Pop Methodology: Unpacking Who and What's "New" in Research Methodology

• In Event: Postcolonial Epistemologies and Transnational Social Justice: Knowledge, Power, and Difference

Abstract

Purpose
This paper analyzes the following questions and challenges: How is our sense of who, and what, is “new” in research methodology generated, especially given our complicity in its generation? What can we learn from theoretical twists and turns (from Marx, psychoanalysis, Foucault, and Deleuze)? Why do certain researchers use which theories, and when? Who owns theory? Is it possible to avoid popular theory and still be heard, felt, seen? What can trend-setters hear beyond permissible narratives? Another challenge is to wonder out loud about the tensions between new materialist (white feminist) theories and feminist of colour, post/decolonial, and Indigenous theories and ask: What’s “race” got to do with it? Likewise, there are tensions among ecojustice and Indigenous onto-epistemologies that seem similar. Who can name what is a crisis, or what is new and innovative? How generative is contextualizing such tensions within broader divisions of quantitative/qualitative, post/critical, and post/neo/liberal research?

Theoretical Perspectives
This research takes up digital, non/human, and more-than-human (critical animal studies) perspectives to examine methodological trends and demarcations in educational research. It thinks about onto-epistemologies as feedback processes (e.g., cybernetics), and draws from Gayatri Spivak’s notions of aesthetic education and heteronormative performativity.

Methodology
To investigate “what’s new” and “who’s who,” the study examines the programs and panels held at major academic research conferences in 2015 and situates these findings historically.

Results
Despite, or in spite of, the “linguistic turn” through poststructuralism and the more recent posthumanist turn, our sense of who and what is new is often framed as a linear, Enlightenment narrative, and is often mobilized as some version of autonomous ownership in policing method/ology and educational research. Thus, while many post/decolonial, Indigenous, and pragmatist researchers remain as materialists, academic capital has been better gained by researchers who (re)turn to the challenge of ontology and material reality in their scholarship. Research is often career-driven, primarily benefitting the scholar and academic institution, despite the rhetoric of altruism. The notion of “flattened ontology,” for example, is mitigated by institutional power structures and other markers, such as race, nationality, ethno-linguistic affiliation, gender, sexuality, etc.

Significance
Understanding how our sense of trends and “camps” in educational research are generated is crucial to understanding what we imagine and count as knowledge and how we use what we know to drive public policy. This research helps address why “good intentions” and policy practices fail to have desired impacts.

Author

• Stephanie Lynn Curley, Manchester Metropolitan University