Rethinking the Temporality of Research Methods

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

Abstract

Objectives
Research methods are empirical interventions into the spatio-temporal world that generate perceptible, recordable data. Whether conventional qualitative methods or multi-media arts-based experiments, they entail a tacit assumption about “before and after.” Post-qualitative theories problematize these methods for how they locate agency in the individual human (St. Pierre, 2011). This paper further contributes to this effort, and shows how time’s arrow is tacitly at work in typical education research methods. I then demonstrate how assemblage theory and diffractive methods break with the relation of before-after and tap into radically different temporalities. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the significance of time and temporality in critiques of research method.

Theoretical framework
This paper considers alternative approaches to the temporality of research in order to expose the Humanist assumptions of conventional research methods and to demonstrate the force of new queer temporalities at work in research. The paper draws specifically on the assemblage theory of Manuel Delanda (2006, 2011), with comparisons to the diffractive “methods” of Karen Barad (2007, 2010), and is more generally situated in relation to prior work that draws on these two theorists (de Freitas, 2012; Mazzei, 2013). I follow DeLanda (2006, 2011) for whom assemblages are emergent entities within systems of matter, energy, and information. DeLanda operationalizes and makes more concrete the Deleuzian proposal that assemblages are relations of speed and movement. He is not simply suggesting that “gradient” is a good metaphor for how complex assemblages are formed but rather that assemblages are differentiation processes and relations of difference. This paper takes up Delanda’s concept of gradient to study the differenc/tiated temporalities of research methods and compares this approach to the quantum queering of time in Barad’s work.

Methods/Data
This is a theoretical paper that compares qualitative research methods for their ontological assumptions about time and temporality.

Significance
The recent ontological turn in the social sciences entails a radically different understanding of time, which is yet to be adequately incorporated into our research methods. This paper shows how causality and relationality are entirely reconfigured through this new way of understanding temporality.

References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway:Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barad, K. (2010). Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance:
Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240-68.
de Freitas, E. (2012). The classroom as rhizome: New strategies for diagramming knotted interaction. Qualitative Inquiry. Vol 18 (7). 557-570.
DeLanda, M. (2011). Philosophy and simulation: The emergence of synthetic reason. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic Press.
DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic Press.
Mazzei, L. (2013). Materialist mappings of knowing in being: researcher constituted in the production of knowledge. Gender and Education, 25(6), 776-785.
St.Pierre, E.A. (2011). Post qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. In N.K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.). Sage Handbook of qualitative inquiry (4th ed.) (pp. 611-635). Sage: Los Angeles, CA.

Author

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Manchester Metropolitan University