Not So Innocent Anymore: Making Recording Devices Matter in Qualitative Interviews

• In Event: 46.086 - Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 46.086-20 - Methodological Issues for a Postworld

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to throw into radical doubt the material-discursive practices of recording devices (e.g., tape and digital recorders) used in qualitative interviews. To do this work, I present a Baradian (2007) diffractive reading, a reading across epistemological and ontological differences that matter, of recording devices to illustrate an objectivist-realist material-discursive practice of these devices in conventional qualitative inquiry. Then, I situate recording devices in Barad’s agential realism, an onto-epistemological framework in which recording devices intra-act with humans, nonhumans, culture, and discourse to generate entangled meanings and knowledge in a constantly shifting world. In so doing, I provide a more just account of recording devices in qualitative inquiry.

Author

• Susan Naomi Nordstrom, The University of Memphis