Writing In/ter/rup/tions

• In Event: Writing Intensions in Post-Qualitative Educational Research

Abstract

Purpose: Writing is an integral part of qualitative research in education. In order to develop the craft of writing, scholars (especially emerging scholars) are encouraged to devote daily, serious and uninterrupted time to writing (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2000; Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). This paper moves away from writing intentionally and experiments with how in/ter/rup/tions to one’s writing practice (that come from a variety of forces outside the individual) can be a productive (and necessary) intensive force (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983) in the writing up of qualitative research in education. While sustaining a flow is very often desired in writing (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), I argue that writing in/ter/rup/tions (as a form of intensity) can result in blank pages, gaps in writing, confusion and even shame (Probyn, 2010) and allow for a reconsideration of what St. Pierre (2011) has termed “conventional humanist qualitative methodology” (p. 611) as well as what counts as education research in neo-liberal times (Denzin & Giardina, 2017).

Perspectives: This paper is informed by post-qualitative research in education (Edwards, 2012; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; MacLure, 2016, 2013; McCoy, 2012; St. Pierre, 2011) as well as non-representational theories and methodologies (Thrift, 2004; Vannini, 2015). This paper is also informed by scholars in education who experiment with various creative forms of in/ter/rup/tions in their own writing (Bridges-Rhoads, 2015; Koro-Ljunberg, 2012). For example, the notion of writing in intervals, as employed by Koro-Ljunberg (2012), will be utilized in this paper as a form of in/ter/rup/tion because intervals “oblige readers to stop, breathe, and remove oneself from the ordered narrative” (p. 809).

Method and data sources: I draw on, and experiment with the intense writing in/ter/rup/tions during my 10-month inquiry in a primary classroom. I focus on two kinds of writing in/ter/rup/tions: 1) child-researcher encounters in which writing was interrupted and made difficult (and often impossible) during fieldwork observations, and 2) ‘glowing’ data (MacLure, 2013) such as photographs and videos taken by the children, which interrupted the process of writing up research.

Conclusions and scholarly significance: This paper argues that while writing is a “method of inquiry” (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2000), in/ter/rup/tions to writing can also inform education inquiry in a variety of ways. In/ter/rup/tions, which often became (and are still becoming) intense and paralyzing (Bridges-Rhoads, 2015) allow us to consider what writing in/ter/rup/tions can produce. How can they – in the pauses and uncertainties they often evoke – be productive for writing qualitative research in education? By engaging with the intensities that writing in/ter/rup/tions invite, qualitative researchers become more attuned to the limitations of language (MacLure, 2016) to represent those intense and “barely sayable” (Vannini, 2015, p. 9) moments that make up so much of qualitative research in education. In this way, working with writing in/ter/rup/tions as a method, can enable us to unlearn qualitative research as we know it (St. Pierre, 2016) and advance new “tools and methods of our fields” (AERA, p. 1).

Author

• Paulina Semenec, The University of British Columbia