Good,Bad,and Hopefully Not the God Trick: Technological Systems in Qualitative Inquiry

Proliferating Recording Devices

In my 2015 article, I demonstrated how recording devices, when not acknowledged, retain post-positivist discourses that claim objectivity and realism. I attempted to show how recording devices are Baradian (2007) apparatuses that are “constituted through particular practices that are perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings” (p. 170). I then offered ways to think about how to expand the discourses practiced with recording devices. This work situated recording devices within agential realism, “an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other socio-material practices” (Barad, 2007, p. 26). Simply put, recording devices consist of and are the products of entangling humans, nonhumans, cultural, discourse, nature, and so on. Humans are just one part of the entanglement and most certainly are not the center of it. Humans make advances in research entanglements through setting of boundaries (e.g., a research focus) that allow them to focus in on the ongoing dynamism. Those boundaries offer onto-epistemological security, a corralling of the ongoing dynamism, to think with the entanglement. The boundaries made through agential cuts “materialize differ/ent phenomena” (p. 178). The work I did in that article suggested that the recording device, something so naturalized and normalized to the point of innocence in interviews, is far from innocent and worthy of researcher attention.

In the 2015 article, I chose the term “recording devices” to suggest the multiple tools (e.g., stenography machines and a wide variety of tools used to record audio) and methods for recording interviews. Here, I make the move toward the word “tools” to denote a wide range of technologies, including recording devices, used in qualitative research. Similar to Orlikowski (2007), I conceptualize technological tools as active and relational parts of an entanglement, in this instance qualitative inquiry, that materialize both practical and theoretical commitments. The term “tools” indicates that their use is purposeful and active. Tools create relational movements that link, for example, spoken and written language, thoughts in a body to thoughts on a page, app, and so on. More important, tools suggest a relation between theory and practice in that they work to inform each other (Foucault & Deleuze, 1977). Since writing the article, I have continued to be curious about the tools used in the generation of data. As I wrote in 2015, “I [as a researcher] was (and still am) part of and result of the intra-actions that the recording device provisionally bounded” (p. 394). After publishing the article, I was not done with the entanglement. Entanglements do not work like that. They keep going (many times whether we like it or not). Some(thing)(one) always generates a productive snag to move with the world differently.

A Methodological Note

My previous work about recording devices grew from a snag between theory and practice. In many ways, the 2015 article was an exercise in poststructural style pragmatism as I sought to answer the following questions: What is the work of recording devices in my study? What theories and practices constitute that work? How might that work produce something new? These questions constitute a methodological approach grounded in the “seriousness and logical rigor with which Deleuze and Guattari pursue their separate or collective ends” (Bogue, 1989, p. 8).

Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts that Massumi (1987) compared with crowbars, draw on the vital forces of practices and relationships with existing ideas. Guattari’s political commitments and work as a psychoanalyst were critical to concepts such as becoming and schizoanalysis. Deleuze noted how Bergson’s and Riemann’s works influenced his work on cinema (Deleuze, 1995). If anything, their singular and collective work can be read as engaging with the forces within these works to “lead to unexpected convergences, and new implications, new directions, in other people’s work” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 30). These convergences then must be put in relation to each other. As they are put into relation, it becomes possible to see how “practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another” (Foucault & Deleuze, 1977, p. 206). These relays constitute the relationships that then have the potential to create new iterations of theory-practices. These new terms, for example, becoming and schizoanalysis, were created to express the new conceptual iterations (Deleuze, 1995). In this way, these novel terms are very much grounded in a pragmatic effort aimed to express the unique relays between theory and practice that constitute the terms. Snags, or forces, help to unravel these relays between theory and practice. The snags allow researchers to ask questions about how these relays constitute their work that, in turn, create different understandings about them. I study one such snag next.

A Snag: Notebooks, Binaries (?!), and Other Things

Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved a new notebook. It does not matter the size, manner of binding, color, or texture of paper. As I open a new notebook, a space unfolds in which I can begin to empty the wild world of my thinking. The crisp, clean, and flat pages soon gain voluminous texture with my touch, doodles, sketches, and sometimes-unreadable script. My fingers release nervous tension that opens the inner layers of the corners of the cover. The notebook becomes an expressive extension of my thinking. Never fully capturing, just contingently holding it.

For quite some time, I mistakenly believed that all I needed was my beloved notebooks and writing utensils to do qualitative research. No technology for me! Notebook good, technology bad! Down with binary code! Peak Luddite level achieved!

