Abstract
In the vast majority of Swedish schools, computer software is used for the registration of the absences and presences of students. How can the material-discursive engagements and practices of registration be researched? The article elaborates, from an agential realist account, on “doing research” in relation to the phenomenon of school absence. Through experimenting with intraviewing, the expressions and actions of materialities are acknowledged and the subject-centrism of conventional humanist qualitative interviewing is questioned. The posthumanist theories engaged with open up a rethinking of the production of data within qualitative research, and a discussion of the inseparability of data, analysis, thinking, and writing. The knowledge created on registration as an embodied, material, affective, and intraactive practice produces school absence as a reality where the computer software is always already a part of the phenomenon and thus needs to be an agential part of researching registration.
Keywords
Introduction: Exploring the Materiality of Qualitative Methodologies
This article is an exploration of “which specific material practices matter, and how they matter” (Barad, 2007, p. 168) in the process of researching school absenteeism. The article is part of a research project on the registration and monitoring through digital technologies of students’ school absences and on the practices created and performed in relation to this. Three Swedish schools are part of the project and the students involved are between 11 and 15 years old. It can be claimed that two recent statutory requirements have highlighted the handling of school absence registrations and have impacted on work in schools in Sweden: students’ unexcused absences have to be noted in the grade for each term (SFS, 2011:185, 6 kap. 12§) and all unexcused absences have to be communicated to each student’s guardian(s) the same day the absence takes place (SFS, 2010:800, 7 kap. 17§). The acts have created a demand for accurate, efficient, and fast ways to manage registration, and consequently more than 80% of Swedish municipalities use computer software for the registration of students’ attendance (Bodén, 2013a). At the same time, it can be claimed that computer technologies have facilitated and created conditions for the fulfillment of the new laws.
As I have shown elsewhere (Bodén, 2013b), materialities like computer software are part of producing school absence. In this article, however, the focus is on the material-discursive intraactions taking place in the process of registration and how to account for this—not only in the analysis but also methodologically. What particularly will be addressed are practices of creating and producing data within an agential realist account (Barad, 1996) that opens up to the “materiality of fieldwork” (Childers, 2013). What becomes of students’ absences and presences in schools as they are registered by teachers, and how can this be researched? How can I as researcher connect to that material-discursive production of absences and presences? Taking these queries as my starting point, the aim of the article is to investigate and elaborate on the material-discursive practices of “doing research” in relation to the phenomenon of school absence.
An anecdote from my memory notes will serve as a first glimpse into the necessity of opening up to the materialities in the research process.
The teacher Anna tells one of the boys, playing with his telephone, that teachers are the only ones allowed to have a phone in the classroom. Since she forgot to bring hers, she has to do the registration of the missing students on the computer. Anna is standing in front of the class and the laptop is placed on a high table. The program running on the computer is called Dexter, a program for registering students’ absences and presences. She goes through the students’ names on the list on the screen and calls out the names of the four students who are reported as sick. One of the names is Sofie. However, one student immediately objects and answers that she is sitting right there. Anna responds that someone must have called the automatic telephone and when Sofie’s birth number is keyed into the machine, the information is automatically transferred to the software and the screen, because this is what is facing Anna. One of the other students replies that since Sofie is not really there, she might as well go home. Anna tells the class that this is quite weird, but one of Sofie’s parents has called the automatic phone before seven that same morning and reported her as sick. In a playful tone she says to Sofie that if she thinks really carefully she might be at least a little bit sick? Later during the lesson Anna discovers that she had confused Sofie’s name with the name written beneath it in the list on the screen.
During the time I spent in the schools, situations like this happened several times a day. The registration took place in the classroom—at the beginning, middle, or end of the lesson—with a laptop or with an app on a smart phone, or in the teachers’ office. However, the playfulness of the teacher and the students in this situation caught my attention. I kept returning to this anecdote, reading, rereading, retelling, and discussing it with colleagues and I often started laughing when thinking about it. Something dragged me back to the situation, it sparkled and glowed (Ringrose & Renold, 2014) like a “hot spot” (MacLure, 2013a, p. 172); it gripped me (MacLure, 2013b, p. 228), charmed me, and discomforted me. What was understood as absence in this situation was not very clear. Was it to be absent from the classroom or was it to be registered as absent on the computer screen? Could a student be absent and present at the same time?
