiricism in epistemology), a human being who exists ahead of the world. I think, therefore I am. Descartes’s subject is.

Descartes’ ontology describes the world as some Other (Difference) that is out there separate from him (Same, Identity), which does not influence him. He is rational and self-contained (organized by internal relations) and moves through and is untouched by the outside that is not he: Self/Other, Mind/Matter, Man/Nature. He is not produced in external relations. Note that Descartes assumes he knows what thought is—I think—he doesn’t explain his understanding of thinking, although it’s clear thought originates with him in his interiority, the human. What he does say is that thinking is doubting and that that particular relation leads to being. So he relates thought to doubt and then to being. I think, therefore I am. It’s not that I am a painter, therefore I am or that I am a professor, therefore I am. It’s that I think therefore I am. And to think is to doubt—not to create or experiment or invent. As a sidenote, John Dewey (1929) wrote a book, The Quest for Certainty—which addresses that Cartesian desire to be certain, without doubt. Why fear contingency, history? What’s that about?

To me, this is an incredibly weak and debilitating, and, at the same time, arrogant description of human being. And of thinking. But it has stuck with us for centuries, and our social science research methodologies depend on it. The researcher exists ahead of, in advance of the world (subject/object), outside it, and so can objectify and know it, can “collect data” from it, for example. To do that, the world has to stop. It has to be. The assumption is that the world is static, inert, still, able to be captured, and known—mastered. So Descartes makes an ontological claim about the nature of reality as well as an epistemological claim about the nature of knowledge.

In my teaching, I explain this human being by using the English language sentence, “John hit the ball.” The grammar of our language—subject-verb-object—produces a grammar (description) of the subject. That structure makes it appear that John (the subject of the sentence) exists first and then he hits (the action) the ball (the object of the action) that is separate from him. John is separate from the hitting and separate from the ball. In other words, John is. He exists ahead of action and the world.

Another description of human being, a Nietzschean (1887/1992) description, would be that John exists only in hitting the ball. John and the hitting and the ball only exist together in relation for an instant. They cannot be separated—this is a very different ontological arrangement. In the next moment, John only exists in a different set of relations—running and then sliding into first base. And in the next—rising and brushing dust off his uniform. And in the next—readying himself to run again. And on and on. John never is; he is always becoming in external relations with the world. Nietzsche wrote that the doer is a fiction added to the deed. The deed is everything. But the grammar, the structure, of our language—subject-verb-object—makes it easy to think John exists separately and first. Again, this is an ontological question—how do we divide up what exists? Or do we divide things up? Why did Descartes invent a human who is separate from and prior to the world, and why do we perpetuate that description? What does that get us? What are the ethics of that invention?

In his book, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault (1966/1970) explained that the human sciences are necessarily hazy, inexact, and imprecise because the human in the human sciences is both their subject and their object. In fact, the human sciences had to, and did, invent their human. What confusion—humans studying themselves and trying to make that appear objective and scientific! But to be both the subject and the object of the human sciences precludes the objectivity some believe science must have to be valid. However, even the more exact, hard, natural sciences deny that kind of objectivity. A human being cannot not be there in any kind of inquiry—think Heisenberg. Donna Haraway (1988) critiqued the “got trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (p. 581). Indeed.

So there we are. If we understand that Descartes invented the human he needed and that the human sciences invented the human they needed—if those inventions are possible—then it is possible to invent other descriptions of human being. And that’s exactly what has happened throughout history. Human being has been invented over and over again—it is historical and so contingent. It certainly becomes real, and we live with the weight of the particular description that’s dominant during our lifetimes, but it’s also not real—it was invented, created, made up. This is social constructionism 101.

Philosophers are likely to understand this work of invention, this description and redescription of philosophical concepts of human being. Unfortunately, social scientists may not. The description of human being that grounds social science research methodologies has been so normalized that it’s pretty much unintelligible. We use the word researcher—Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) call it “the strange persona of Investigator advanced by the empiricists” (p. 72)—much too easily; without, I think, acknowledging that it refers to Descartes’ cogito and his onto-epistemology. But we seldom study ontology or philosophy in research methodology courses, so we just identify ourselves as researchers and get on with the methodology as if both are natural and normal—given. We drop down into the structure of the methodology and become the subject it requires. We’re not trained to question that human and that ontology. We don’t put that description of human being under erasure, as Derrida (1967/1974) suggested because, if we did, the entire structure of methodology would crumble, would be ruined.