Anke te Heesen’s (2005) work on the notebook as technology, however, made me question my peak Luddite status. Not soon after the end of the Middle Ages, notebooks and pencils became prominent technologies. Te Heesen (2005) wrote that “Fixed ideas about how something should be written down on paper have existed for a long time” (p. 585). These ideas were first developed in the sixteenth century in the fields of natural sciences, archiving, and accounting. For example, the sixteenth century naturalist Konrad Gesner (also inventor of the pencil) claimed that the notes scientists took were critical to the production of scientific knowledge (te Heesen, 2005). Later in the Enlightenment, Bacon and Locke described a commonplace book that held notes about learnings made from readings, references, and quotations. Locke (1760) compared such a notebook with a storehouse of the memory. Since then, the notebook, which can be a variety of sizes, has collected the chronicles, narratives, observations, and ideas of the notetaker across disciplines (te Heesen, 2005). In many ways, it is still being reinvented as a technology through different repetitions.

As I read te Heesen’s (2005) piece about the notebook as technology, I began to think otherwise about technology. I realized that my assumption about the notebook as non-technology was quite wrong. Throughout history, including those notebooks used in the early days of recording interviews mentioned in the introduction, people have remade the notebook through theory and practice. In so doing, each iteration makes the notebook become otherwise. As I studied my notebooks, I began to see how I used them differently for different projects. One contained more drawings than another. Another functioned more as a folder as I shoved slips of paper in it. And so on. Notebooks doing different things for different purposes.

These reflections generated further thought about other tools of research. I never just used a notebook and writing utensil. I also used a computer. And Microsoft Word. And the recording device. And online and on-the-ground storage. Oh, and a camera. And. . . And. . . And. . . I was never really the Luddite I claimed to be. My rejection of things built by binary code that I used in my research created a space to study how I upheld binaries about technology. Old technology (anything not associated with binary code)/New technology (anything associated with binary code), good/bad . . . and . . . and . . . and. . . Those binaries then upheld conceptualizations about technology (e.g., deterministic, positivistic). Good poststructuralists are not supposed to uphold binaries. Oops.

The recognition of upholding a binary can offer a snag, an opportunity, to think the terms in a logic of the and (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) wrote that “the multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available” (p. 6). My moment of sobriety, the recognition of upholding binaries, offered an opportunity to pause and examine what is happening to learn about the work of technology and my practices surrounding it. I soon began to see this work as thinking through binary computer code, seemingly endless series of ones and twos to create something otherwise, the multiple.

01000111 01101111 01101111 01100100 00101100 00100000 01000010 01100001 01100100 00101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01001000 01101111 01110000 01100101 01100110 01110101 01101100 01101100 01111001 00100000 01001110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01000111 01101111 01100100 00100000 01010100 01110010 01101001 01100011 01101011

Or

Good, Bad, and Hopefully Not the God Trick

Before I get to work with these ones and twos, I offer these words. I understand that my scholarship is frequently associated with postqualitative inquiry. In the spirit of not upholding more binaries, I do not wish to create a binary between qualitative and postqualitative inquiry. Rather, I understand postqualitative inquiry as being part of what Denzin (2008) called the big tent of qualitative inquiry—a circus like atmosphere of multiple theories and practices. As I noted in 2022, the big tent approach requires that researchers honor the different theories and practices that are housed within the tent and create dialogue between them. This article is an attempt to create such dialogue (Nordstrom, 2022).

While I use Deleuze and Guattari’s singular and collective work as a methodological tool to disentangle the work of technology in qualitative inquiry, this article is not solely for those doing postqualitative work. Rather it is the work of a humble servant to the big tent of qualitative inquiry. Simply put, I do this work not to create yet another category in qualitative inquiry. I offer it to study the work of a concept in qualitative inquiry, not perform some sort of god trick (Haraway, 1988). Deleuze’s (1995) words help me to think about this work:

A concept’s full of a critical, political force of freedom. It’s precisely their power as a system that brings out what’s good or bad, what is or isn’t new, what is or isn’t alive in a group of concepts. Nothing’s good in itself, it all depends on careful systematic use. (p. 32).

In other words, I take technology in qualitative inquiry as a conceptual entity full of forces to bring about both the good and bad, the new and not-so-new, and so on. These forces disrupt the stability of binaries and place the terms in a series of ands. These ands, in turn, offer a space to consider how the etymology of technology, that is an artful system of making and doing, can be useful in qualitative inquiry. To do this work, I first return to history to better understand current-day practices.

