Trust(ing) in a Qualitative Inquiry Course: Speculative Ethics and Matters of Care

• In Event: Posthuman and Care Ethics for Re-Imagining Higher Education Pedagogies

Abstract

“The course built up stamina in me and also forced me to trust the process and the messiness of coming to better understand complex topics filled with ‘gray-ness’” (student response on informal course evaluation).

Purpose
Since 2015 we have collaborated as teachers and researchers in graduate-level research courses (Authors, 2017; in press). We often ask ourselves questions like: What do graduate students need to trust instructors? What if we (instructors and students) trusted ourselves to be messy in the moment? What if trust was on our horizon, rather than findings, outcomes, and implications? Or even assignments and grades? Then, we also have to ask ourselves, what is ‘trust’?

The purpose of this paper is to narrow into one graduate-level introductory qualitative inquiry (QI) course in order to explore this question. Specifically, we wonder how feminist posthumanist concepts and writings on speculative ethics and care might open possibilities for how we think of socially just pedagogies in higher education.

Theory/Data/Methods
This paper uses data--such as weekly course planning conversations between us (instructor and doctoral student serving as research and teaching intern), teaching notes, two sets of focus group interviews, student assignments--from a semester-long introductory QI course to serve as an exploration of this question: what is trust? Employing a diffractive methodology (Barad, 2007), we read Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), other concepts from feminist new materialisms more broadly (i.e., entanglement [Barad, 2007]; response-ability [Haraway, 2016]), and data from this course through one another to produce newness and commit “to understanding which differences matter, how they matter, and for whom” (Barad, 2007, p. 90).

Insights & Significance
“Care is a human trouble, but this does not make of care a human-only matter” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 2).
Pedagogy, perhaps like care, is a human trouble, but it can no longer be conceptualized as human-only; we cannot take the human out of pedagogy (or out of care), but neither can we ignore the entanglements of humans, nonhumans, space, time, materials, and so forth in our pedagogies (as in caring). These multiple entanglements effect (and affect) how students engage in the pedagogies in our classrooms and how we/they trust each other. Therefore, this paper theorizes trust differently--not as human-centered, but as entangled with textbooks, assignments, politics of inquiry and neoliberalism in the academy, and...and...and...--to illuminate new possibilities for socially just pedagogies in higher education, especially in relation to how we prepare and mentor qualitative inquirers.

Barad (2013) proclaims that “we inherit the future” (p. 23); the ways we teach QI is the future we will inherit in the academy. It matters that we understand what trust is when orienting from a feminist posthumanist position and how trust is produced (i.e., processes, relationships). As the student noted above, QI is complex, messy, and full of gray-ness; therefore, the relationships (human and nonhuman) in a course and how trust is produced are important to explore.

Authors

• Candace Ross Kuby, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Rebecca C. Christ, Florida International University