Befriending Snow: On Data as a Research Companion

• In Event: Wild Thinking With Water: Dreams and Possibilities for Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to show that personifying and befriending data might be needed in qualitative inquiry. Data are/is discussed as someone we work with, a companion, a colleague. As such, water (in the form of snow) as data does not represent as if an outside reality, she is not a courier or a mediator, rather an untamed companion with whom we gain new possibilities of being and knowing.

The theoretical framework we subscribe to is an ontological approach according to which our existence does not precede our encounters with other beings or things, which is at the core of posthumanist thinking (Pickering, 2005). To carry this ontology through to how we conceive data is understanding that we gain our existence in encounters with our data.

The methods presented in this paper are intentional practices of becoming attached, of befriending. The authors re-evaluate their past and present inquiries as well as work towards the future with practices of befriending. As an everyday life practice befriending is not magical or transcendental, rather a set of concrete deliberative acts. Talking out loud to inanimate things, naming things, observing movement, intensities, intentions and processes in the surrounding nonhuman world – in a word, egomorphising (Milton, 2005) – are habits we can either cultivate or repress.

Main data sources or materials are the authors’ diverse engagements with snow, ranging from childhood memories to recent and current research projects. Snow as one of the manifestations of water is a long-term companion in both of the authors’ everyday lives and in research. Snow is alluringly paradoxical: both hard and soft, cold and warm, wet and dry, solid and liquid, moving yet still. It drives and transforms the authors with its wildness yet malleability.
Results and conclusions suggest that working backwards and outwards from being a scholar reveals an ideal of an anthropocentric researcher who is conditioned and trained into thinking she ’designs’ her research, ’collects’ or even ’produces’ data alone or with fellow researchers. The authors had failed to see a significant nonhuman partner who designed, affected, infected, directed their research and worked alongside them and the participating people. This invisible friend was instead reduced into a thematic category in what was named as proper data. Snow.

The scholarly significance of the work is the realisation that new politics become possible through the study of interdependencies between our researcher-human selves and nonhuman beings and things; a politics that emerges from realising the limits of humanist versions of democracy and the possibility of “political forms that are not narrowly restricted to [the interests of] humans” (Snaza et al. 2014, p. 49). Furthermore, as we cannot befriend all things in the world, what are the topics and modes of data that we avoid or find hard to befriend? Why?

Authors

• Pauliina Rautio, University of Oulu

• Anna Vladimirova, University of Oulu