Being Methodology-Free: Untraining Qualitative Researchers

• In Event: 18.059 - Research Without Method in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: Post qualitative research (St.Pierre, 2011) explains that postmodern and poststructural scholars rejected the idea of method decades ago. Derrida (1988) wrote that “deconstruction is not a method” (p. 3); Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) explained that the rhizome is anti-method; and Foucault’s (1976/1978) chapter on method in the first volume of The History of Sexuality describes power. It has been difficult for qualitative researchers to take up the poststructural refusal of method, perhaps because we seldom study theory well enough to understand that some theories, like poststrucuturalism, are not commensurable with pre-existing methodologies we learn separately. The onto-epistemological structure of conventional humanist qualitative methodology that we teach and learn is not thinkable or doable using “post” theories nor using new material, new empirical, and posthuman approaches. This paper argues that we’ve been teaching methodologies at the expense of onto-epistemologies for too long and might have to untrain ourselves and try to forget conventional humanist qualitative methodology if we want to put to work this “new” onto-epistemology coming out of the ontological turn. This means we have to understand that what we’re able to do depends, in large part, on what we’re able to think and that we have to refuse the rush to application that plagues applied fields like education. Further, it argues that we should stop teaching stand-alone methodologies and, instead, first teach the onto-epistemologies of different systems of thought that enable us to think differently about what inquiry might be. This approach to training educational researchers would renew education’s long attachment to the humanities, to philosophy, and detach it somewhat from what Kathleen Stewart (2015) recently called the “horrible social sciences” and their pre-existing, methods-driven methodologies in which a researcher can “do” without having to “think” too much. Relying on methodology is a trap, and not doing so may seem a risky business, but it is no riskier than continuing to legitimate an unnatural present of qualitative research we may no longer believe in, a present that weighs us down and drags on our futures.

Theoretical perspectives: Poststructuralism, post qualitative

Mode of Inquiry: Methodological/theoretical

Data sources, evidence, warrants: 25 years of teaching and writing about qualitative methodology and post qualitative inquiry

Results, significance: This paper is significant because it draws attention to the limits of pre-existing methodologies that shut down inquiry and prevent educational researchers from thinking and doing something different.


References
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)

Derrida, J. (1988). Letter to a Japanese friend. In D. Wood & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), Derrida and différance (pp. 1-5). Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press.

Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality Volume 1: An introduction. (Robert Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1976).

Stewart, K. (2015, October). Plenary #3. Paper presented at the Affect Theory Conference. Lancaster, PA.

Author

• Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, University of Georgia