Inquiry on the Sly: Playful Intervention as Philosophical Action

• In Event: 29.082 - Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: 29.082-8 - Work/Think/Play in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes: In our presentation we engage with elements of inquiry work that often escape critical notice to learn from their very excess. To ground our investigation, we focus on the intersection of work with elements of play, a promising entanglement that has impacted our collaboration in the area of qualitative inquiry. Through play, the work of inquiry manifests alternative possibilities for educational research with ramifications for social justice enactments of education.

Modes of inquiry: Specifically, we engage in a bit of a quandary: how to make our playful actions visible while, at the same time, resisting the foreclosure that visibility often entails? We thus engage with de Certeau’s (2011) conception of la perruque (“the wig”) as a playful mechanism for “working inquiry” and disrupting the normative status quo. We overlay Certeau’s work with a Deleuzian-inspired orientation towards the excessive capacity of becoming: through playful excess the work of inquiry intervenes in normative processes of knowing and being. Such a disruption makes possible an indeterminate space in which social justice work (as inquiry) might be differently enacted.

Theoretical framework(s): We begin with Hannah Arendt’s (1958) distinction between labor, work, and action, arguing that the product of inquiry has been unnecessarily conflated with the act of doing work. In contrast, action extends a plurality that, through its new beginning, exceeds any full relation to the final product. We next link the Arendtian notion of action with Certeau’s offering of la perruque. Entangling Certeau’s playful interventions with Arendt’s actions adds dimensionality to Deleuzian assertions of excessive becoming, an onto-epistemological orientation that has accompanied the materialist turn in contemporary qualitative inquiry.

Conclusions: As an ongoing practice, work can never be fully accounted for or described. Often, in the realm of inquiry, the product of work remains the center of descriptive focus. That is, in research articles the process of inquiry is merely alluded to as a mechanism for bringing clarity or veracity to the end product itself. The inquiry product is shown to have been worked, to have undergone a systemic process that results in its production. Renderings of the work process often take the shape of a rather neat and tidy “methods” section that is a mere pathway to the conclusions or findings that remain the focal center of the text. And yet, there remain a host of practices and activities that extend beyond such representation. These are the becomings that exceed normative narration; they escape notice due to their ambiguity, their messy incompleteness.

And yet, what is lost—what gained—in such a scenario? How might turning the critical eye towards those activities that escape representation in the research process make possible different patternings of inquiry, alternative ways of doing inquiry?

Significance: In the end, ours is a call for inquiry as activating playful work practices, an engagement with the messy (and ongoing) process of coming-to-know-and-be that might productively enact a social justice imperative of intervening in the normative status quo.

Authors

• Aaron M. Kuntz, The University of Alabama

• Kelly Woodall Guyotte, The University of Alabama