Getting After Things Amid Failure: Inquiry, Impotency, and Collaboration in the Posts

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

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to ponder getting after things in the midst of failure. How does a spirit of inquiry continue despite claims to its impotency in creating change, winning grants, or being “useful”? To do so, we engage the working/thinking/playing behind the scenes of our collaborative scholarship that has experienced its own share of failings and accusations of impotency.

Theoretical framework: “Can we,” St. Pierre (2014) asked, “develop a new ethos” and, “If we did, how would we get on, live, ‘be’ in a world so overcoded with the being of humanism? How might we inquire? (p. 14). Here we think through these questions pondering how “we” as scholars have gotten on, lived, and been, in an overcoded world. Drawing upon queer theory’s attention to failing (Halberstam, 2009), we develop the concept of impotent inquiry. Impotency is a failure of its own right. Yet, we argue it opens up ways of getting on in the world to be and do things to the side of humanism - something impotency inevitably thwarts.

Modes of inquiry: This project utilizes a humanities-oriented approach to research. Relying on autobiographical, philosophical, and historical texts that contest “research” in order to inquire through the posts, we contemplate the hidden working/thinking/playing that takes place in a collaborative intellectual relationship. In doing so, we “problematize unrecognized assumptions, implications, and consequences of various kinds of educational practice” within “methodological” debates (AERA, 2009, p. 482).

Materials: Our materiality matters. And so, here, the materials we take up are quite personal. Yet, this work is not meant to be confessional. Rather, it attends to the conditions that we work/think/play within while seeking to inquire about matters of concern. This personal material includes our failings at being understood by reviewers; of not fitting in; and finding ways to still get on with working/thinking/playing together.

Warrants for arguments: To be impotent, to embrace impotent inquiry may not be warranted. Warrants, after all, authorize actions to be done in a variety of contexts. Yet, to be and do impotent things is to question the ways in which what is and is not warranted come to be and matter. This is, to be sure, partly fun and games - that’s the play part. But it is also work, as we must think through our own intellectual curiosities and about the conditions under which we labor as junior and adjunct faculty.

Scholarly significance: In a world obsessed with reproduction - in various guises - to take up the impotent position might be read as quite shameful. Arguably, the working/thinking/playing done by scholars that is not part of the “products” but the process is often hidden. The significance then of impotent inquiry may be that it lends itself to a history of work that embraces the shameful to make it habitable and livable for those that don’t fit, aren’t recognized, fail at the games that are part of the academic rat race.

Authors

• Kevin Burke, University of Georgia - Athens

• Adam Joseph Greteman, School of the Art Institute of Chicago