Un/faithful Methodologies

• In Event: Promiscuous Research: Reimagining the Study of Higher Education Through Philosophical Misbehaving

Abstract

This paper thinks with critical materialist theories (Braidotti, 2006, 2013a), and specifically the concept of un/faithfulness as a relational practice of becoming aware of “one’s condition of interaction with others, that is to say, one’s capacity to affect and be affected” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 307). Following Braidotti, faithfulness is conceptualized not as a dogmatic, rigid verisimilitude of morality, but a creative and relational becoming in a world that is unstable and shifting. Un/faithfulness as a promiscuous methodological practice that “highlights and at times celebrates its limits and limitations” (Voithofer, 2013, p. 527). Un/Faithfulness as promiscuous methodology “works the ruins of past and emerging frameworks,” thinking with the productive incommensurabilities between data-phobic and data-driven research (Voithofer, 2013, p. 526). Faithful to theory, faithful in theory, faithful until you realize otherwise, un/faithfulness.

I consider un/faithful encounters throughout a research project exploring the spatial relations of a college campus through walking interviews and focus groups with college students. For example, I find myself on the floor of my apartment, transcript excerpts piled around me, organized by themes. I am stuck, and I pause to read one, and I am pulled back to a moment: Angela and I, on a walk, pass by the “vagina statue” on campus, where she tells me again the story about kissing her first girl there, a story she had shared in the focus group months before. A story that she had followed up during the focus group by saying “... this whole quad just feels like home to me.” And as I sit on the floor of my apartment, holding the slip of paper with this excerpt, I remember the pause that followed in the focus group, a moment, pregnant with awe? Something still undefinable at the weight of what she shared in that particular space and time. And Sky breaking the silence by saying “it's where you became you.” The quiet, full feeling that filled that little room. Jumping up from the floor to pull up the transcript on my computer, to pull up my response (cut from the excerpt I held in my hand) “I think about that story every time I walk by here.” And how when I said that, I did not mean her story, exactly, but that moment. The sharing, the encounter. The relationality and connection between the three of us in that little room in the education library.

In this moment, I am jolted back, pulled away from the codes and themes to theory, cutting and pasting, and drawing and reading. Reading these moments promiscuously, it is not the dogmatic faithfulness to theory that produced the jolt, the spark, the plugging in. Instead, methodological un/faithfulness, promiscuously zigzagging between transcripts and codes and philosophy and encounters and memories, processually embodies the nomadic theory I am striving to be faithful to. This paper wanders the tensions between data, theory, and methodology un/faithfully, offering un/faithfulness as a promiscuous response to the binaries of data-less and data-centered qualitative research.

Author

• Maureen Alice Flint, University of Georgia