Writing Techniques and Post-Qualitative Inquiry: A Visual, Material Play Space

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

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: The purpose of this paper is to write visual space as post qualitative work/think/play. In a move toward transparency, readers are invited to participate through 1) cutting, 2) folding, and 3) assembling research-creations. The first approach to writing allows readers to materialize agential cuts. By treating paginated articles not as sacred text to be confined forever within a print journal – but as paper play spaces to be removed by adventurous readers – writing escapes the page. Second, readers materialize the fold as text becomes an assemblage to be de/constructed and written and read. Third, readers might take these work/think/play spaces and assemble a collaborative, digital #researchcreation.

Perspective: This paper works within a post qualitative perspective (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2013, 2014). More specifically, the paper uses process ontologies (Whitehead, 1968) to activate concepts through different modes of writing. The emphasis, then, is not upon generating new knowledges, but upon producing spaces in which to “experiment differently with meanings, practices, and our own confounding” (Lather, 2007, p. 18–19). As post qualitative scholars have continued to demonstrate, writing provides fertile ground for theoretical, conceptual, philosophical, and methodological explorations.

Techniques and modes of inquiry: This paper adopts the technique of writing concepts as a post qualitative mode of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005; St. Pierre, 2014). Three concepts are of interest in this paper: cutting, folding, and assembling. For Barad, agential cuts “do not produce absolute separations, but rather cut together-apart” (2014, p. 168). For Deleuze, the fold is a unit of matter that relates as much to origami as it does to metaphysics and material science. There are, he writes, “Folds of winds, of fire and the earth, and subterranean folds” (1993, p. 6). Finally, for Manning and Massumi (2014), the research-creation is an assemblage that embodies “techniques of emergence” to explore how “a creative art or design practice launches concepts in-the-making” (p. 89). Taken together, these concepts offer possibilities for the visual materiality of post qualitative writing. (Because each concept draws from multiple theoretical works, in/commensurabilities are addressed in the full paper.)

Materials: theory, methodology, concepts, imagination, work/think/play.

Results: In situating these material play scapes in writings past, present, and future, I display the visual landscapes (Spirn, 1998) through which I compose (Author, 2015, 2016a, 2016b).

In the process, writing
exorcises ideas that haunt me
produces transparency
makes visible the day-to-day, messy processes of my behind-the-scenes
writes material, post qualitative inquiry
works/thinks/plays together.

Significance: Because thinking differently involves writing differently, writing has the potential to influence developments in post qualitative methodology. Scholars have begun to explore how post qualitative research might be written (Bridges-Rhoads, 2015; Kuby et al., 2015), as well as how it might cut and enfold into research-creations (Powell, 2015; Springgay & Zaliwska, 2015). Given these methodological turns, therefore, it is timely to explore how “the techniques of philosophy are writing techniques” (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. vii) that offer playful modes of working, thinking, materializing, processing, and creating post qualitative research.

Author

• Jasmine Ulmer, Wayne State University