Post-Qual's Concept-Ecology (Economy): Affirmative Critiques From a Twitter Bot

• In Event: Response-able Pedagogies in Educational Research: Four Studies Using Posthuman Methodologies Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives: This paper focuses on the textual bodies of qualitative research, specifically the tweets generated by a Twitter bot (unnamed for anonymity). The Bot’s ongoing tweets are a research-creation project developed as both an artistic and theoretical intervention into our current academic concept-ecology (concept-economy) using ‘post-qualitative sounding’ phrases. This paper begins with a gloss of the theoretical orientations that inform what has been called post-qualitative research; followed by the mechanics of how the bot operates and an overview of research-creation as an orientation to research. The paper ends with a critical engagement with some of the Bot’s tweets as a way of thinking through the future of the field.

Theoretical Framework: ‘Post-qualitative’ is a term popularized by Patti Lather and Elizabeth St. Pierre (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013) in a paper that raised important questions about the state of feminist research in an era of “neo-positivism,” “big data,” and “metric mania,” and the scientification of qualitative research generally (p. 629). What circulates as the nebulous body of post-qualitative research methods/methodologies draws on theories that are aligned with the ‘ontological turn,’ including the feminist new materialisms, posthumanism, and vital materialism. These theories’ influence on qualitative research includes charging researchers to: re-think the politics of collaboration; become anachronistically accountable for the world-building practices that take place during research and dissemination; and acknowledging that thought and words have material affects, meaning the theories we choose to think with have material effects (Panelist, 2019).

Methods: Research-creation is an interdisciplinary confluence of theory and research embedded in aesthetic or artistic practice (Panelist, 2018). Research-creation understands the content of the research as not separate from its form. As such, the bot performs a computational poetics where its content is imbricated with its form, and its Tweets operate as an ongoing “mode of inquiry” (Manning, 2013, p. 229) that allows the researcher to think through a phenomenon by producing the very thing they want to investigate.

Data Sources: The Bot’s Tweets are a conceptual cascade of proliferating post-qualitative propositions that are both humorous and serious. The latter half of the paper diffractively engages with some of the Bot’s generated Tweets—or micro blogs—as critiques and provocations for the future of post-qualitative research. These tweets will be displayed using AV equipment.

Results and Significance: The paper offers an affirmative critique of how post-qualitative research teeters between offering something new that is helpful in an anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-ableist, queer way, or, through a fetishization of doing data-differently and embracing ‘the new,’ re-inscribes neoliberal ideals of academe. Further, the paper highlights how the search for new methods in research, particularly through instrumentalizing the arts, ironically echoes modernist calls ‘to make it new’ that also align with and support neoliberalist ideas. The paper provides a clarion call to reassess where the field is heading and reaffirm a feminist politics of engagement as the foundation of response-able post-qualitative research.

Author

• Sarah E. Truman, University of Melbourne