And that’s exactly what happened to me. I had studied poststructural scholars’ redescription of human being, and it did not allow me to be the empirical investigator qualitative research methodology required. But it wasn’t only the description of the empirical investigator that failed, all the other concepts that rely on that investigator failed too—research methods like the interview and the observation, data, findings, language, reality, knowledge, and so on. All those concepts work together to produce, to organize qualitative methodology. In other words, the onto-epistemological descriptions of all the concepts in a system of thought must be aligned—the concepts lay out a plane. So if you describe human being in a certain way, then the rest of being has to be described accordingly. And on and on. So once that ontological concept of human being failed, the entire structure of qualitative methodology failed. I could no longer think or do qualitative inquiry. The good news is that Derrida explained that the failure of a structure enables something different to be thought/done. This is the affirmative move of deconstruction—this opening to difference. How might one inquire after the onto-epistemology of poststructuralism has ruined qualitative methodology? It was the failure of the humanist human of the human sciences that enabled me to think/live differently long before I could think post qualitative inquiry.

What Happens to Conventional Qualitative Research Practices in Post Qualitative Inquiry?

I believe what I’ve said thus far answers, to a great extent, your second question regarding how one’s philosophical approach to inquiry affects traditional research practices, such as the literature review, data collection, data analysis, and so forth. In a nutshell, I’ve pretty much given up the whole qualitative research process and its practices because it is not aligned with the onto-epistemology of poststructuralism. To assume one would use those practices in post qualitative inquiry is nonsensical, given its ontology of immanence. I’ve pasted in the following some quotations from scholars we call poststructural that respond to the “what to do” question that might be useful—this is a handout I use in teaching. Sometimes it’s not as much about what to do as about what not to do. For example, having studied poststructuralism, you might realize you’re avoiding particular words and concepts when you write or deciding not to do this or that. For example, students who’ve studied the “posts” tell me, “I don’t want to interview anyone.” You might not understand why at first, but that’s often how the breakdown and refusal of a structure begins—with being unable to think or do something. I tell students that when this happens, they’re beginning to get the theory in their bones—they’re being taken up by the theory and invented differently. And they can’t go back. Once they’ve “turned,” they can’t turn back. To put it another way, the paradigm has shifted for them. They were taken up and produced by the old paradigm, so they understand it. Now they’ve been taken up by a different one they’ve yet to figure out. And that’s as it should be—this is slow work, I think. See the following handout.

What to Avoid Doing in Post Qualitative Inquiry

“One way of looking at this question is to see Deleuze as engaged in a constructive project guided by certain proscriptive constraints, that is, constraints which tell him not what to do but what to avoid doing” (De Landa, 2002, p. 27).

“By the way, here’s a philosophical rule of thumb: always start with the negative definitions. Negative definitions are always easier to understand.” (Lawlor, n.d.)

The “What To Do” Question OR the Perceived Need for Preexisting Methods and Practices in Poststructuralism and Post Qualitative Inquiry

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If one has, indeed, studied these and other philosophers, which is required in post qualitative inquiry, one gives up the notion that there is “something to do,” some process to follow, some practices to use in advance of inquiry. I tell my students the one thing I know they should do is read and read, and read and read. If they’ve been reading, they’ll know “what to do.” Most people have already begun the project they’re interested in anyway; they’ve already been doing it. So what have they been doing?

One of the most troubling social science concepts for me has been data and the most troubling practice, coding data. I’ve written a great deal about data and the problem of coding data over the years, beginning in my dissertation, where I deconstructed data and, playfully, identified dream data, emotional data, sensual data, and memory data (St. Pierre, 1995, 1997). After studying Derrida, I could not imagine coding data. But the obsession with data is understandable, given our data-driven, evidence-driven social sciences. Following Derrida, one might say that data seem necessary but, at the same time, they are inadequate, perhaps impossible.