What happened in the classroom can be understood as a Deleuzian event. According to Deleuze (1990) and Deleuze and Guattari (1994), an event neither has a specific start nor a definite end but is an infinite movement that combines past and present, active and passive. As different parts of the situation in the classroom came together and produced something new, this event stretched beyond the specificities of its happening. I was fascinated by the complexity of the situation and the confusion displayed by Anna and the students, as the event took off in new directions that simultaneously blurred the limits of absence and presence. At the same time, I was discomforted; it seemed as though I was missing out on something important. When focusing solely on the voices, actions, and feelings of the teacher and the students, what was left unnoticed? In writing about silence in interviews, Mazzei (2007) claims that the production of knowledge becomes partial and incomplete if the data are limited to the spoken words of humans. Nevertheless, the starting point for qualitative research has often been the human voice as “present—spoken, heard, recorded, and transcribed into words in an interview transcript” (Mazzei, 2013, p. 733). Trying to retell the event to myself without focusing merely on the words and actions of Anna, Sofie, or the student who challenged Sofie to go home, it struck me that what was missing in my narrative was not the silences of human voices, but the sounds of the silent materialities. Once again rethinking the event, I gradually recalled more and more sounds and actions, that neither I nor the other participants appear to have noticed: the forgotten phone requiring Anna to do the registration on the laptop instead, the list of names showing who was supposed to be in the classroom, the automatic phone speaking to the computer in binary text reporting students as absent, and the computer screen helping Anna become aware of Sofie as missing, even though she was not. Together those many tiny and silent actions were actually quite voluble and affected the event, what happened and what was said. What happened—and I will describe it with the help of Childers (2013)—was that when the materiality of the field became recognized and (ac)knowledge, both the physical and discursive were understood as equally important forces shaping the ontology of the event. Thus, it became apparent how ontologies (“the being” of the event) and epistemologies (“the knowing” of the event) were enmeshed: practices of knowing and practices of being were mutually implicated. Barad (2003, 2007) describes this as an onto-epistem-ology: “the study of practices of knowing in being” (Barad, 2003, p. 829). Furthermore, what became obvious was how entangled I was, as a researcher, in producing the phenomenon I was studying. Knowledge was not produced because I was standing outside of the world I was researching, but because I was of the world in its becomings (compare with Barad, 2007). My (in)ability to acknowledge the materialities in the methodological process of research would be critical to how the phenomenon of school absence was constituted.
I had planned on carrying out interviews with teachers and students, and also with parents to open up thinking about how the systems of registration extend beyond the walls of the school building. However, when I realized that the interview process would put me at risk of falling back on actions, feelings, and words as products of unique, independent, essentialist (humanist) subjects, I came close to abandoning the interview. Nevertheless, I was still interested in exploring whether “a posthumanist stance [would] enable me to materialize a different conception of the interview and interview data” as Mazzei (2013, p. 733) expresses it. What I will do in the article is thus to invite the reader to be part of an elaboration of methodologies of interviewing for researching school absenteeism that questions the anthropocentrism of conventional humanist qualitative methodology 1 (St. Pierre, 2011, 2013), and opens up scrutiny of how data are created in the enactments between the analysis, the seven participating teachers, me as a researcher, the materialities of the events and theory. By doing this, I am not trying to pin down exactly how interviews within posthumanism should be done, but rather how such methodologies work and what they produce. In the following, I will unfold some of the concepts that I think will be helpful in this process.
Agential Realism and the Move Toward a Material-Discursive Methodology
Feminist educational research is interested in the embodiment of knowledge and the materiality of the research process that questions and puts under erasure the split between practices of collecting data (“doing”) and practices of analyzing (“thinking”). Closely connected to the focus on knowledge production within “posthumanism” (see, for example, Braidotti, 2013), “material feminisms” (see Alaimo & Hekman, 2008), and “new materialism” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012), attention has moved from human meaning-making and interpretation to movements and forces in-between human and nonhuman bodies. Meaning can never be understood as abstract, but is always a specific material (re)configuration of the world (Barad, 2003). Thus, a radical break with theories relying on dualisms is established, as cultural discourses and materialities are theorized as co-constitutive of realities (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). To emphasize the refusal to separate the discursive from the material or the material from the discursive and to illustrate their interdependence, the conjunctive term material-discursive is used. Or, in the words of Barad (2003), “materiality is discursive [ . . . ], just as discursive practices are always already material” (p. 822). Taking this theoretical framework—and more specifically agential realism (Barad, 1999, 2007)—as my starting point, I will in the following introduce agential realism as an apparatus of knowledge to enable a rethinking of the dualism between humans and nonhumans, discourse and materialities in the process of researching school absence.