Technological Systems in History

Two scholars—Francis La Flesche and Zora Neale Hurston—offer ways to consider the work of technological systems in early anthropological history, a disciplinary history that informs qualitative inquiry’s past, present, and future. In this section, I think with the field notes, journals, images (both still and moving), music recordings, and more that constitute their work. This historical work creates a space to consider how technological systems can be used to create more than just research.

Francis La Flesche, who, as Parins and Littlefield (1995) suggested, lived his professional and personal life navigating the middle spaces of Indigenous (Omaha) and White cultures, offers ways to understand how technological tools can be used for a variety of effects. ¹ Graber (2017) wrote that La Flesche’s writing is dense and does not seek to reduce or oversimplify through language. Whereas Lévi-Strauss (1969) noted that the Omaha cultures are so complex that they may stretch the capacity of anthropology and may be better explained by mathematics, La Flesche is able to represent the Omaha in their own complexity. La Flesche took extensive field notes (many of which are available at the Smithsonian) and used the new technology of wax cylinders to record and preserve Indigenous (Omaha and Osage) songs and stories. In his letters to his collaborator Alice Fletcher, La Flesche frequently describes his concerns about language and getting it right. His concern is illustrated in this excerpt from a 1905 speech.

The myths, the rituals of the race have been frequently recorded in such a manner as to obscure their true meaning and to make them appear as childish or as foolish. This has been in a large measure due to linguistic difficulties. The Indian tongues differ widely from the English language, not only in the construction of sentences but in general literary form. Moreover, the imagery of the Indian speech conveys a very different meaning to the mind of the Indian from that which it conveys to the white man. The Indian looks upon nature, upon all natural forms animate and inanimate, from a different standpoint and he draws from them different lessons than does one of the white race. So when scholars give a literal translation to an Indian story, both its spirits and its form are lost to the English reader. Or when the myth is interpreted by an Indian who has picked up a scanty and colloquial knowledge of English, even if, even if by chance he has himself a comprehension of the meaning of the myth he translates, his rendition will be on that on intelligent Indian an accept as a true presentation of the mythic story. It is from translations such as these that the mental capacity of the Indian has been judged. (pp. 269–270)

In this lengthy quote, La Flesche asks that researchers engage Indigenous linguistic, epistemological, and ontological complexities rather than simplify them. Such work, logically, begins with the technologies (e.g., notebooks, wax cylinders for recording, and journals) that are used to record and create data. How a person uses those technological tools to create data matters. La Flesche nods toward the dangerous things that can happen if a simplistic approach is used. In so doing, La Flesche opens a space to consider the work of technological tools in data generation.

Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork practices also offer a way to consider how technological tools can be put to work in a project. ² Hurston used a variety of technologies, including film, recordings, and field notes, in her data collection that ultimately materialized her commitment to relational fieldwork practices. Hemenway (1977) described Hurston’s fieldwork as unorthodox, citing its relational nature. Plant (2018) described her fieldwork practices as follows: “Even as she rejected the objective-observer stance of Western scientific inquiry for a participant-observer stance, Hurston still incorporated standard features of the ethnographic and folklore-collecting processes within her methodology” (p. xxiii). In other words, her fieldwork appears to be reflective of at least two areas, her upbringing and her training at Barnard and Columbia. She was a daughter of the culture she studied, and her practices reflected it. In her descriptions of fieldwork practices, her emphasis on relations is primary (Plant, 2018). For example, in her work with Kossola (Cudjo) Lewis, the focus of Hurston’s (2018) Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” she created relational ways of knowing by caring for him as a person and elder. For example, she brought him insecticide to help with pests in his garden, ham, and all other sorts of things he needed or may have wanted.

Hurston’s fieldwork generated unorthodox ethnographic texts. The influence of the Harlem Renaissance comes into play with her published writing. Similar to La Flesche, she refuses to present people in reductive ways. Hernández (1995) wrote about her work in Mules and Men, “Hurston casts doubt on the ethnographer’s ability to adequately represent these different communities and criticizes a discipline that offers up people for view through the lenses of the spyglass” (p. 161). In other words, Hurston refused to use fieldwork as way to offer up the other to the reader in a realist way that dominated the field at that time. She makes the reader work, to enter the participants’ world and ways of knowing and being to get to know them. Plant’s (2018) introduction to Hurston’s Barracoon offers a summary of Hurston’s work. She wrote,

Embedded in the narrative of Barracoon are those aspects of ethnography and folklore collecting that reveal Hurston’s methodology and authenticate Kossola’s story as his own, rather than as a fiction of Hurston’s imagination. Hurston transcribes Kossola’s story using his vernacular diction, spelling his words as she hears them pronounced. Sentences follow his syntactical rhythms and maintain his idiomatic expressions and repetitive phrases. Hurston’s methods respect Kossola’s own storytelling sensibility. (p. xxiii)

Hurston’s note-taking capabilities in those notebooks materialize her commitments to Kossola and his story. Moreover, they materialize her middle spaces of being responsible to her home and her anthropological training. One cannot simply attend to language as she did without a lot of detailed field notes. Hurston presents those details in a rich complexity that refuses reduction.

