Grappling

• In Event: 34.056 - Doings and Dialogues of Post-Qualitative Experimentations: Transversal Methods and Justice-to-Come in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

In this collaborative paper, the authors (instructor and graduate students) discuss grappling with reconceptualized meanings of “data” and “data analysis” (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014) that emerged through their encounters with post-qualitative inquiry in an education research methods graduate course. They collectively consider the multiplicities, aporias, uncertainties, interruptions and new possibilities that emerged from thinking with data alongside theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). The paper pays particular attention to the material-discursive formations that emerged as data and theory together forced the authors to new thought amidst methodological uncertainties of working without a pre-set analytical formula to follow. Drawing from their individual research projects, the group presents their grappling as a short provocation that highlights their interruptive modes of working with particular concepts.
Through a methodology of collectively grappling with various theoretical concepts as they complexified and amplified one another, the authors were moved towards both critical and creative modes of data analysis wherein social media, application documents, photographs, broken bones, memories, affects, tears, cyborgs and building architecture, and more emerged as active data-event becomings. The paper discusses the challenges and the possibilities that the authors grappled with in (re)meeting data in ways that resisted an approach to data as something “out there” awaiting discovery and taming into knowability (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014). The paper also considers the possibilities that emerged in moving away from treating everything as data and instead using theory to assist in determining what counted as data (St. Pierre, 2013). The significance of this work is discussed in relation to how post-qualitative methodologies might respond to the micropolitics that inhabit everyday life, especially in educational contexts. The authors also consider the potential for post-qualitative research methodologies to enact interferences to normative knowledge making since, in very different ways, each of their projects worked with data and concepts as both modes of knowledge making and critically interruptive practices of responding to inequities. Throughout the paper the authors highlight the significance of intentionally resisting a stance of removal from the “data” and instead orienting themselves as always already implicated and entangled participants in the encounters and events.

Authors

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas - Austin

• Aimee Elizabeth Hendrix Soto, The University of Texas - Austin

• Michael R. Scott, The University of Texas - Austin

• Jessica Cira Rubin, The University of Texas - Austin

• Stacia Cedillo, The University of Texas - Austin

• Sungryung Lyu, The University of Texas - Austin