The Production of a Specific Material Reality
As emphasized by Barad (2007), the use of the concept reality in (social) science often provokes a sense of discomfort because of its positivist associations. Yet, Barad (2007) claims that “‘we’ cannot afford not to talk about ‘it’” (p. 205). However, as Barad unfolds her understanding of the concept it becomes obvious that reality is neither a fixed essence independent of human practices nor is it a social/discursive construction. Humans are not able to stand outside reality to assemble the different theoretical or methodological apparatuses that construct it, but are always part of the (re)configurations of the world: “humans (like other parts of nature) are of the world, not in the world, and surely not outside of it looking in” (Barad, 2007, p. 206, italics in the original). Hence, humans are neither pure cause nor pure effect, but part of reality in its becoming (Barad, 2003). According to Barad, this allows a new formulation of realism, an agential realism. Barad (1996; see also Hekman, 2010) describes how agential realism provides a framework for addressing broad epistemological and ontological 2 issues. First, it grounds and situates knowledge in local embodied experience. Second, it privileges neither the material nor the cultural, but rather emphasizes the way productions are always material-cultural. Third, agential realism necessitates the interrogation of boundaries and critical reflexivity. And fourth, it underlines the ethics of knowing as knowledge will always have material consequences. This means that from an agential realist perspective, reality/realities do exist, but the agencies and practices of measuring reality are always already a part of the results obtained. In an agential realist account, the object (in the case of this study, school absence, the computer software, and the relations in-between them) cannot be separated from the measuring agencies (the software as a tool to control absences, along with the theoretical and methodological researching apparatuses) when all the relevant features of the researching process are included (Barad, 2007). To be able to research the registrations of school absence as “specific material configurations of the world” (Barad, 2007, p. 206), the apparatuses of knowing—“the material conditions of possibility and impossibility of mattering” (Barad, 2007, p. 148, italics in the original), that is, the conditions for doing research that are unfolded in the methodological process—have to be thoroughly scrutinized.
The anecdote discussed above can be described as an example of how I, as part of the research apparatuses/the apparatuses of knowing, produced the registration of school absence in a very specific way. What mattered and what was excluded from mattering produced a specific reality, a product of human voices and actions that left the material forces at play within the event as a backdrop. It can thus be claimed that the apparatuses of knowing offer a means of relating both to how knowledge is produced as well as how knowledge produces realities. To put it in other words, the methods put to work strengthen some realities, but erode others (see Law & Urry, 2004). Thus, in an agential realist account, reality is never independent of the ways it is researched, but is an ongoing dynamic of intraactivity with the apparatuses of knowing. This means that when I am researching a phenomenon like school absence, the phenomenon will always be produced in the relations between data, method/methodologies, research questions, and theories. In performing an interview based on those insights, what becomes important is of course, as in any interview situation, the questions being asked. But when there is no longer a belief in the disentangled humanist self, qualitative methods such as interviewing that are grounded in a humanist representationalist logic have to be rethought (St. Pierre, 2001). What is important are thus the relations between the materialities, the participants, and the researcher that the interview opens up: the where and when and if of the interview, as Mazzei (2013) expresses it. These relations can be theorized as an apparatus of knowing that enable some questions and hinder others. This is crucial for the performance of interviews, where what matters and what is excluded from mattering opens up or shuts down ways of producing a different becoming of school absenteeism.
Interviews as Enactments of Agential Cuts
As discussed above, what constitutes realities are the intraactions of the object of study and the measuring agents. This means that school absence and the methodologies for researching school absence are always entangled, and can only be distinguished from each other through artificial, provisional, and temporary cuts (van der Tuin, 2011). To be able to perform a scientific analysis, it is necessary to, in some parts of the process, produce a separation between the object of inquiry and the apparatuses of knowing that I, as a researcher, am part of. Barad (2007) theorizes this as the practice of enacting agential cuts. An agential cut can be described as a temporal freezing of the phenomenon of inquiry, to be able to analyze its myriad entanglements. The cuts or demarcations can never be determined before the research process begins, but have to be treated as a temporary practice defined and created within the methodological and analytical work. The cuts are made, not by autonomous research individuals, but by the larger material and discursive arrangement of which they are a part. The separation between what is researched and the apparatuses of knowing thus becomes a momentary disintegration within the phenomenon (Barad, 2003), which will affect how the phenomenon is constituted. “We are responsible for the cuts that we help enact not because we do the choosing (neither do we escape responsibility because ‘we’ are ‘chosen’ by them), but because we are an agential part of the material becoming of the universe,” as Barad (2007, p. 178) puts it. Events, humans, and materialities become connected through the cuts, because some things within the process of research are written, analyzed, and highlighted as if they belonged together. At the same time, the cuts will be divisive (Barad, 2007): by the researcher not recognizing some things, by sundering the data into categories, or by emphasizing the importance of some things but not others. Different cuts will thus produce different realities (Barad, 2007) or different versions of the thing studied. This means that, as researcher, I am always inevitably entangled with the research “object.” Being ethically responsible within agential realism is thus about being attentive to the material-discursive cuts enacted (Taylor & Ivinson, 2013). The surroundings—the other(s), both humans and materialities—are never far away, but rather co-constituted and entangled through the very cuts that are enacted by the researcher (Barad, 2007).
