Post-Qualitative Inquiry's Reversal: Validity, Concepts and "Humans"

• In Event: Rigor and Validity in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives
Under conventional humanist research, humans use ideas of validity to assess concepts. In this ‘grid of intelligibility’ (Foucault, 1976/1978, p. 93), concepts are static and ultimately determined to either possess or lack the quality of validity. However, post-qualitative inquiry works in an “ontology of immanence” (St. Pierre, 2019a, p. 4). Concepts are not stable, but always becoming. This paper will explain the reversal between the prominence of concept and validity that occurs when moving into post-qualitative inquiry.

Theoretical frameworks
Post-qualitative research is pre-knower, pre-knowledge, anti-method, and treats ontology as inseparable from epistemology. Under post-qualitative inquiry, validity and all other philosophical concepts co-exist on the plane of immanence (St. Pierre, 2019a). As Judith Butler wrote, “If one of the points associated with postmodernism is that the epistemological point of departure in philosophy is inadequate, then it ought not to be a question of subjects who claim to know…” (1992, p. 8). Philosophical concepts are allowed to change this onto-epistemological arrangement.

Modes of inquiry
Dispensing with method, post-qualitative inquiry engages with philosophical concepts, refusing commonly held assumptions in order to find new and different ways to do and be. The only “method” is careful reading in order to understand how philosophical concepts might work and appear (immanence). Post-qualitative inquiry involves believing in these concepts as more real than any previously held assumptions about reality or knowledge.

Evidence
At the 2019 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Professor Elizabeth St. Pierre asked “Why do we think we should know what to do before we begin to inquire?” (2019b) Taking this question seriously leads to an overturn of several aspects of qualitative research as it is often understood. Commonly-held onto-epistemological assumptions (including the notion that ontology and epistemology are separate) must be re-imagined in order to faithfully read and comprehend post-qualitative concepts.

Substantiated conclusions
The conventional practice of procedurally verifying concepts using validity evidence is reversed in post-qualitative inquiry. Evidence itself must be reimagined on the plane of immanence. One example of a concept in traditional qualitative research which is troubled by post-qualitative inquiry is the notion of subjectivity. As post-qualitative inquiry is pre-human, the old considerations of objectivity and subjectivity no longer apply. Post-qualitative inquiry comes from dispensing with any and all preconceived notions about what is and can be known, from starting at the deepest level, the onto-epistemological level, from engaging with philosophy, starting anew by not knowing at the beginning.

Scholarly significance
To conduct post-qualitative inquiry is to embrace several refusals to describe qualitative research conventionally, notions like interviewing, subjectivity, bias, and assumptions as important as the human subject. Philosophical concepts at play are given freedom to re-describe reality, knowledge and ethics. On the ontological plane of immanence, philosophical concepts determine what is valid, not humans.

Author

• Travis Henry, University of Georgia - Athens