Everyday Post-Structuralism in Educational Research

• In Event: The Usefulness of Post-Structuralism in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

This paper illustrates the practicality of the variety of critiques poststructuralism offers and how those critiques function to “open up” or deconstruct what has become normalized and taken for granted, thereby enabling different ways of knowing, doing, and living. The author exemplifies this work by deconstructing what she calls “conventional humanist qualitative research methodology” to which she has been quite attached but which she argues has become so centered it has exhausted itself and is increasingly inadequate in producing knowledge that can enable shifts in practice post NCLB. The paper focuses on post qualitative inquiry, which does not provide handy “research designs” in which one can secure oneself and one’s work in advance of an engagement with what some are calling the “new empiricism” and the “new materiality,” an empiricism grounded in Deleuzian ontology. Post qualitative methodology encourages connections across disciplinary and methodological boundaries, rhizomatic linkages, mash-ups, and “advanced” rigor and validity that comes out of deliberate attention to context and epistemology. The paper calls for different ways of producing different knowledge after a normalized qualitative inquiry.

Author

• Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, University of Georgia