Material Enactments of Language in Qualitative Research

• In Event: What Methods Do: New Materialisms and the Consequences of Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives:
While methodological theorizing informed by indigenous, pragmatist, and new materialisms is accounting for the ways in which research has ontological effects in the communities researched, what has not been discussed at length is how these theories intersect in their ontological assumptions in ways that provide qualitative researchers with a set of analytic practices enriched by a purposeful convergence of these perspectives. This paper aims to specifically examine how data can be thought materially, engaging the semiotics of Peirce (1935) and a reinvigoration of deconstruction in a positing of the earth’s grammar by Kirby (2011), toward new conceptions of the materiality of language in qualitative research.

Theoretical Frameworks
This paper is written under the influence of scholars who are diffractively reading the insights of pragmatism and new materialisms through one another (e.g., Atkinson, 2013; Rosiek 2013). The author begins with the assumption that language is indeed material (Kirby 2011) and continues by troubling the received methods of interpretive qualitative inquiry through an opening up of previously untapped theory in my own work, specifically the ontological theorizing present in the work of pragmatist (see for example, Rosiek, 2013; Pratt, 2002; Peirce, 1935) and new materialist (see for example Barad, 2007; Kirby, 2011) scholars.

Modes of Inquiry
In this paper I use Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of diffraction as a methodological practice of reading “insights through one another.” A diffractive reading of multiple theoretical insights, in the case of this paper, those from pragmatist and new materialist perspectives, moves a thinking of qualitative research away from habitual normative practices and readings toward a diffraction that spreads thought in unpredictable patterns, thereby producing different practices of knowledge production. In some of my current methodological theorizing, I am interested in how, through the act of data analysis, I am becoming or am produced as a subject by the material force of data in the form of transcripts and field notes. In this paper, I am interested in how language, and in the case of this project data, both materializes and produces material affects. I will therefore take data that I have previously analyzed through a new materialist lens and read it diffractively, opening up new insights previously unavailable to me.

Scholarly Significance
This paper aims to show how the methodological imaginings and experimentations of what has been called new materialisms and contemporary pragmatism can produce research methods that can transform the way we understand researching in education as a material discursive enactment. Taking up Peirce’s semiotics, Kirby’s materialist deconstruction, and Barad’s ontoepistemology, this paper will engage the materiality of language itself instead of treating it as a representation of reality as is the case in traditional humanist qualitative inquiry. The author intends to enact a methodological approach in which she is both producing an analysis while at the same time being produced as a researcher.

Author

• Lisa A. Mazzei, University of Oregon