So the idea of data is troubling enough in itself. Complicating matters further is the idea of coding data, a practice that always pops up. Students are required to code data in some qualitative data analysis classes and also to code it in research projects they’re involved in. When they complain and say it doesn’t make sense, I reply, “Well, then, don’t do it.” They typically reply, “What else can we do?” And I just get very frustrated then because, after all, they’re doctoral students and should figure that out for themselves. I typically respond, “Good heavens, do you think you’d code data if you hadn’t been taught to do it?” It’s just some bizarre positivist practice we pass on to you—we teach it because it’s teachable— and then you teach it to your students, and eventually people begin to think it’s not only necessary but good, and they write books about it—it’s all part of the qualitative methodology business machine.

Who could think coding data? In what onto-epistemology is coding data thinkable? What empiricism claims that language can be brute, that words can contain and close off meaning, that language can be perfectly clear and precise, a solid objective foundation for truth claims? The answer, of course, is logical empiricism. For example, see Ayer’s (1936) book, Language, Truth, and Logic, for his description of language. He also wrote a book championing logical positivism (Ayer, 1959).

So there you are—coding is thinkable in logical empiricism, not in the supposed interpretive empiricism of qualitative inquiry in which there’s always another interpretation. In interpretive approaches, all we’ve ever got is one interpretation piled on another and another. The researcher hears participants’ interpretations of lived experiences, which were their parents’ or friends’ or Sunday School teachers’ interpretations, which they, in turn, learned from someone else, ad infinitum. As Geertz (1973) explained, it’s turtles (interpretation) all the way down:

There is an Indian story—at least I heard it as an Indian story—about an Englishman, who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on (p. 28) the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle “Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.” (p. 29)

All we ever get in interpretive inquiry is an interpretation, which can never be uninterpretable, never be brute. But qualitative methodology has retained a great many of the positivist concepts and practices it was invented to critique, like coding data. To address this ongoing concern about coding data, for example, Alecia Jackson and I edited a special issue of Qualitative Inquiry (2014) on “qualitative data analysis after coding.” We invited scholars to describe what they do with data other than code it, and their articles are quite wonderful. That issue has been very popular. I got an email from Research Gate just last week that our introduction to the issue, “Qualitative Data Analysis After Coding” (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014) had reached a “milestone” and been “read” (not sure what that means) 10,000 times. So there’s some data that tell us something about concerns with coding data.

My general feeling about qualitative research methodology and other social science research methodologies is that they continue to exist because we keep teaching them. And we keep teaching them because we want to control inquiry and maybe because we don’t know how else to teach inquiry? Heaven forbid that someone should think/do something outside the bounds, the dogma, of accepted research methodologies—remember the adviser who told the student not to use the philosophical concept becoming in her dissertation research. And of course, qualitative research methodology has become a big business! Think of all the books out there that are introductions to qualitative methodology—you can probably name the chapters of those books: Chapter 1 might be a nod to theory; Chapter 2 about identifying a research question; Chapter 3 about the lit review; then a chapter about design; another about participants; identifying methods of data collection; a long chapter about interviewing; methods of data analysis, especially coding data; writing it up, and so on. That table of contents not only organizes the structure of qualitative methodology in the books but also in practice. However, as Thomas Kuhn (1962/1970) explained, by the time a science (or social science) textbook is written, the science is pretty much dead.

But the structure of qualitative research includes not only introductory textbooks but also handbooks, other books about every tiny aspect of qualitative methodology, journals, conferences, university curriculum, and all the other divisions and elaborations of qualitative methodology that have occurred since the 1970s. I don’t think we should be proud of what often seems a mindless repetition of dogma. It’s hard to imagine dismantling that structure. But as Kuhn explained, when the basic tenets of a paradigm (structure) become inadequate, other paradigms become thinkable, and shifts occur. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if university social science departments just stopped teaching those preexisting research methodologies—that dogma. Following Foucault (1966/1970), one might imagine “the unfolding of a space in which it is once again possible to think” (p. 342). My own work has been inspired by that challenge.

Once Again Possible to Think

This is my desire for post qualitative inquiry—that it opens up a space, especially for our students and early career scholars, to experiment, invent, and create—not just to repeat. We established scholars can be too established, I’m afraid, too well trained to imagine difference. During my 27 years as a professor at a major U.S. research institution, I’ve worked with so many wonderful doctoral students. Often, they’re older students who’ve already been successful in one or two other careers, as I was when I began my doctoral program. They come back to the university—to the promise of education—trusting that we’ll have something to give them, something to help them live the next years of their lives differently. They don’t really know what a doctoral program is or should be. They just jump into it determined to be good students and do the right things. They’re A-makers; they’re pretty docile, actually.