Both La Flesche’s and Hurston’s work offers a way to consider the work of technological tools in research practices. Both La Flesche and Hurston used (at the time) modern technology, such as photography, film, and audio recording, in addition to field notebooks. Their use of technology allowed both scholars to present the cultures they studied in rich and complex epistemological and ontological ways to work against oversimplification and the potential deleterious effects from oversimplification. La Flesche and Hurston shifted away from the ideas that technological tools capture reality. Instead, their work suggested that technological tools produce realities in particular ways that have social, cultural, and political effects. Their work creates a space to consider how technology is a system of tools used in data generation that creates ontological, epistemological, and ethical realities that have the capacity for more socially just worlds.

Who Assembles Qualitative Inquiry?

Both Trinh (1991) and Anzaldúa (2007) wrote about how creative acts are a collective and expansive enterprise that pours through researchers. Other people, ideas, art, music, nature, and so on have such generative creative capacities as they move through researchers. Behar (1995) expanded that collectivity by drawing attention to technological tools used in fieldwork. Almost as an aside, she noted that computers, then beginning to dominate fieldwork practices in the early 1990s, are “assembled by the delicate hands of a native woman somewhere else” (p. 3). Computers, notebooks, pencils, pens, and whatever else someone may use in the creation of knowledge are most likely crafted by others, many times in faraway lands whose histories are dominated by colonialism and global capitalism. I, for instance, type these sentences on an Apple laptop using Microsoft Word with an internet connection that allows me to save all these words to two different cloud storages. I am seated at a desk and chair next to a pile of books, all manufactured elsewhere by many other hands. I scribble notes on a notebook next to my laptop that sits next to a paper calendar that contains my to-do lists. All these things that make this article possible are made elsewhere by other people. Behar’s aside allowed space to consider how the very objects we use in the production of knowledge are very much material entities that are connected to many other people and places. Moreover, her aside creates space to realize the privileges held by those who use those objects to produce knowledge. Simply put, any research I do using any system of technology is the result of many people, things, and places. Many hands from many places have had a hand in my and others’ creative acts.

Behar (1995) acknowledges that the technology with which we do research disrupts the myth of the self-sufficient researcher. As Butler (2004) wrote, such “forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they are a part, that final control can be secured, and that final control is not, cannot be, an ultimate power” (p. xiii). The very research we do is dependent on global processes. Almost so much that it may very well be impossible to do research without these global processes. These processes overwhelm any sense of researcher self-sufficiency. One system of technological tools links researchers to so many people and corporations all over the globe. The technology that we adore, that is featured in this special issue, the technology that made this very special issue possible reveals how very vulnerable we are to each other and the entangled ethics of that work. We cannot wish that vulnerability away, lest we lose our own humanity (Butler, 2004). One is already so many and that many requires attentive care.

Becoming Maven: Another Snag

I must admit something. Although I may have jokingly claimed a Luddite status for quite some time, I confess that I was an early adopter of Refworks, a reference management system. Luddite failure. Luddite liar. I remember first learning about Refworks in the mid-to-late 2000s. Endnote, another reference management system, had crashed my computer a couple of times, resulting in a couple of expletive-laden tear-filled rants to the sky. All those references lost. Again. Refworks, however, a new online database, promised not to crash. No crashes? Not having to upload references multiple times? Being able to upload and view references wherever I had an internet connection? Being able to search my reference notes for key terms? Yes. Please. To all these questions. Maybe I was never a Luddite, maybe I was becoming maven. That is the thing about binaries and the absolutes they can generate. They usually fail. Categories exclude so much that they ultimately make us all liars as we seek to contort ourselves into the categories of our desires. As Keating (2013) noted, “oppositional thinking erodes our alliances and communities” (p. 8).