Where and When and If? From Interviewing to Intraviewing
An interview can be described as an agential cut that in a quite harsh, but yet temporary, way freezes the entanglements of a phenomenon. This means that the researcher is not merely ethically responsible for how the recorded material is stored, treated, or analyzed. The questions asked, the time, place, and space of the interview; the voices heard or unheard; the actions recognized or ignored—the where and when and if of the interview—will enable some intraactions and impede others. In the following, I will introduce a transcript from a conventional qualitative interview along with some of the analytical, methodological, and theoretical underpinnings of this interview. Then, in the next section, by showing how the methodological approaches in the interview and the intraview differ, I will discuss the consequences this has for the phenomenon of school absence as well as for how the entanglements of the researcher can be understood.
Following my request to the teacher Anna to try to describe what she thinks absence from school means, she responds, in part, in the following way:
The education office doesn’t want us to separate them [different forms of valid absence]; they just want us to write valid or not valid. I think this is the wrong way for primary schools, because we should have, we do have some sort of assignment to educate them [the students] on how to study. Because of this, I think it becomes important to distinguish between different types of valid absences for example. That there is a difference between being sick for 4 weeks and missing a lot of teaching or taking every opportunity to go to various . . . groups, the school choir and stuff that [a student is] not really required to do. It could actually mean that I miss so many hours of a school subject that I’ll find it hard to achieve the intended learning outcomes.
The interview was conducted in a classroom after the school day was finished. In the interview, questions were asked about the teacher’s thoughts around school absence, about her opinions of Dexter (the registration software), about the formal school rules concerning registration, and so on. It is apparent when analyzing the interview, that both Anna and myself in different ways not only relate to but also construct and (re)produce discourses around school absence: she by expressing and emphasizing some aspects of absence while leaving others un-touched, and I by my questions and my encouragement of some answers (e.g., by saying “mm,” nodding, laughing, and so on) and not others. One example of this is that a shared understanding is created concerning which school activities the students should partake in and which they could sometimes miss. I giggle as Anna vividly describes the students who take every opportunity to participate in the school choir around Christmas time, to be able to skip as many lessons as possible. Neither of us laugh—but rather murmur seriously—when discussing the dilemma of whether and how to report the student’s absence if the student has participated in the school council (“elevrådet”). “Being part of the school council is actually a very positive thing, but it still means that there is an absence from a school subject,” as Anna describes it.
In the interview, Anna and I are engaged in processes of making sense of the software and of students’ presences and absences. Within the interview, it can be claimed that Anna performatively creates herself as a particular kind of teacher, in contrast to some of her colleagues. She states repeatedly that she always does her absence registrations, whereas her colleagues come up with all kinds of explanations for not doing them. By stating that this is something that she herself thinks is important—as do the headmaster, the municipality, and even the government—she legitimizes her claims. My non-verbal agreement can be understood as an encouragement of her statements and of our common understandings of what constitutes a good teacher. In this line of thinking, Dexter becomes a resource that Anna can use in the conversation to create herself as a particular kind of teacher.
In the analysis above, Anna’s meaning-making becomes the center of attention and the relation within the interview situation between her as participant and me as interviewer becomes that which enables understandings of school absence and of the software Dexter. What is important to acknowledge when looking at the creation of data within—as well as the analysis of—this conventional interview is not only how it produces interesting knowledge on how a teacher understands the registration of students’ absences and how the teacher and I make meaning of her experiences but also on how this is done in a particular way that makes the human(s) the center of attention. Interview methods in humanist qualitative inquiry often put the emphasis on how humans assemble sense in situations such as interviews (Silverman, 2006) that force the researcher to center the subject and to focus on how the words of the human subject are spoken, heard, recorded, and transcribed into written language (Mazzei, 2013). “Traditionally, the interview apparatus has sought to make visible the enclosed, complete humanist subject” (Kuntz & Presnall, 2012, p. 735, italics in the original). Despite the constitution of the interview as a site for the co-construction of meaning between interviewers and respondents (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995), the teacher is constructed as an autonomous subject (see also Kuntz & Presnall, 2012; Nordstrom, 2013). The traditional structure of the interview—Anna and I sitting in a classroom talking—thus contributed to a specific production of meaning and knowledge (see also Kuntz & Presnall, 2012). Some things seemed to matter (like the interaction between Anna and myself) and were ascribed with the agency to affect the knowledge production on school absence, while other things (like the software Anna and I were talking about) were invited into the conversation only through the words of the humanist subjects. Dexter was thus mainly used by Anna and me to make certain points in the conversation. Although the focus of my study and intended focus of the interview, Dexter was still left out of the methodological process and treated as a non-agentic tool.
Encountering Intraactions in Interviewing . . .
To be able to research how school absence was created and performed in relation to Dexter, other expressions had to be listened to and other actions acknowledged. This meant that I could no longer take as the starting point the interactions between the teachers and myself in the interview, but had to look for ways to involve what could be of importance in producing the phenomenon of school absence. A conventional qualitative interview might be able to be analyzed and discussed in posthuman terms, as materialities in different ways will always be part of the conversation. However, agential realism invites us to do more than that. It invites us to engage with more than the human agents in the interview situation itself.