I wrote a book chapter (St. Pierre, 2001) about how bored and disappointed I was with my doctoral program until I found feminist theory and then poststructural theory and all the other theories I read and keep reading. I wrote about how my whole world changed when I began to really read—not just about English Education or teacher preparation but philosophy. I desperately needed help in thinking differently.

I so regret that students are required to and/or believe they have to take tired social science research methodology courses and that they end up believing that’s what counts as inquiry. I’d rather they study philosophy, history, literature, art, and so on, and find concepts and ideas that thrill them and then put them to work, inventing their work as they go. That’s the kind of inquiry I wish for them. But I’m not sure that’s teachable. I don’t know how to teach someone how to think, but it surely happens. I watch it happen when students are not too constrained. One of my students took a philosophy course on Bergson and was transformed. Another determined to really read Foucault and has become an expert. Another read A Thousand Plateaus over and over again and is my go-to expert on that text. Another has studied Walter Benjamin, too long neglected in education, and put him to work for early childhood education. None of that work was assigned or required. They decided what/who they wanted to read and study. And they’re not using conventional social science research methodologies in their dissertation research because those methodologies don’t make sense with the concepts/theories/theorists they’re using. But they are certainly inquiring.

That’s the kind of work I’m interested in—inquiry driven by theory and concepts, not by methodologies. And I don’t care what that work is called. In a recent special issue of Qualitative Inquiry on “new approaches to inquiry,” I (2021) wrote about post qualitative inquiry, Lisa Mazzei (2021) wrote about speculative inquiry, Maggie MacLure (2021) about inquiry as divination, Aaron Kuntz (2021) about parrhesia, and so on. People differently name their inquiry work that leans toward philosophy, but it’s all moving away from those methodologies. Erin Manning (2016) wrote that methodology is “an apparatus of capture” (p. 32), and I don’t want my students to be captured, stuck. I work hard to give them permission not to jump through the methodology hoop. I have real ethical concerns about all that.

My advice has always been the same: read, read, read. Read widely as long as you can, but, unless you want to be a doctoral student forever, you’ll need to focus eventually. Find a theorist or group of theorists and go deep. I encourage them to read that aberrant line of philosophers: Lucretius, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Simondon, Deleuze, and Foucault—especially philosophers of immanence. I went deep in poststructural feminism and then deep into Derrida and Foucault, especially. Lyotard was so helpful. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts haunted everything I did. I encourage students to put methodology aside and get some theoretical expertise first. Those methodologies aren’t rocket science, and a couple of introductory qualitative textbooks can be sufficient in many cases.

I’ve learned that if students have done their reading, they seldom ask me “what to do.” Most likely, they tell me what they’re going to do, and I typically respond, “That sounds good. Remember that Foucault said there are a thousand things to do. So try that and see what happens. If it doesn’t work, do the next thing that makes sense.” It’s my students who’ve taught me how little they need methodology to inquire.

As to how to begin to inquire, I often quote Barad (1999) who wrote that something in “the world kicks back” (p. 2) to Deleuze (1968/1994) who wrote that “something in the world forces us to think” (p. 139). One of my smart students called that something an “ontological break”—I really like that. And Foucault (as cited in Rajchman, 1985) wrote that his projects began because he “recognized something cracked, dully jarring, or disfunctioning in things I saw, in the institutions with which I dealt, in my relations with others” (p. 36).

Methodology just shuts students down because what methodology does is methodologize talking with someone into THE INTERVIEW, or watching someone do something into THE OBSERVATION, or thinking about the stories people tell into NARRATIVE ANALYSIS. Methodology methodologizes everything because that’s what it does! It tries to formalize and scientize everything, pin it down, nail it down, so it can become the topic of another journal article soon to be a book. No contingency here, no chance here, no becoming here. I may be exaggerating some, but not much, I think, given what I read and hear these days. For example, a colleague recently said, earnestly and proudly, “I can methodologize anything.” I was horrified and speechless! But think about how Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept assemblage has become assemblage methodology, and they aren’t even cited in those articles and books. How is it that a concept that exists only in an immanent ontology is methodologized! Methodology can be monstrous, almost pathological, and the rage to methodologize is fierce. At the least, it’s a potent display of disciplinary power, normalization, and dogmatic thought that should be challenged.

