Fuck It: Profane Methodologies

• In Event: Promiscuous Research: Reimagining the Study of Higher Education Through Philosophical Misbehaving

Abstract

Poststructural and posthuman theories of social relations (Alaimo, 2016; Braidotti, 2013b; Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) theorize the profane—excess, the outside of reason, sense, or common practice—at research sites. If promiscuous feminist research, in part, enacts a “revolt against representation” (Voithofer, 2013, p. 534), profane research names the slice of the revolt that says ‘fuck it.’ This is a statement of productive disinterest in the project of naming educational environments such that they can be optimized. It is also a statement of productive disinterest in naming methodological movements such that they can be walled off from others. ‘Fuck it’ initiates a pause or an impasse in polite research and educational settings. The point here is not coarseness for its own sake, but rather to interrupt spaces where manners allow for the continuation of a problematic world, and in that impasse, experiment with how the world might become differently. Profane research practices demand promiscuous connections to concepts across theories and theorists that rupture polite methodological productions. Research that minds its manners “provide[s] an infrastructure of sociality” (Berlant, 2011, p. 172) that allows radical neoliberalism (Clough, 2018) to continue apace. Crisis ordinariness in higher education produces passive acceptance of disruptions, precarity, and instrumentality (cf. Berlant, 2011). Proper higher education environments that go along to get along in their crisis ordinariness teem with profane tendencies, the expression of which carry potentials to make worlds otherwise. After exploring the contours of a profane methodology, this paper explores the possibilities of profane research practices within the impasses of an undergraduate program labeled a high-impact practice (HIP; Kuh & Schneider, 2008) at a southeastern university.

HIPs thrive in crisis ordinariness, where their existence is supported through their positive impact on student retention (Kuh & Schneider, 2008). The crisis of universities failing to create cultures of retention and completion can be solved, in part, through ensuring students complete one or more HIPs beginning in their first year. HIPs live in the “metastructure of consent” (Berlant, 2011, p. 185) produced by radical neoliberalism in the academy through delivering a quick route to retention and graduation solutions administrators desperately desire. High-impact practices merge polite methodologies of outcomes research and assessment (e.g. Mayhew, Rockenbach, Bowman, Seifert, & Wolniak, 2016) with polite university practices of responsibility to degree completion metrics.

And yet, something happens in HIPs. There are moments and openings of connection and possibility oozing out of instantiations of HIPs such as first-year seminars, learning communities, and undergraduate research experiences. In their enactments, profane methodologies rise to the challenge of researching university environments that creatively explore students’ capacities, evincing a productive disinterest in outcomes measurement and management. Profane practices seek production in excess of representation of desired worlds, rendering research as research-creation (Manning, 2016; Voithofer, 2013). Using field notes, transcriptions, and other inescapably representational artifacts of a multiyear research experience, I close by mobilizing the fuck it aesthetic to reanimate quotidian moments where student success was experienced with a disinterest to outcomes, a research-creation of, by, and for the impasse.

Author

• Laura Elizabeth Smithers, Old Dominion University