By weaving together the concept of the interview and the agential realist concept of intraaction, Kuntz and Presnall (2012) introduce intraviews as a new understanding of the material-discursive enactments in interviewing. In agential realism, intraaction describes how agency is not a thing possessed by either humans or materialities, but an effect of different intraactions: human–human, human–materiality, and materiality–materiality (Barad, 2003, 2007). The concept of intraaction is differentiated from the more commonly known interaction, that presupposes a pre-given split between the components, often describing an inter-personal relationship (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011). Thinking about the interview as an intraactive event thus becomes an interruption of the traditional structure of the interview (Kuntz & Presnall, 2012), as more agents are acknowledged as produced in, and as part of what produces, the process. In their description of leaving the space-time setting of the classroom where an interview with a teacher began, walking through the school building to a nearby park and ending up in front of the school, Kuntz and Presnall (2012), in an article on intraviews, show how the teacher, the school, and the environment are involved in the production of creative forms of knowing; it is a dynamic and transformative becoming, as the actual material event of wandering opens up the opportunity for thoughts to wander and affects to be expressed (Kuntz & Presnall, 2012).
Encouraged by the concept of intraviews and its potentialities, I decided to explore and transform intraviewing in relation to school absence and Dexter. My challenge was not so much the need to create affective possibilities for the teachers to engage with their surroundings (even though affects turned out to be of interest), but to create possibilities for the materialities to be acknowledged in the methodological process and thus be a part of the apparatus of knowing. Inspired by Kuntz and Presnall (2012), I decided to perform intraviews where the computer and Dexter were a part of the conversation, as a means to make the interview “a cocreation among (not between) multiple bodies and forces” (p. 733). When materialities (such as documents, photographs, or other artefacts) are included in interviews, they are habitually treated as ancillary and supplementary sources, used to get a deeper understanding of the human participants. Working with the philosophy of Deleuze, Nordstrom (2013), however, shows how the subject-centered conventional qualitative interview can be transformed into an object-interview that becomes “a space in which both subjects and objects produce knowledge” (p. 238). The object-interview becomes a conversation in which objects and subjects are entangled and the objects are understood to be as important as the subjects in the production of knowledge (Nordstrom, 2013). In a similar vein, I invited Dexter to be a part of the methodology and the apparatus of knowing. This meant I tried to engage with not only the words of teachers but also with the nonhuman in the intraview situation, to be able to analyze, discuss, and understand the agency of the computer software in the production of school absence.
. . . and Transforming the Interviews Into Intraviews
Sitting at a table in a closed school library, a laptop, myself, and the teacher Carl are engaged in a conversation on school absence and Dexter. Carl had brought his laptop, and in the first part of the conversation, it lay closed on the table while Carl and I talked on similar topics as in the interview with Anna, discussed above. At this point, the conversation can be described as echoing the features of a conventional qualitative interview. When I ask Carl what he thinks of when working with Dexter, he responds,
I don’t even know if . . . if I send a text message using something else, on my own mobile phone, I sometimes will get the information that it [the telephone number] ceased to exist or if there is no existing phone or something like that. But with this, I don’t know, it may go away, a year can pass by . . . or we will never know, if I don’t have the current . . . Mm! Yes!
Critical of some features of Dexter, Carl describes the software as arid and formal and indicates that he loses control over the conversation with the parents because he does not know if the text messages automatically sent through the software (as he registers the invalid absence of a student) actually reach their mobile phones or not. Analyzed from a subject-centered humanist perspective, this could be understood as an example of Carl constructing himself as a responsible and autonomous teacher who is worried about Dexter’s reliability as a tool for handling school absence. At the same time, the situation gives a glimpse of a teacher not being in control. In an agential realism account, it could be claimed that the intraactions between Dexter, Carl, the mobile phones, and the parents show how the work by schools around student absences is a material-discursive intertwining, and not a human-alone responsibility. The words of Carl and the knowledge created are thus an “enactment among researcher-data-participants-theory-analysis” (Mazzei, 2013, p. 736). Even though the data created in the conversation enable this kind of analysis, Carl’s and my voice were the only ones recorded and transcribed, whereas the actions and expressions of Dexter were reckoned only through Carl’s (and my) descriptions. In trying to decenter the humanistic focus in the conversation and after about 30 minutes of talk, I asked Carl if it would be okay to open the laptop and to start up the software.
[reading from the screen] “You are not connected to the Internet”? Now I see something.
Nineteen seconds of silence.
No, it won’t . . .
Well . . .
Five seconds of silence.
But I’m fully connected.
Yes, it seems . . . Does it tend to give hassles like this on . . .
No, it’s been great lately.
Four seconds of silence.
I hardly remember when it was like this the last time.
That it didn’t work?
Yes.
Mm. Has it happened before that it doesn’t . . .
