Diffractive Studies and Place Based Studies: A Comparative Analysis

• In Event: Posthumanist Philosophy and Educational Research: A Review of Analytic and Axiological Features

Abstract

Objective. Posthumanist philosophies, defined broadly, have inspired the development of analytic practices that focus on transformation of ontological relations. This paper compares two of these modes of analysis—diffractive studies and place-based inquiry. It highlights the transformative ethical and political implications of these inquiry practices.
Theoretical framework: Both approaches to educational research involve meta-theoretic pluralistic ontologies that imply it is impossible to represent all possible valid ontological relations in a single representation and so forgo the effort. Both theoretical literatures maintain that inquiry involves non-human as well as human agency.

Diffractive Studies: Like cartographic analysis, diffractive analysis is immanent, “a way of understanding the world from within and as part of it” (Barad, 2007, p. 88) and, as such, “are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world.” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). Diffractive analysis does not seek to describe the experience of being transformed by knowing practices. Instead, it takes the form of reading disparate phenomena alongside one another to performatively generate relational effects. These relations are shaped by both the agency of the inquiring subjects and the material agencies in the world. More precisely, the intra-action of inquiry constitutes both human and non-human agency.

Place-based Studies: The adjective “place-based” is used in many ways by education researchers (Gulson & Symes, 2007; Helfenbein, 2021; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). For the purposes of this review, we focus on research that emphasizes the way place shapes the ontological and ethical character of inquiry. Many of the most compelling examples of this kind of research are found in Indigenous studies scholarship (Marker, 2018; Higgins & Madden, 2019; Watts, 2013.)

One of the most distinctive features of place-based research is its emphasis on specificity of relation. Unangax scholar Eve Tuck and co-author Marcia McKenzie (2015) succinctly summarize this emphasis:
…consider as researchers, how we are contributing to place as event through our research. It is the specificity, the rootedness of place that makes it so important in social science, and in (post)human imagination. (p. 637)
Place-based research acknowledges the multiplicity of relations possible, as a prelude to emphasizing a need for commitment to specific place relations and specific future relations.

Data Sources and Evidence: Multiple examples of published diffractive and place-based studies will be provided to illustrate the way these practices transform researcher’s and reader’s ontological relation to foci of study (e.g., Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, 2013; Nxumalo, 2021).

Substantiated Conclusions: Diffractive and place-based research provides a clear alternative to Western enlightenment ideals of epistemic clarity and representationalism. In so doing, it shifts the merit of inquiry from accurate description of antecedent conditions to the quality of the future possibilities generated by the inquiry.

Scholarly Significance: Diffractive studies and place-based research have emerged as the analytic practices that, so far, most clearly exemplify the posthumanist shift away from representationalism and its call for expanded standards of ethical and political responsibility in research. This paper compares and contrasts these contributions and thereby helps clarify the current state of this discussion of research responsibility.

Author

• Alexander B. Pratt, University of Memphis