Teaching Post Qualitative Inquiry

I believe I’ve already said quite a bit about teaching doctoral students, but I can add a bit here in response to your third question. I remember something I learned about teaching many, many years ago that sounds pretty trite but makes sense to me: Find out where children are and take them as far as they can go. You know, in the field of education, we welcome people from all kinds of disciplines: history, chemistry, art, music, philosophy, English, foreign languages, business, economics, the military, you name it. We’re not picky—we’ll take anyone! So we’re very lucky to have this very interdisciplinary and diverse student body with a variety of rich intellectual and professional experiences. I think we should capitalize on that and not just overlay a curriculum on them that ignores their expertise. Of course, we want to put new ideas in their way, but I don’t think we should cut them off at their knees and ignore what they bring to us. And imposing a research methodology can do just that.

In fact, sometimes it seems to me that methodology is intended to do just that, to force them to give up their prior training and ways of thinking and become proper social scientists, to discipline them into what Kathleen Stewart (2015) called “the horrible social sciences.” But if they have majors in English, they already know how to inquire; if they’ve been trained in history, they already know how to inquire. If they have majors in biology, they already know how to inquire. For example, my English majors always want to know why the literature review doesn’t count as research. I say, “It does.” But in social science research methodology, it’s only the preface to empirical research—it’s something to get out of the way so you can get to the real work, the empirical work in the field. When we force students to take a sequence of methodology courses, it’s as if we’re asking them to abandon their expertise and, after taking those courses, too many can barely think outside methodology. They’re doomed to methodology.

What’s really strange, I think, is that, although we’re pushing empirical research on them, we don’t begin their training as social science researchers by teaching empiricism. Of course, there’s not just one kind of empiricism—I (St. Pierre, 2016) wrote an article trying to flesh out some of that. For example, logical empiricism—which grounds social science research methodology—is quite different from Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental empiricism, which is different still from the empiricism of phenomenology. Empiricism (knowledge through the senses) is set against rationalism (knowledge through the rational mind) in epistemology. So if we teach empiricism, we’d also teach rationalism (Descartes), which means we’d teach epistemology. And if we teach epistemology, I think that would take us to ontology. And then we’re deep into philosophy, which is where I think doctoral studies should begin—PhD, Doctor of Philosophy.

I argue we should begin doctoral studies in the social sciences by teaching philosophy, epistemology, ontology, the history and politics of empiricism, the history and politics of social science, and so on. We should begin with the big picture of various onto-epistemologies and, only then, think about whether a pre-given research methodology is thinkable, given that particular arrangement. My argument in post qualitative inquiry has been, all along, that the immanent onto-epistemology of poststructuralism does not allow one to think any preexisting, given, research methodology. What is not yet—immanent—is incommensurable with what is—the given.

But if students have not studied ontology, they just will not understand that, and they’ll try, for example, to apply some of some of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts from their immanent ontology in a qualitative research study. Those concepts are not meant to be applied, but students may well not understand that. They never had a chance to understand it because we’ve taught too much methodology and not enough philosophy.

But, really, I think the history and philosophy of concepts and ideas is what’s key in doctoral studies. For example, I teach a doctoral seminar about “new materialism,” but we don’t actually read anything about that until the last third of the course because you can’t understand “new” materialism (which isn’t new, of course) until you understand the “old” materialism. So we take a historical approach to matter and begin with Aristotle’s discussion of matter. Then we read Descartes’ meditation in which he separates mind/body, mind/matter. We read Whitehead, who doesn’t do that. We skip to Deleuze and Guattari because they don’t separate matter out either. We read some Barad who helps us understand that the soft social sciences are trying to mimic something that doesn’t exist in the hard natural science—the idea that matter is static and still and inert and thus can be captured as “data.” Even physicists are confused about matter. And then we get to some more recent articles about the “new materialism,” which by then students take with a big grain of salt. One of their assignments is to find articles in their disciplines that claim to use “new materialism” and critique them. At that point, I’m impressed by how quickly they’ve gotten smart about matter and can spot papers that aren’t sound.