For a while . . . the students have their own computers at this school and there happens to be a lot of Spotify [a software for streaming music] that takes a lot of space . . . SkiStar [a website for purchasing ski trips], now we’re about to go skiing . . . [He whispers at the screen] but what is this?
Twelve seconds of silence.
What would you do if this happened during class?
Then you get to conjure with . . . [giggles]. No, I guess it wouldn’t be a problem, it, it may after all be as it gets . . . Of course . . .
Mm . . . You will wait and do it later?
Yes.
It took more than 5 minutes for Dexter to start, and during this time, I seriously questioned my idea of experimenting with intraviewing. Was it at all possible to speak with computer software and did Dexter have to be so resistant? 3 However, what struck me when listening to the recordings or when writing and reading the transcripts of the conversation with Carl was that although Dexter was not part of the entire intraview, the computer was. By, in a powerful way, refusing to collaborate, the computer became entangled with both Carl’s actions and my questions. In the act of describing this as a silence—rather than as a powerful action—the ontological differences between different words and actions were recreated and had consequences for what I was able to understand as data, as theories are always embedded in the production of data (St. Pierre, 2011). Returning to the recordings and my notes, trying to listen more sensibly, the seconds of silence—carefully counted and written down in the transcript—were not as silent as in my initial experience. Listening to the recording, another story becomes possible: “Nineteen seconds of silence” (the quiet but ongoing hum of the fan and the computer’s heat sink, the movement of the cursor over the screen, a click on the track pad); “Five seconds of silence” (the hum of the fan, the sounds of movement from the bodies of the teacher, and the researcher as they lean toward the computer screen); “Four seconds of silence” (the echoes of student voices from the corridor outside the library, almost drowning out the sound of the fan); “Twelve seconds of silence” (the movement of the cursor, the sound of a mouth opening and closing before words are uttered). These sounds and actions were not loud enough to be recognized at once or to disturb the human voices, but loud enough to make it impossible to describe the pauses as silent or still.
The agency of Dexter in the intraview became apparent in the conversation with the teacher Malin as well. Sitting in front of the laptop where Dexter was running, Malin opened a webpage that displayed the monthly schedule of a girl in the eighth grade. Each field on the screen represented 1 day and each used a specific color to indicate whether the student had been present or absent that day. A green field showed that the student had been present the whole day, a yellow field that the student was absent but that the absence was valid and that the parents had reported it beforehand, and a red field that the student had been absent and the absence was invalid (see also Bodén, 2013b). When opening the page, Malin said, This is someone who is absent so much that I will call the parents today, I think. Right now, I don’t think she has a lot of red absences . . . she is reported qui . . . it was 1 day, good week, she was there all week. But too . . . many reported . . .
What happens in this example can be described as an ongoing intraaction between Dexter, Malin, and myself where the relations in-between us cannot be separated from the knowledge produced on school absence. The girl whose screen is shown gradually transforms from a student who is absent so much that it is necessary to call her parents the same day, to a student who does not have very much unexcused absence, then to a student who was in school all week, and finally to a student whose parents are to blame for reporting her too often. All of this unfolds as Malin’s and my voice are mixed with the actions and expressions of Dexter. Together with Dexter, the understandings of the absence transform (see Figure 1).
Dexter displaying the schedule for a week.
The intraview continued as I looked at the screen and asked,
Is there something else that you think is interesting to show here in . . .
Noo, noo. I don’t think so.
How do you usually use it then?
This. No, it’s becau . . . when you’re the homeroom teacher, it’s great that you are able to see it like this.
Yes, this is an overview of the whole month . . .
It should preferably be green. [whispers]: I will take October then that’s . . . [inaudible]. Yes, no it’s like this, I try to remember that presence is very important.
Malin continues to slowly move her hand on the track pad of the laptop, while silently whispering to the screen—a whispering that both Malin and I seemed uncomfortable with (or maybe unaware of) as Malin quickly returns to the theme of the talk: presence in school. I suddenly seem to become aware that Dexter will not be recorded on tape and will thus be impossible to capture in the transcript and that this conversation should evolve around the teachers and Dexter. I slip into a conventional logic and start to question Malin on how she uses Dexter as a tool. To be able to capture the sounds of Dexter, I start to translate Dexter’s actions into my own voice by asking questions or pushing the teacher to describe the engagement with Dexter. The words to show and use reinforce the ontological differences between the entangled agents and this culminates as I try to give voice to Dexter and what I see by speaking directly to the recording device: “Yes, this is an overview of the whole month . . . ”
Dexter and the materialities of the intraview were, at first, unrecognized in the transcript above. My initial feeling was that to be able to incorporate materialities into the transcripts—in the same way as they were incorporated, entangled, interwoven in the intraview—I perhaps should have filmed the intraview or made notes that included every detail of movement on the screen, which I had not done. My notes were actually quite sparse. During the intraview, I was caught in the intense relation between Dexter, Malin, the track pad, the red and green colors on the screen (see also Bodén, 2013b), and so on, and the note book was almost left untouched. But, when listening to the recordings, I was thrown back to the intraview again and accordingly tried to incorporated materialities in the transcript:
(Dexter displaying the weekly schedule of a girl. There were no red lessons on the screen). “Is there something else that you think is interesting to show here in . . . ” (Malin’s hand moving over the track pad, at different paces. The cursor traveling back and forth over the screen, where it sometimes stops as new information pops up when the cursor moves over the menus). “Noo, noo. I don’t think so” (The screen suddenly showing a schedule of a whole month. Different colors appear, but most of the screen is green). “This. No, it’s becau . . . when you’re the homeroom teacher, it’s great that you are able to see it like this” (The same month is still shown on the screen). “Yes, this is an overview of the whole month . . . ” (The different lessons displayed on the screen). “It should preferably be green” (Malin intensely looking at the screen). “I will take October then that’s . . .” (The sudden change of atmosphere as Malin raises her voice). “Yes, no it’s like this, I try to think that presence is very important.”
