Writing Toward Thematic Analysis: Excess and Theoretical Resonance (Poster 4)

• In Event: Themes Without Coding: Expanding Approaches to Thematic Analysis

Abstract

Collecting, analyzing, and writing up data is a process of domestication, taming. Thematic analysis, as one iteration of that process, seeks to draw boundaries that are describable and intelligible around messy data in order to capture and (re)present it. Processes like coding, which often lead to the identification and description of themes, has as its goal reduction. However, in the writing, data proliferates, resists domestication. Writing as a means of thematic analysis has a kinship with existing methodological approaches, such as writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005), thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), theoretical reading (Brinkman & Kvale, 2014), and concept as method (e.g., Lenz-Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017). This paper takes up writing as a methodological process to produce ‘themes’ that positions excess as its point of departure.

Qualitative research is excess. Each moment of designing and conducting research exceeds the boundaries we draw around it. Research questions contain possible responses that we cannot imagine. Participants share data that is wild and embodied, exceeding the capacity of a recording device or transcription. Excess often exists in liminal spaces, the vanishing half of the research process, cleaned up to make analysis resemble what is already recognizable. Excess, here, draws on multiple theoretical concepts. Manning and Massumi (2013) proffered the notion of a philosophy of the useless, which resonates with Barad’s (2012) description of experimentation as “[s]tepping into the void, opening to possibilities, straying, going out of bounds, off the beaten path” (p. 208). Derrida’s (1984) notion of the monstrous, appearing “without tradition or normative precedent” (p. 123), resonates with Foucault’s (2000) description of the purpose of writing: “I write in order to change myself and in order not to think the same thing as before” (p. 240). Each concept gestures toward an openness to the unforeseeable will always already exceed what is currently thinkable.

Writing, then, becomes a way to be with the excesses of data, producing analysis rather than reducing data to the analyzable. The researcher can write “for the intensity of thought, for the joy of being moved by thought, for living thinking to the max” (Manning & Massumi, 2013, 11:37-11:43). Such writing is an effort to respond to the tangled complexities of data as meaning is made—drawing boundaries—and exceeded in a process of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). The goal of writing as thematic analysis is not to describe what is there but to see what can be produced. Writing as thematic analysis is evocative and provocative, creating resonances--those moments in which, while writing through data and with data, producing data and thinking data, something crystallizes; data pulsates with the connection to theory, as if they are one in the same. As such, themes can be (re)conceptualized as theoretical resonances.

Author

• Jessica Van Cleave, Gardner-Webb University