Beginning With Concepts and Unlocking Possibilities Through Post-Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Post-Qualitative Inquiry Practices for Beginners

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes
In this paper, I engage with the postqualitative practice of “beginning with theory/concepts” (St. Pierre, 2015) to consider what is possible for educational research, drawing specifically on my work with community organizing pedagogy. I start by reviewing the philosophical underpinnings of this practice and the promise of poststructural and new materialist theory for interrogating pressing problems. By letting ourselves as researchers and practitioners be moved by a concept rather than a prescriptive method, we can embrace the instability and ambiguity of discourse while also inviting in other disciplines and creative data sources. I position postqualitative inquiry not as a “new” blueprint for social science research, but rather as an unfettering from normalized and categorized ways of being, knowing, and inquiring. As such, I show how engaging with a problem from a place of conceptual curiosity offers a sort of freedom to experiment and permission to play with paradigmatic and disciplinary boundaries.

Theoretical Framework
I draw from poststructural treatments of concepts as conjurers of possibility (Derrida, 1978; Deleuze & Guattari, 1994; Gane, 2009). At the same time, I take very seriously the charge of poststructuralism to deconstruct normalized categories. As such, I work to unsettle any notion of poststructuralism as a coherent and stable canon by bringing in the wise words of theorists, writers, and poets who don’t subscribe to this label but whose work inspires the sort of creativity and experimentation that poststructural theory and postqualitative inquiry suggest.

Modes of Inquiry
Postqualitative inquiry denounces starting with a method, as methods are another form of “dividing practices” (Foucault, 1982/2000, p. 326) that limit what counts as valid research. In this spirit, I am less concerned with pinning down exactly how to enact concept-driven inquiry and more interested in offering theory-informed vignettes about my encounters experimenting with concepts as pedagogical entry points in community organizing settings.

Data Sources
I offer the concept of justice as an example to show how beginning with a concept has produced provocative insights in my own work as a community organizer. What might emerge when we are compelled to unpack (and perhaps rearticulate) the assumptions of this concept? I draw from conversations, pedagogical experiments, and philosophical texts to think through the possibilities that lie in this deconstructive project.

Results and Significance
This paper’s significance lies in its potential to suggest to scholars wishing to do postqualitative inquiry how they might begin. Starting with a concept shows how postqualitative inquiry is not about drawing definitional boundaries around what it is for the purposes of replication and generalization (these are relics of traditional social science research), nor creating yet another research methodology for insulated academics. Rather, its project is to foster the conditions under which creative and imaginative collaborations can emerge. Every day, we are inundated with categories that present themselves as normal and immutable. To do something differently and unsettle that myth requires processual unlearning, and for researchers and practitioners alike, postqualitative inquiry and its companion poststructural theory offer a direction for such unlearning.

Author

• Briana Bivens, University of Georgia