The advent of Refworks and the other reference management systems was an exciting time. It still is. I am amazed with how my students use technologies to help them organize studies and how much I can learn from their systems. From detailed Microsoft Excel files to Zotero (a reference management system) to QDAS, apps, and much more, they have worked to create systems that help them do their work. These systems, however, are not new. They are repetitions of systems that began centuries ago. From the notebooks at the end of the Middle Ages to La Flesche’s innovative use of wax cylinders to record songs, Hurston’s work with filmmaking, and Behar’s consideration of who assembles technologies, create a space to consider technology as a system of tools. Each system, with its repeated different combination of new and not-so-new technological tools, shapes the field of qualitative inquiry. Each system, however, is many. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) wrote, “Even technology makes the mistake of considering tools in isolation: tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible” (p. 90). The term “tool,” in this instance a technological tool, assumes “a symbiosis of bodies” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 89), an assemblage. That assemblage includes all the people who made a technology possible. That is, the people who invented it, the people who gathered materials to make it, the people who make it, the people who made it possible for researchers to use, and the researchers. That list is not exhaustive. That list shows the vast circulations of technology between culture, politics, and history. The circulation of technology, however, does not stop after its use in data generation, analysis, and write-up. It continues to do more things, as La Flesche’s and Hurston’s work reminds us. The technology, itself an intermingling, creates more interminglings. These intermingling products of a technological system can be put to work in so many intentional and unintentional ways. Conceptualizing technology as a system of tools allows researchers to think about the distributions, circulations, and mutations of the intermingling technological tools that constitute such a system (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

Technology is doing quite a bit of work and has done so for some time. Technology is steeped in history that is being written and rewritten in the present. All the histories of the technological tools in a system are being rewritten with each use. There is no pure space when a system is in the middle of binary terms, good, bad, and. . . and. . . and. . . . In the middle, researchers and technological tools are churned together and made different in an unending series of ands that create different repetitions in the ongoing history of technology in qualitative inquiry.

Conceptualizing technology as a system of tools creates a way to think about how vital technology is to qualitative inquiry. Many, if not all, of the advances in qualitative inquiry would not be possible without these systems. Consider arts-based research and the ways that technology has enabled those researchers to share their work with the world. That work, in turn, has created more artistic exploration. Consider the availability, an availability made possible by technology, of research for the public to read. Consider how a note in a notebook may be a kindling to change the field. Consider this very journal. It is a product of technology and so many hands that make it possible. Technology, in many ways, has helped qualitative inquiry go beyond itself and push the field to different and exciting spaces. Perhaps qualitative inquiry has always been a field engaged with technology. ³

Technology is a system we are all engaged with, good, bad, and everything in between. The different technological tools—even a notebook and a pencil can be considered a technology—resist new/old and other binaries and enter a logic of the and (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). When technology is a series of ands, one may ask the following questions: What tools comprise the system? How am I using those tools? What is the work of this technological system in this project? That logic allows researchers to consider what a system does. How does it circulate? What does it do? What kinds of phenomena is it productive of? How might researchers use a system to create better worlds?

Next Generation

I am indebted to my students for helping me think about technology as a system of tools used with careful skill. After I have shared my use of RefWorks and other ways I managed reading in my doctoral program with students, they have sometimes asked whether their way of organizing references was “okay.” Those kinds of questions always struck me. Who am I to decide which technology of all the technologies available that they use is “okay” for them. I am not the person using it. They are. I respond to their queries with some version of the questions that conclude the paragraph above.

The “okayness” of a system is partially one of pragmatics. A system is okay for a student, for anyone, if it works for them. Without a doubt, and as many have said before me, working with technological tools requires some practice that involves research and some trial and error. That research and trial and error helps them to develop the skills to use a particular tool and to know what to do when it does not work. A tool, however, is rarely used in isolation. In many ways, the “okayness” of a tool is dependent on how one tool works with other tools as well as the human and tool system connection. Some tools work well together. Others do not. Some tools are intuitive and helpful to some people. Others are not. There is no point in using something that is not helpful, no matter how many times one tries to make it work. Better to stop and find another one that does help one think. It is not as if we are lacking technological tools now. Developing a system that is okay for one student (and many times not another) is then about pragmatics, learning by doing, but that is not all.

