Productive Aporias and Inten(t/s)ionalities of Paradigming: Spacetimematterings in an Introductory Qualitative Research Course

• In Event: 14.016 - (A)New Politics: Attuning to the Materiality of Pedagogies for Social Resistance in Times of Austerity

Abstract

Purpose:
We share joyful tensions of teaching an introductory qualitative research (QR) at a university (hence, inten(t/s)ionalities) and specific pedagogical practices that created spaces for students to lean into, explore polyphonic and proliferating paradigms, and become a(new). Lather (2006), in discussing paradigm proliferation, states that we should teach in such a way that students can locate themselves in the tensions and that learning about paradigms should not be about competition. We find hope in the concept of polyphonies—the ways that a number of ideas and perspectives compose, harmonize, and play simultaneously without loss. We ask, what ways of being/doing/knowing QR are produced when students understand paradigms as fluid, malleable, and ever changing in a human ←→ nonhuman, material ←→ discursive world?

Theory/Methods/Data:
We put to work theoretical concepts as method (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), specifically Barad’s notion of spacetimemattering. Spacetimemattering is a way of thinking/writing that claims “neither space nor time exists as determinate givens, as universals, outside of matter. Matter does not reside in space and move through time. Space and time are matter’s agential performances” (Barad, 2013, p. 28). The past (our teaching ←→ learning in QR courses, dissertation committees) intra-acted, (re)worked, enfolded with the present (teaching the course), and the future (ideas of what students’ committees might allow/or not). Past, present, future all intra-acted.

We co-produced data with students (online postings, copies of assignments, class recordings), our planning meetings, and focus group sessions. Diffraction, a quantum physics phenomenon, as a methodology entails, “diffractive reading of data through multiple theoretical insights [which] moves qualitative analysis away from habitual normative readings toward a diffractive reading that spreads thought and meaning in unpredictable and productive emergences” (Mazzei, 2014, p. 742). We diffractively read theory on spacetimemattering with/in/through/against data.

Insights & Significance:
Inspired by Barad’s (2013) notion that matter does time, we argue that a paradigm isn’t a thing, but a doing. We do paradigms. Paradigming. In doing paradigms, we produce not only new knowledges, but new realities and relationships. Metaphorically, we came to see teaching about paradigms is a lot like electrons jumping, creating quantum leaps. Despite the proliferation of QR books that present neat, orderly research designs and methods for coding, we don’t see teaching QR as neat and orbital. As Barad (2013) describes, quantum leaps don’t drain the electron’s energy. So while leaning into uncertainties and possible unanswered questions about paradigms(ing) might seem to drain a teacher’s and students’ energy—we found by encouraging spacetimemattering about paradigms that new energy was produced.

Conventional wisdom supports the pedagogical notion that if you teach paradigms in linear, orderly ways that students will feel better, less confused, and more easily articulate the one paradigm they best identify with. We found that by introducing students to a proliferation of paradigms, our students actually stated they felt more energy and a good frustration. As instructors we must focus on the ways spacetimemattering intra-act with ideas, bodies (human and nonhuman), assignments, and other aspects of teaching a QR course.

Authors

• Candace Ross Kuby, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Rebecca C. Christ, Florida International University