Depending on how the intraactions in the intraview are articulated in the transcript, a different analysis becomes possible. Entanglements that in a conventional humanist qualitative interview could (or even should) be ignored become important and affect the methodological process and maybe even the phenomenon of school absence. It was a challenge to account for the cacophony of actions and expressions (compare with Haraway, 1988) that became part of the research and that—at least at first—did not seem to have anything to do with the phenomenon of school absence. What about SkiStar and the comment about going skiing? The hum of the fan? The teacher whispering as she looks intently at the computer screen? Matter like webpages, computer screens, and fans seemed to matter, but it was not until the material practice of writing took place—“in the thinking that writing produced”—(St. Pierre, 2011, p. 621, italics in the original) that these things appeared as data. It was a “remix, mash-up, assemblage, a becoming of inquiry that [was] not a priori, inevitable, necessary, stable, or repeatable but [was], rather, created spontaneously in the middle of the task at hand, which [was] always already and, and, and . . . ” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 620, italics in the original). In a material-discursive perspective, new things appeared as data, and I needed to engage with them.
What We Think With When We Think
In the conversation with Carl, the silent seconds—nineteen, five, four, and twelve—were irrelevant (or maybe a sign of a failed research experiment) until they became recognized, through posthumanist theories that acknowledge the agency of more than just human agents, as sounds of silence. The fan kept on humming and the image of the ski travel agency appeared as the cursor traveled over the screen. When the conversation met the obstacle of the web browsing history, and what was shown on the screen was a website that Carl had visited before our meeting in the library, the personal life of Carl suddenly became part of the intraview, the apparatus of knowing and the knowledge produced on school absence. When waiting for Dexter to start, the act of registering students’ presences and absences became something else, not only a neutral, strict, impersonal, and automated action but an embodied process of waiting, of joking about how to deal with the complexity of digital devices in the classroom by playing tricks or conjuring, and even of dreaming about an alpine holiday in the Swedish mountains. At the same time, the voices of the students affected by the registration were echoing from outside the corridor, making the names on the screen come alive. What became manifest, when inviting the materialities to be part of the methodology, was that doing the registration is never an individual act on behalf of an independent teacher. The computer is involved (with fan, cursor, screen, track pad, etc.), Dexter is involved, the students in the corridors are involved, affects and emotions and life outside school are involved, and thus the phenomenon of doing the registration can only be researched as a multifaceted gathering. Just as Kuntz and Presnall show how walking intraviews open up a wandering of thoughts and expressions of affect (Kuntz & Presnall, 2012), the materiality of Dexter and the computer as part of the intraview seemed to open up affects and an understanding of the—for me—unexpected but reiterated and ordinary practices of absence registration. There are always more agents involved than can be predicted. How those agents affect what is registered or not is beyond the scope of this article, but it is vital to recognize their presence when thinking about knowledge production on the registration of absence and presence that is made or unmade through different methodologies.
When problematizing the separation made between data collection and analysis in conventional humanist qualitative research, St. Pierre (2011) describes how “what we think with when we think about a topic” (p. 621, italics in the original) are commonly identified “during the analysis and not before. Until one begins to think, one cannot know what one will think with. In that sense, data are collected during thinking and, for me, especially during writing” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 621, italics in the original). Something similar happened to me. What were first known as silences in the conversation became sounds and became recognized as data in the writing and produced a new understanding of the process of registration. The analysis of what had taken place during the intraview was intertwined with the intraview itself, and data were created continuously during the process of research. When writing about Malin’s intense engagement with the screen and how Malin and I intraacted with the colors on the screen of the girl whose parents Malin felt obliged to call, I was suddenly thrown back to my own kitchen table and my own laptop, looking at the web page of my 7-year-old son. I once again see the yellow fields among the green ones, and even though I (as an “involved parent” and as a researcher of similar software) know that yellow fields indicate valid absence, I for a second feel my pulse rush as I click the fields to get information about the absence. “Reason: Valid.” Wait, no more information, valid, what on earth did he/we do that day? I check my calendar and breath out. We were visiting the ear specialist.