You know, I’m always looking for good texts to read for my classes, and I remember finding this fabulous book on Amazon by Friedrich Lange, The History of Materialism and a Critique of its Current Usage. I thought, WOW! this is the book I need for my class! We’ll just read this book—he’s already done all the work! Then I saw that the copyright date is 1866! 1866! So it’s not that matter and materialism haven’t always been problematic concepts or that what it is hasn’t always been up for grabs. How, then, has it been thought differently in different onto-epistemological arrangements? Why/how/when does matter matter? This is a big ontological question, isn’t it? This work is so exciting, I think, but, again, matter is given in our social science research methodologies—no need to call it into question.

So to sum up, I would teach philosophy (e.g., ontology, epistemology, ethics, empiricism, and rationalism) and history, and the politics of both, at the beginning of doctoral education in the social sciences and go from there. I would certainly not teach methodology unless someone is using an onto-epistemological arrangement in which it is thinkable. And I would not teach much methodology, ever. In fact, stand-alone methodology courses are not de rigueur in much of the world. One of my colleagues in another country said they stopped offering those methodology courses at her university because they stifled students’ work—it became pedestrian, it all looked alike—which is not surprising.

The Politics of Methodology in the Academy

Your last question about the politics of methodology is a good one, and I’ve already talked about it in relation to SBR. Every institution in every country is different, so I can’t make any generalizations here, just describe my approach. First, I do advise doctoral students to choose their dissertation advisor and committee wisely. Second, I advise them to read, read, read, and to get very smart about what they’re interested in. That gives them the expertise and confidence they need to defend their work. Third, once they’ve done that, I advise them to take charge of their committees as much as they can because it is their PhD, after all.

Of course, they should take the advice of their professors, but they shouldn’t let a professor or a committee just shut them down. There are ways to bring your teachers along with you. Help us go with you. And if your work is good—and we can tell when it is—then we are likely to be impressed and support you. Students need to explain as well as they can what they want to do and provide a solid rationale for doing it. And if a student wants to do something different, their work has to be especially good! We recognize typical mediocre work, but we may not recognize something different but stellar. Again, the way your work gets good is through reading. No one can read for you, and those who read a lot can always tell when others don’t. I just love it when, in a committee meeting, a student demonstrates that scholarly authority that only comes from having done their homework. When they easily answer questions and steer the conversation in the direction they want to go. When they know their stuff so well, they can be pedagogical and help us understand too.

As a professor, I’ve always tried to open up a space for students to do something different—that’s my ethics and politics of resistance. And, of course, there are colleagues who say what I do is “too way out there.” But, honestly, if coding data isn’t too way out there, I don’t know what is! Again, I just have to do my work, my work. I have to read, read, and read; try to open up a space for difference and not worry too much about what others think. I do listen to critique and then decide whether its solid and something I need to think about or whether someone just doesn’t want to think differently. I have less and less patience with those who reject someone’s work without having studied it carefully. I agree with something Spivak (1993) wrote, “I cannot see why the publishers’ convenience or classroom convenience or time convenience for people who do not have the time to learn should organize the construction of the rest of the world” (p. 187). Judith Butler (1995) wrote something similar, “Is the effort to colonize and domesticate these theories under the sign of the same . . . an excuse not to read and not to read closely?” (p. 5). So just summarily dismissing a whole body of thought is unacceptable, especially when we’re working with our students. As an advisor, I may be “paradigms behind” (C. Patton, 2008, p. 269), but that’s no justification for telling students they can’t study and use certain philosophical approaches I haven’t studied yet.

At this point in my career, I can see how very difficult it is to escape our training. That’s why it’s so important to always think about how our doctoral training controls the rest of our careers in academia. How were we trained? Who did we study with? What were the big, sexy theories at the time? Were we drowned in some overdetermined methodology? Were we encouraged to think big, to take risks? And what are we doing to our students now? Are we opening things up for them or closing them down? Are we encouraging risk-taking or insisting on the normal, the pedestrian. Lots to think about here, always, but I haven’t changed my mind about what I learned as I wrote my dissertation: methods are easy; folding is hard.