Producing Newness: Thinking/Be(com)ing/Doing Post-Qualitative Inquiry With/in Literacying

• In Event: 67.057 - Common Worlding Methods: (Im)Possibilities of Post-Qualitative Research

Abstract

The aim of this storying poster is to share how research as an entangled becoming-with humans and materials (focusing on literacy productions) produced newness—new ways of thinking/be(com)ing/doing postqualitative inquiry (Haraway, 2016). From the QR SIG call, our poster responds to the invitation of a
creative, multi-modal submission that work[s] against and across disciplinary and epistemological divides to...“reimagine education research, given our ‘post-truth’ context, as the sum of our parts…” and to empower a populist movement of a new kind—one that demands a caring, supportive, and challenging education from early childhood through adulthood as a basic human right.
Our poster, a combination of two papers, interlaces stories of doing postqualitative (St. Pierre, 2011) inquiry in two contexts: a second-grade literacy classroom and intergenerational art classes. We explore the following questions: In our efforts to shift the anthropocentric stronghold in childhood and education research, do we succeed in moving beyond human-centered terms and understandings? Where are our human limits with/in our posthuman thinking-doing efforts? How do we work (with/in) postqualitative inquiries as always, already becoming speculative fabulations rather than assured research designs?

The first paper draws on a researcher-teacher partnership existing since 2010 in a second grade Writers’ Studio. The author discusses the ways in which we “researched” literacies, drawing on DeleuzoGuattarian (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) and Baradian theories (Barad, 2003, 2007, 2014) theories. We focus on the unfolding of an Egyptian pyramid game board that came to be at the end of a school year. In doing so, the author shares some of the relational ways we engaged with and produced research with children-materials in an ongoing, rhizomatic way of literacying, or as we conceptualized, based on Deleuzian notions of desire, literacy desiring(s).

The second paper shares narrative impressions of postqualitative inquiries into the literacies of preschoolers and elders in intergenerational art classes. The impressions focus on the constituents, movements, and effects of the intra-relations (Barad, 2007) of the classes when knowledge related to death and dying was evident in the data despite being relegated to the null curriculum (Eisner, 1985). Through the lens of new materialist theories (e.g., Braidotti, 2017), the null curriculum became visible and indicated the ontological inseparability of intra-acting constituents of the classroom curriculum (Doyle, 1992), suggesting a new complementarity and in-it-togetherness (Braidotti, 2011) of literacies.

Grounded in lively inquiry practices that illustrate the relationality, multiplicity, and surprise of phenomena like literacying, we offer responses to the questions above. The situatedness of these responses make them particularly apt for entering ongoing research dialogues concerning the production and make-up of literacies and childhoods (e.g., Lenters & Whitford, 2018). Yet, they equally contribute to broader contemporary postqualitative educational research conversations that reframe modern research through the engagement of onto-ethico-epistemological understandings of heretofore taken-for-granted concepts such as matter (e.g., Smythe et al., 2017).

Authors

• Candace Ross Kuby, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Rachel May Heydon, University of Western Ontario