Post-Qualitative Curriculum Research: The Urgent and Necessary Commitment to Alterity

• In Event: Curriculum Matters and Matterings: Reimagining Research Methodologies

Abstract

Objective
In this paper, I gesture towards a notion of “phantasmatic ethnography.” As those terms are intertwined with a modern humanism built on the idea of an autonomous and universal subject, their use will follow the post-structural lesson in which familiar terms are used under erasure (Derrida, 2008).

Theoretical framework
I will be mingling post-qualitative research (St. Pierre, 2014, 2018, 2019, 2021) and some contributions of Barad (2010, 2014) with Derrida’s notions of aporia of experience, hauntology, and trace (Derrida, 1994, 2008).

Methods and Data Sources
This is a theoretical study that seeks to address the concerns of post-structural research in curriculum within different communities – quilombos, indigenous and LGBTQIA+ communities, schools on the periphery – in Brazil. Being with others in those communities is another moment of what St. Pierre (2019) calls the “concrete encounter with the real”, when “something in the world that is unintelligible and unrecognizable within existing categories and practices 'kicks back' (Barad, 1999, p.2), sticks, and takes hold” (St. Pierre, 2018, p.604). Without renouncing empirical studies, I present a theoretical exercise of redefining, in a Derridian inflected post-qualitative approach, “data collection” or the “reality” that supposedly can be described and/or categorized. Thus, no data source will be presented.

Results
In dialogue with Derrida (2008), the paper will operate with the notion of “trace” – “the différance that opens up appearance and meaning” (p.80) – to think of “data” as ghostly hauntings that produce movement and estrangement, without them being able to be told as truths or representations. The curriculum/school experience that research sought to capture and to narrate thus appears, not as an experience of something, but as aporia. These are merely provisional glimpses of a fictitious landscape or, in the words of Barad (2010, 2017), intra dis/jointed movement or intra-activity. There is no possible temporal or spatial linearity, not even knowledge in the sense that is normally given to the term. As Derrida (1994) highlights, the spectrum “is not known, not out of ignorance, but because (...) it no longer belongs to the control of knowledge” (p. 6). If there is no evidence, but the spectral company of ghosts, writing turns into a laborious experience of responding to the alterity that challenges us – an ethical task. In that sense, I will argue for a Derridian hauntology capable to respond to some ontological concerns that underpin post-qualitative research, without ignoring that it seems insufficient to St. Pierre.

Scholarly significance of the study
In a context in which assaultive regimes of truth seem to prevail in educational public policies, it seems imperative to avoid generalizations and allow the memory of differences to emerge. My research in the field of curriculum is committed to the excesses that arise in the unpredictable to build conditions so “that the life of minorities (...) become more possible and more bearable” (Butler, 2018, p. 40). In this sense, its relevance is, more than epistemological, ontological as it addresses what counts as life in specific social and political conditions.

Author

• Elizabeth Macedo, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
  Presenting Author