Materialist Mappings of Knowing in Being: Researchers Constituted in the Mangle

• In Event: New Material Feminist Methodologies

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to extend the thought of the three previous papers in the session. While the preceding papers will address how agency, analysis, and the relationship between language and matter are fundamentally changed in a posthumanist materialist approach, this paper considers how researchers are constituted and constituting in the process of intra-action in ways that produce different knowledge.

Theoretical Framework
It is the work of Karen Barad and others named as "new materialists" or "material feminists" to ask how our intra-action with other bodies (both human and nonhuman) produce subjectivities and performative enactments. In a qualitative study of first-generation women academics, the author engaged in a process of reading the data with and through a materialist lens to open up new ways of producing thought. Such thinking requires a methodology that does not center on our research subjects as the site of agency and therefore the focus of our inquiry, but rather, to consider the enactment of agency and the co-production of these enactments (Barad, 2007; Tuana, 2008). Such an approach relies on a process as described by Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) as a “flattening” whereby data and theory and researchers and participants are folded into a process that produces a flattened relationship with data. Such a process of flattening does result in a different relationship with data and participants. While qualitative researchers are beginning to account for the ways in which ontology, epistemology, and practices are fundamentally altered, what has not been discussed is how as researchers we are constituted differently in this “mangle” (Hekman, 2010) that is a complex web of factors. What the author has described in the above mentioned project is how the subjectivity of participants is constituted in the intra-actions with the materiality of their worlds. What this paper then produces is how researchers are also entangled and becoming in the intra-actions with participants, data, and the materiality of doing research.

Significance
In defining her diffractive methodology, Karen Barad makes a distinction between diffraction and reflection, a practice viewed as sound methodology for many qualitative researchers. This paper will contribute to a critique of traditional practices of reflection in which the researcher mirrors and “reflects” sameness, toward a practice of diffraction that moves us away from habitual normative readings and accounts of our practices as researchers. If the “I” of the participant is always becoming in the process of telling and intra-acting, so too the “I” of the researcher is always becoming in the process of researching, listening, writing, and intra-acting. The aim then is to re-consider how as researchers we are produced in these intra-actions and how we produce different knowledge as a result.

Author

• Lisa A. Mazzei, University of Oregon