Simondon’s Transduction: An Alternative to the Deductive/Inductive Binary

• In Event: Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: Social Theory in Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

This presentation focuses on transduction—a concept developed by Gilbert Simondon (a contemporary and influence of Gilles Deleuze)—an alternative to the inductive/deductive binary that situates thought and reasoning in a creative and generative multiplicity, a multifaceted structure without a center, beginning or end. Transduction assumes that problems, themselves multiplicities, are situated in interconnecting multiplicities, or networks. The role of the researcher, herself a multiplicity, is to mediate those networks and to create something new from those networks. In this presentation I detail transduction by explaining how I put it to work in my post-qualitative study about how 11 family history genealogists use objects to construct their ancestors.

Author

• Susan Naomi Nordstrom, The University of Memphis