Qualitative Inquiry

This article turns to a handwritten travel journal from more than two decades ago to explore how the past might be animated in the present through provoking affective, material and imaginative encounters with the text, the subject, and the world. This experimental animation of space-time through writing draws upon the figure of the mirror in Foucault’s “heterotopias” as it sets in motion lines of force and displacement that enable openings toward emerging intercorporeal subjects in writing.

Barad’s diffractive methodology was used to explore one man’s encounter with Parkinson’s disease after long exposure to pesticides in home maintenance. The study moved from a realist account of relevant studies in toxicology, entomology, and neurology toward an onto-ethico-epistemological enquiry that asked how humans and insects live and work within the shared mattering of minerals, water, and time. Constructed memories of my father’s later life were explored within masculine discourses about protection of the family from invading insects and an intra-active reconsideration of the contradictions involved in the use of poison as both care and harm. New materialist theorizing took the focus from an exploration of the difference experienced by one fragile body toward a larger engagement with material and discursive forces, ending with questions about U.S. modernism and the tenaciousness of human subjectivities in a time of changing climate and movement of species around the globe.

Working with a letter written in 1799, the author turns to a post-humanist diffractive methodology to work with both the material specificity of the one who wrote the letter, the letter itself, and the lines of force brought into play in the letter-writer’s account of himself. Arguing the necessity of moving beyond representationalism, the author sets out to animate the letter, and the author of the letter, examining the flows in between human subjects, material objects, and a range of onto-epistemological lines of force.

This article takes up Goodley’s challenge to explore the ways in which poststructuralist research methodologies open up new ways of thinking about encounters with disability. Working with the materiality of their own encounters with disability and the conceptual possibilities opened up in poststructuralist and new materialist thought, the six authors deconstruct the ability/disability binary through animating disability differently. They draw on memories generated in a collective biography workshop to explore the ways in which concepts, such as heterotopia, can be put to work to mobilize a humanity-in-common that is both multiple and open to differenciation, that is, to continuously becoming different.

This article includes autoethnographic vignettes that explore the emotional, embodied, relational, communal, and ritualized aspects of sleeping. As a Western, White, upper-middle-class professional woman in a long-term relationship with a partner who has similar characteristics, I describe sleeping in the familiar environment of our primary and vacation homes, where we both define ourselves as sleeping well together. To tease out important aspects of what counts as a good night’s sleep, I contrast sleeping at home to sleeping in other places, such as in an airplane, hotel in a foreign country, and a hospital, and then compare my experience of sleeping in a modern Western environment with sleeping practices in preindustrial society. I examine my definition of “a good night’s sleep” and how it is affected by historical and cultural narratives of normative sleep. Questioning my original conceptions of good sleeping and sleeping ritual, I explore and put into practice alternative storylines regarding how to accomplish a good night’s slumber.

This article examines the implicit educational logic of Patti Lather’s book Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science and her insistence on critical self-reflection. To unlock the form of education that Lather enacts through Getting Lost, I will turn to Italian critical theorist Giorgio Agamben and his notion of study as an alternative to mere learning. What is unique and important is that Getting Lost offers a moment of what I refer to as studious inoperativity wherein the researcher as studier can live within a threshold condition that is neither outside nor inside the research protocol. Instead of being lost, Lather emphasizes getting lost as a state betwixt and between, of pushing forward toward resolution while also perpetually withdrawing from such resolution, of constantly feeling the power to find solutions while also perpetually witnessing such solutions fade into the background as new problems arise, of learning from and wrestling with a learning that un-learns itself in its learning. In this sense, to get lost in the remnants of research is to feel the shift in the educational logic of research from learning from one’s experiences (to be an advocate or militant researcher) to studying in the ruins of this experience.

We engage in story-retelling by recounting, reconstructing, and reflecting on our experiences as evaluators in a cross-cultural setting, a South African village. A principal focus on the serendipitous ethical and methodological issues that arose is highlighted. As most ethical dilemmas go, solutions are not clear. Therefore, the authors spend time critically considering the soundness of the decisions that were made, from the lack of diversity of the research team, to the ways we interacted with local citizens, to research design issues. We share our thoughts through a confessional tale via research poetry.

This article shares an experimental poem created by three poet-researchers using an online word processor to collaborate within a single document. We attempt to blur the line between creative and academic writing, focusing on the possibilities for writing as a method of inquiry and the opportunities for different perceptions of being that it suggests. Our project unfolds as we also produce a brief diffractive reading that does not mirror or deconstruct the poem, but thinks it in an alternative way, as a broader collaboration, or intra-action between entities, both human and non-human. We avoid determining how our purported individual voices merge to form any united voice. Rather, we are alert to agencies and flows that complicate understandings of us as three rational, discrete, fully formed human figures articulating coherent narratives. We therefore offer a response to theoretical calls to explore collaborative writing as inquiry, through sharing our practice.

The following autoethnographic duet by faculty advisor and professor creates a dramatic and evocative account of the personal and cultural experience about a disabled student teacher. They blend storytelling and music which fuses a theoretical analysis about storytelling and life. Although sociocultural issues draw deep reflection about the emotional turmoil, cultural influences of language and social interaction provide details that critique social structures. As musician becoming teacher is a passionate yet complex endeavor, the faculty advisor shares first-hand a poetic but painful story about a disabled teacher being inducted into the teaching profession. By making explicit the personal-cultural connection, they use the life-changing epiphany to critique cultural issues about teaching and disability. As the faculty advisor approaches the professor for advice, his musicianship shifts her forward, backward, and sideways through feelings that evoke, invoke, and provoke a curriculum that does not transfer knowledge from educational method classes. Instead, it embeds musical language as a metaphorical conduit to interrogate the pros, cons and both sides of the complicated issue of disability that influences the completion of his teaching practicum for his undergraduate bachelor of education degree. An epiphany from music and story reveals the irony of living in a culture of both uniformity and diversity. They explore the constructs of ideology, abnormality, marginalization, and secrecy. Thus, by blending story and music, the authors resolve a transformative autoethnographic aspect about the personal and cultural influences that provoke new deeper ways of thinking about curriculum.