Enter: Ho/rhizoanalysis

• In Event: Various Un/thinkable Possibilities of “Data”

Abstract

Objectives
This paper aims to think and do data differently. We embrace the concept of thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) to produce an assemblage of data/researchers/theories in order to imagine more fluid, complex possibilities for data in taking up, writing up, and teaching qualitative research. We creatively and critically engage with research that has problematized conceptualizations of data as linear, fixed, and stable, and think about data as messy, shifting, and unsteady. Specifically, we ask what might a different data look like as we think it with theory? Data in the context of an interview became the specific focus of our exploration, (re)visioning data as words at play in theory.

Theoretical framework
We join the company of others who have explored, blurred, and transformed interview, while recognizing that as a field we continue to slip back into the comforts of spaces already arranged, secure, and coded. To slip differently and productively, we draw upon Deleuze and Guattari (e.g.1987) for concepts and figurations that encourage creation and experimentation. Their concept of the rhizome allows us to consider thought as growing and functioning horizontally and in the middle, fleeing the vertical, arborescent structure to create new connections. The rhizome opposes linear thinking for it has no foundation but is constantly in the process of becoming, seeking out new relations. Further, we ask how might horizons extend rhizomes? We began envisioning the interview transcript as situating ‘reality’ in a horizon that may be desired, feared, written, misunderstood, rewritten, and…and…and…
Moreover, the Deleuzoguattarian rhizome allows us to think with/in a horizon of multiplicity, entering and exiting at any point, resisting tidiness or closure, and activating and enlivening possibilities of data.

Method and data sources
We interviewed one another, troubling questions about qualitative research and data. We encountered each other as scholars deeply engaged in poststructural theories. We troubled the methodologies and pedagogies at play in the qualitative research interviews we had constructed. Words surrounded us; we spoke fluidly through swells of our own words and those of others. As we began to render these conversations as a text, an urgency developed—a call to keep these words at play, to imagine something different, something more...This allowed us to play with three visual and conceptual renderings of data in the context of interviews. In doing so, these three renderings took the form of a visual script that performs and disrupts the roles of interviewer and interviewee as it unfolds, expands, and takes data off into lines of flight.

Significance
The paper aims to resist the flattening of the interview into the single dimension of words and encourages new figurations of what qualitative data might look like when we embrace the crowded complexity of our multiplicity, our multiple identities, while acknowledging the constraints of the discourse of scholarship.

References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Jackson, A.Y. & Mazzei, L.A. (2012) Thinking with theory in qualitative research. NY: Routledge.

Authors

• Jennifer Bogdanich, University of Georgia

• Brooke Anne Hofsess, Appalachian State University