As I have attempted to show here and in 2015, the devices and tools with which we do qualitative inquiry do matter. For example, earlier I noted that a technological system is both good and bad and depends on its uses and outcomes. As I demonstrated in 2015, recording devices are not innocent, they are far from it. Paulus and Lester (2022) suggested that technology of all kinds must be used reflexively. I could not agree more. Technological tools are not inactive ahistorical entities. Their very production relies on complicated networks of global economies and politics. They are, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) noted, interminglings that create further interminglings that are social, cultural, and political. These tools, then, are put together in systems that require creativity and care. The system is a creative act that generates more creative acts. The tools I put together in a system for a project require some degree of creativity. Moreover, what I do with that system, that constellation of tools, is creative work that offers up different matterings. As evidenced in the aforementioned history, researchers have used technological systems for different aims. Creativity requires the reflexivity that Paulus and Lester (2022) advocate in their book, in addition to the reflexive work suggested by Pillow (2015) that concerns how one produces knowledge. The researcher is response-able for the configurations, the knowledge, of the world they are putting together in their research.

How, then, is such an approach taught to the next generation of qualitative scholars? First, no combination of technological tools in a system will create total knowledge. Something will always slip away, be off-frame, be inaudible, be un-capturable. A system is both and, an intermingling of many things that make the god trick impossible. To help students begin to understand such a system, I offer them Figure 1. While Figure 1 reduces the idea of the system as I have described it, it is useful to help students to understand the work of such a system. On one side, there is the system designed for the project. Each of the small dots is a tool that constitutes that system. Each dot is a combination of a tool, a human as well as social, cultural, and political discourses and practices. Each dot is steeped in history. Each dot is a product of complex global economies and connections that make it possible. In effect, each dot is itself a system of ands that work together. Each dot then works with other dots to produce/create particular and partial political, social, and cultural realities. The figure aims to help students understand technology as a system that not only requires creative skill to use the components, but also how the system can be used to create more socially just realities.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Technology as a System That not Only Requires Creative Skill to Use the Components, but Also How the System Can be Used to Create More Socially Just Realities

Figure 1 attempts to help students release the “taken-for-grantedness” of technology and better understand the work of a system in a study. As I stated in 2015, one would not think of doing an interview without some kind of recording device. Likewise, one would not think of doing qualitative inquiry without some combination of technology now and for some time now. As I stated before, history allows us to understand that some kind of combination of technology has had a hand in the production of knowledge for quite some time. In many ways, we cannot think of qualitative inquiry without technology as a system of tools working together to produce knowledge.

Snags to Come

My use of the term “snag” has been deliberate for two purposes. First, it is frequently referenced in the poststructural literature as a moment that “can no longer be mended, a spot where neither meaning, however plural, nor any form of presence can pin/pen down the trace” (Derrida, 1981, p. 26). It is also used within technology to denote something not working. Both versions are useful in noting when something is not quite right and needs to be addressed in some way or another. I began by revisiting the snag that generated the 2015 article about recording devices. That snag unraveled a space for me to think about technology as a concept full of forces. Those forces rendered my Luddite status null and void when I realized that I used groups of technological tools in systems. That use demands care and skill as the system produces knowledge. That use, however, is not simply use. Each use overflows with and creates circulating historical, cultural, social, and political discourses and practices. Such a system is both good and bad, new and old, and so on. Simply put, a system is a contingent grouping of technological tools that are used to create shifting cultural, social, and political realities.

While such a system may appear to flatten the hierarchies that generate binaries, the binary terms, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) noted, are the terms we are forever rearranging. Halberstam’s (2020) consideration that queer theorists engage with both and of the binary, so as not to reproduce the repressive side of the binary is instructive. All too often, entanglements and assemblages are used to describe complex and messy things without acknowledging the work of terms as they circulate in assemblages and entanglements. The work I have attempted to do in this article aims to place technology in a space of both and, both good and bad, old and new, and so on. By directly addressing the work of social, cultural, political, and historical forces in a system and the pedagogical work surrounding such a system in qualitative inquiry, I have attempted to heed Halberstam’s call.

Such a middle space begins to examine the question, “Can we think qualitative inquiry without technology?” Given the history of technological systems and their future use and development, I would argue no. Qualitative inquiry cannot be separated from the technology that makes it possible. A technological tool or the system in which it is used may not be “cutting edge” but its use may be “cutting edge.” How that tool is used and how does the use of the tool put to work different repetitions and difference become the central questions. What is the work of that tool? That system? The work of that tool and system generates movements within qualitative inquiry. Those movements are the field’s past, present, and future. Thinking about the work and what that work does creates a space for researchers to consider their use of technological tools and systems in their work. That space may very well be full of snags that, when examined, can generate new and different thinking that continues to push the field in different ways. Maybe we are all mavens.