Queer Temporalities, Spacetimematterings, and a Pedagogy of Vulnerability in Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: What Pedagogies Produce: Teaching Responsible/Response(able) Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Purposes
This paper began with a daughter’s innocent desire to ask her father “Why?” in reference to childhood experiences, when presented with the opportunity to do so through a qualitative research (QR) course’s interview project. As she sought answers, we (the course instructor and graduate student) found ourselves in an ever-looping liminality that recognized both the impossibility of such innocence and the power of an ability to live on the boundaries of wanting-to-know and never-knowing (Barad, 2013). In this paper, we focus on our learning/teaching intra-actions through that course assignment. We examine the ways that various connections exposed and produced vulnerabilities, and how those vulnerable moments were/are valuable in the QR course and to the field of qualitative inquiry (QI).

Theoretical Framework, Modes of Inquiry, & Evidence
Our paper is based on Barad's notions of "inheritances" and "time flow," with various moments in various times (sometimes seemingly disparate ones) being placed together to produce an overall narrative that is coherent but does not work to establish artificial linearity (2013, p. 19). Our approach explores the temporalities of our intra-actions with/before/beyond one another. Our understandings of and participations in those moments were/are overlapping, enfolding, and sometimes painful—the stories that we tell are the sort that "put the story-teller at risk" (p. 17) but are meaningful to both us and to QI pedagogies. Our personal narratives will not/cannot be linear because the past/present/future concepts were/are already/always overlapping. Instead of a "linear unfolding," we aim to offer our stories as "threaded through one another in a nonlinear enfolding of spacetimemattering" (p. 18).

Conclusions/Significance
Example narrative: I [Author1] stop the interview audio of [Author2] and her father. The project is incredibly well done. [Author2] has exceeded every criterion of the assignment. Her excellent interviewing skills and reflexive writing are not the reasons that I feel this interaction so strongly, though. [Author2]’s efforts to reach into her past have hauled dusty ghosts from my own. My fingers linger over the laptop keys as I consider ways to explain to [Author2] why her interview means so much to me. Should I explain why it does? How do I grade an assignment like this? I find my cursor again blinking at me as I consider how best to explain the ways that we have overlapped, mindful of the pain evident in her interview with her father.

Spacetimemattering is messy stuff, and often the stories that emerge from them are risky and scary (Barad, 2013; 2015). But it is the very tensions that make those stories hard that make them generative. Vulnerability is not a concept that instructors or students necessarily enter into QR expecting, but we would argue that to be vulnerable is both inevitable and powerful. Barad compares the generative potential of spacetimemattering to an electrical storm that pops and illuminates dark skies. A QR pedagogy that embraces vulnerability as essential galvanizes learning in ways that “surge forth electrifying the field of dreams” (p. 416).

Authors

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, The University of Alabama

• Shelly Melchior, University of Alabama