Speaking Ourselves Into Being: The Material Effects and Affects of Language in Qualitative Research

• In Event: 65.079 - Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: 65.079-16 - Language and Semiotics Within "New Materialist" Research Methodologies

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss material feminist conceptions of ontology and how they have enabled me to enact a different thinking of the ways in which textual artifacts and data analysis function materially in qualitative inquiry. I locate myself theoretically within the work of feminist materialists Karen Barad and Annmarie Mol. I go first to Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism, a concept she uses to denote the intra-action that occurs as matter and discourse constitute one another. Additionally, this paper is informed by Mol’s (2002) exemplar of how ethnographic methods produce multiple ontologies as researchers inhabit multiple spaces that hold different ontological commitments. I argue ala Mol that our research and analysis practices do produce multiple ontologies. Further, the spaces in which I operate as an educational researcher (schools, administrative offices, teacher education programs, classrooms) are spaces in which there are disparate ontological commitments that bring different ontologies into being—diverging views as to what constitutes schooling, what constitutes a “successful” student, and the types of students and teachers brought into being and sustained (or not) as a result. For instance, when students in a particular school district are spoken into existence as ignorant, poor, or lacking the factors that contribute to academic “success,” then they are spoken into an existence that has the potential to produce lasting material effects: lack of access to advanced placement classes; poor preparation for college; low self-esteem, a life of low-wage jobs.
The scholarly significance of this paper is an exploration of how language, or more specifically textual data, both materializes and produces material effects. This shifts the focus from what participants say, or what words mean, to the material effects and affects that they produce. Kathleen Stewart’s project was to “slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique long enough to find ways of approaching the complex and uncertain objects that fascinate because they literally hit us or exert a pull on us”, thereby creating “a contact zone for analysis” (2007, p4, 5). Stewart prompts me to ask what might constitute such a contact zone and to pose ensuing questions. What happens when narrative accounts given by research participants hit us with a force in this contact zone in ways that produce us? What happens when researchers are unprepared for the intra-actions that occur in this contact zone? How might researchers take seriously the ways in which participants are spoken into and out of possible futures?
The paper will conclude with an analysis of interview data that writes in this contact zone and that demonstrates the ways in which language produces material effects and affects.

References:
Barad, K (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lenz Taguchi, H. (2012). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analyzing interview data. Feminist Theory, 13(3), 265-281.
Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Durham: Duke University Press.
Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham: Duke University Press.

Author

• Lisa A. Mazzei, University of Oregon