These bodily experiences of doing research became entangled with the apparatus of knowing, as I was forced to go back to the transcript when remembering Malin’s awareness of the reactions of parents. Parents think that the school notices their shortcomings in their upbringing of their kids and stuff like that. Parents don’t want to get singled out . . . that they didn’t wake them up in the morning and things like that.
The registration of student’s absences was not only located in the classroom, or in the teacher’s room where Malin and I were sitting, but also traveled outside the computer screen, the walls of the school, and into the bodies of parents receiving the registered information. The materialities that became part of the apparatus of knowing seemed to extend both what I was thinking with and the phenomenon of school absence.
In Conclusion: Reckoning the Mess of Qualitative Methodologies
What has been shown in this article is that when engaging in a material-discursive methodology, “doing research” will be a messy affair. It will sometimes be about getting lost in the myriad of entanglements, and it will always be about producing a new reality. Inviting computers and computer software into the intraviews became a way of questioning the subject-centered conventional interview and of acknowledging the materiality of fieldwork and the way research methodologies have to take seriously the agency of the materialities constructing phenomena. By pushing the limits of conventional qualitative methodologies, it can be claimed that this article try to put a post qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2011) to work. During conventional interviewing, questions would be difficult to ask that could touch upon the things that inevitably become part of the intraview (silent sounds, ski trips, and teachers’ embodied relations with a computer [screen]). It can be claimed that the intraviews, because of their material-discursive enactments, opened up a different reality where unexpected things could—and did—happen during the conversation. The intraviews helped me not only to recognize more than human agents in the process of doing research but also to recognize how the materialities affected the conversations and the thinking on school absence. A webpage suddenly opening up might throw both a teacher and a researcher into thinking about ski trips and produce an understanding of the impossibility of separating what takes place during registration from what takes place during the school day or in the short breaks between lessons when a teacher dreams about a holiday (for a discussion of the complex time and space structure of teachers’ workdays, see Skolverket, 2013). The unexpected colors on a girl’s weekly schedule might transform a student from a truant to someone who was there the entire week (and place the blame on her parents instead) and thus open up a new understanding of school absence. In the words of Barad (2007), the intraviews become a way to understand “which specific material practices matter, and how they matter” (p. 168).
As I engaged in the intraviews, it was clear how easy it was to slip into a human-centered approach, as the examples in the article have shown. And when asking myself if video recording was the best way of capturing everything in the intraview situations, I inevitably was back in the representationalist ontology I was trying to problematize. However, when theories were (again) incorporated with data in a Baradian non-representationalist (van der Tuin, 2011) mode of enquiry, a new reality was produced through intraviews, in thinking, in writing, and in analysis; it was a reality that highlighted how things that at first seemed unimportant were vital to understanding the processes of registering school absence. The article expanded during the exploration, and became something more than a seeking for new ways to produce knowledge through interviews as it became obvious that the production of empirics does not end when the recording device is shut off, but continues and intensifies through analysis and writing. When a representationalist ontology is questioned, the writing and the analysis will always be part of the creation of empirics, and of realities. What became apparent in this methodological journey and in me allowing (posthumanist) theories be part of the whole research process was how the teachers and I—as enclosed, complete humanist subjects in control—were constantly questioned. The bringing of Dexter to the conversation seemed to make it possible to emphasize how humans and the nonhuman together produced material-discursive knowledge on the registration of school absence. The intraviews and the analysis they enabled shed light on a myriad of things happening simultaneously, at different places at different times: by the computer with Dexter, in the corridor, outside the school with parents, in the private life of the teachers, in the memories of the researcher.
The exploration of methodologies and the knowledge created about registration as an embodied, material, affective, and intraactive practice can thus shed new light on the work of teachers performing the registration: the pride Anna took in always doing her registration, the resistance Carl expresses toward Dexter, and the weight Malin, as a homeroom teacher, places on getting an overview of the whole month of the students’ absences. The registration of school absences and presences always involves more affects, more agents, and more materialities—“the wind and more” (Erickson, 1981). These insights expand beyond the boundaries of researching school absence and are valuable for a wider area of research within the field of education and posthumanism.
So what made the event in the classroom with Anna, Dexter, and Sofie glow? What was it that provoked and intrigued me in those encounters (St. Pierre, 2013)? Why was I drawn to the accidental display of a website for ski trips? Or to whispers directed at a screen and the slow movement of a hand on a track pad? Because, in those small and temporal freezings of the events, affects were acted out, along with the blending of what belonged and what did not, the mess, and the materialities of the daily, ordinary (and at a first glance even boring) practice of registering students’ absences and presences. Dexter was already an integral part of the production of school absence, and needed to be an agential part of researching it.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.