Narrative Inquiry in the Ontological Turn

• In Event: Thoughts Awaiting Narrative Researchers: Narrative Inquiry as "Public Scholarship" in the Age of Postqualitative Research

Abstract

A philosophical shift is occurring in contemporary qualitative research methodology research. It is born of a weariness with well-rehearsed debates between epistemological foundationalists (be they positivists, critical theorists, or interpretivists) and epistemological anti-foundationalists (be they contemporary hermeneiticists, poststructuralists, or Rortyean neo-pragmatists.) Despite their differences, both of these philosophical positions share a common assumption: that the agency in inquiry processes lies entirely within human minds. Either we create representations of a real world that passively awaits our accurate representation of it (foundationalists) or uniquely accurate representations are impossible, and humans “construct” their reality through selective representation of parts of the world (anti-foundationalists). Both of these conceptions of inquiry presume the world to be ontologically inert. This assumption is being questioned by an increasing number of contemporary philosophers of science and social science methodologists.
The alternative ontological view that is emerging posits agency as a characteristic of both human and non-human phenomena. Referred to variously as agential realism, agent ontologies, new materialism, feminist materialism, post-humanism, post-qualitative research, and the ontological turn, this literature highlights the way our representations of the world shape and influence the world, while simultaneously acknowledging the obdurate, often surprising, and sometimes dangerous ways the world responds to our efforts to understand it. The things of this world are simultaneously real, constituted in part by our activity, and also protean in a way that exceeds and evades any effort to capture them in a single representation of the real. The objects of our inquiries, in other words, perform like agents.
When objects of inquiry are recognized as agents, then inquiry itself ceases to be a process of discovery. It becomes an ontologically generative establishment of particular relations between agents, relations that are real but could be otherwise. These implications are resonant with personally transformative conceptions of narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) as well as more policy focused arts-based approaches to narrative research (Barone, 2001). Agential realism, however, provides a more robust framework for thinking about the ethics of narrative inquiry than has previously been developed in the field.
This paper will review three versions of agential realism found in three distinct literatures: contemporary indigenous studies (Grraoute, 2013; Tuck, 2015; Watts, 2013), pragmatic semiotics (Halton, 1995; Peirce, 1992; Author, 2013; Author, 2015; Short, 2007), and contemporary science studies (Barad, 2007, 2011; Bennett, 2011; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Kohn, 2013). The utility of agential realist ontologies in narrative inquiry will be illustrated by applying it to data collected in a ten-year study of the racial resegregation of a public school district. This data set will provide examples of the way a personalist or autobiographical approaches to narrative inquiry lack sufficient moral and political reach. It will also provide example of how strong constructivism that informs most arts-based approaches to narrative inquiry often underestimate the material obduracy of racism. It will explore the way agential realism provides a way to intensify the transformative potential of narrative inquiry and how narrative inquiry practices will be needed to put agent ontologies into methodological practice.

Author

• Jerry L. Rosiek, University of Oregon