Possibilities and Difficulties in Performing a Diffractive Methodology in a Project on School-Related Health Problems

• In Event: New Material Feminist Methodologies

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to theoretically outline and discuss the possibilities and difficulties of performing a diffractive methodology in qualitative data collections and analyses, focussing a forthcoming project studying student’s health and well-being in the socio-material practices of schooling.

Theoretical Positionings
Theoretically, a diffractive methodology/analysis takes a post-constructivist feminist (relational) materialist stance from within a relational ontology; drawing on theorists such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Myra Hird, and Annemarie Mol, as well as educational researchers Bronwyn Davies, Alison Jones and Lisa Mazzei. A relational materialist stance means understanding students’ subjectivities as well as their self expressed health, stress and/or well-being, as socio-material phenomena. The materialities of the school environment, as well as the teaching and learning practices, are understood to be active performative agents in the production and enactment of students’ subjectivities as well as of their school related health and well-being.

A Diffractive Methodology
Diffractive methodology was first suggested by Donna Haraway in the early 1990’s and later developed by Karen Barad. A diffractive methodology does not focus merely on human subjects, but on the intra-activity that emerges between humans and different matter, learning environments, teaching materials as well as power-producing discourses. Reading data diffractively is about reading with the data, rather than from a distance and separated from it. This means that the researcher and the data are understood to be mutually constituted in the research process. So: how is it possible to collect data that can be analyzed diffractively, making visible what is produced between material objects, the body, affect and discourse? How do we produce analysis when we understand the researcher as part of intra-active processes doing analysis together with the data? In order to exemplify some of the possibilities and difficulties of doing a diffractive methodology, we will use data from a pilot-study.

Tentative Results
Diffractive data are constituted by different sets of translations and re-enactments of material realities in “text-formats” that re-create the realities that evoke well-being or health-problems in school. Instead of interviewing, students will be asked to tell “stories” about spaces, places, things, practices and teaching-learning activities that matter to how they perceive their health and well-being. They will be asked to take photographs and make presentations also using constructed sounds as well as voice-over talking, to re-enact the affects and intensities evoked. As researchers we are simultaneously part of the creation of these data, as we are part of the analysis. There are some considerable difficulties in relation to making this visible, which will partly take the form of a rhizomatic script-writing. There are ethical considerations to be addressed, not the least in relation to other students and teachers.

Significance
The paper aims to achieve a deepened understanding of how to perform diffractive methodology/analysis in qualitative research, which can help us produce knowledge about how social-material practices in school produce student’s health and wellbeing.

Authors

• Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Stockholm University

• Anna Sofia Therese Palmer, Stockholm University