To cite this document:

 Aghasaleh, R. St.Pierre, E.A. (2014). A reader’s guide to post-qualitative inquiry proposals. Retrieved from: http://goo.gl/3OC5b2    ^[1]

A Reader’s Guide to a Post-qualitative Inquiry Proposal

        Educational scholars are typically quite familiar with conventional qualitative research. They have studied and conducted research using it and have advised their students about conducting this kind of research. Thus, they know the concepts and categories that are usually used in a qualitative dissertation proposal.  However, post-qualitative research does not rely on a pre-determined methodology like quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodologies.  In fact, postmodernism produced a sustained critique of and is highly suspicious of the idea of “method.”  Method always comes too late, is immediately out-of-date, and so is inadequate to the task at hand.  Because of that, in post-qualitative research there is no “research process” that can be explained before inquiry.  Importantly, post qualitative inquiry does not assume the ontology that grounds either the language or the subject of conventional methodologies.

This is a brief review and guide that I have prepared as I have considered how one might read and think about a post-qualitative proposal.  In what follows, I compare and contrast post-qualitative research with conventional qualitative research in a table and through a few paragraphs.

Note: Post-qualitative research, like all other posts (postmodern, poststructural, postcolonial, postfeminist, postcritical, etc.) never offers an alternative methodology, structure, recipe, or outline to serve as another handy research design to fix, correct, or guarantee one’s work.  Its purpose is rather to destabilize and question the normativity of conventional research methodology in social sciences.

Paradigm:

Paradigms are models or frameworks that are derived from a worldview or belief system about the nature of knowledge and existence. Paradigms are shared by a scientific community and guide how a community of researchers acts with regard to inquiry. Habermas (1971) and Lather & St.Pierre (2007-revised 2013) identified inquiry paradigms.  Humanist paradigms are informed by modernist, structural, and humanist theories/discourses versus post-humanist approaches that are informed by postmodernist, poststructural, posthumanist theories/discourse. Post-qualitative research is grounded in post-humanism.  In the post theories all major epistemological, and methodological concepts (e.g., language, discourse, knowledge, truth, reason, power, freedom, the subject, objectivity, being, reality, method, science) are deconstructed.

Ontology:

The Humanist paradigm is based on a hierarchical ontology in which human knower preexists knowing.  This knower has innate agency as opposed to the known (world of reality) which is passive and lacks agency.  In this hierarchical ontology, language is a transparent medium that can represent that reality.  However, in a flattened ontology (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987/1980) subject, object, and language are always already entangled, and the “human” has no separate existence, but rather, all come into existence together.

Goal:

In humanist inquiry such as interpretivism and social constructionism that are often dated from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1966) book, The Social Construction of Reality, the researcher emphasizes that social reality is viewed and interpreted by individuals according to their ideological positions.  Therefore, knowledge is personally experienced rather than acquired from or imposed from outside.  This approach holds that reality is multi-layered and complex (Cohen et al, 2000) and a single phenomenon can have multiple interpretations. Interpretivism is marked by at least three schools of thought in the social science research. These are phenomenology, ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism and they emphasize human interaction with phenomena in their daily lives. Thus, the goal of this research is to understand something.

Another humanist approach is critical inquiry that emerged grew from Frankfurt School and the social movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Marx wrote, “Why should we be content to understand the world instead of trying to change it?”  Critical theorists doubt that interpretations that simply describe lived experience go far enough.  Critical social scientists are ethically committed to identify, expose, and overturn structures of oppression that lead to “false consciousness” and hegemony in which people contribute to their own oppression. Thus, emancipation from social injustice is the goal of the critical social sciences.

Deconstruction as Lather and St.Pierre (2007) used is a general goal for the post research.  In other words all post theories such as genealogy, archaeology, marginality, performativity or concept like assemblage, bodies without organs, intra-action, etc. are forms of deconstruction in a sense.  Deconstruction is a way of reading, and it is especially useful when the researcher wants to trouble a normalized, taken-for-granted structure and break it apart so that it can be rethought.  But, more than that, it is an attitude, a way of listening, reading, thinking, and living.  The researchers who study deconstruction easily identify binary logic, hierarchies, and structures that appeal to foundationalism and transcendentalism.  Since the researchers live in structures, they are constructed by and through structures and might even gained advantages from structures, it is so hard to criticize them.  All structures have been created because at some point—at least for a group of people— there was some goodness about having those structures.  However, perpetuating, taking them for granted, and/or normalizing them is usually problematic. Thus, Spivak defines deconstruction as “persistent critique of something you cannot not want.”

Subject:

Qualitative research, and its chief method of data collection, the interview, relies on the “voice” of the knowing Cartesian subject.  Post qualitative inquiry, however, follows Foucault (1970/1966) who wrote, in The Order of Things that human and human’s voice is not the center of the inquiry.

I tried to explore scientific discourse not from the point of view of the individuals who are speaking, nor from the point of view of the formal structures of what they are saying, but from the point of view of the rules that come into play in the very existence of such discourse:  what conditions did Linnaeus (or Petty, or Arnauld) have to fulfill, not to make his discourse coherent and true in general, but to give it, at the time when it was written and accepted, value and practical application as scientific discourse. (p. xiv)

This does not simply mean that the researcher stays in a cave and writes up the research.  Foucault himself spent many years going to prisons and most probably took notes, however, he does not cite or quote a prisoner, guard, or other humans in his Discipline and Punish; the Birth of the Prison.   Like Foucault, post-qualitative researchers refuse to privilege participants’ voices over other sources of knowledge and being in the inquiry.  That is, they question the “phonocentrism” of conventional humanist qualitative methodology– the belief that speech is superior to, or more primary than, written language. As Derrida (1974/1967) argued, phonocentrism developed because the immediacy of speech has been regarded as closer to the presence, the real being, of subjects than writing.  

Post-qualitative research, then, focuses on identifying structures and discourses that allow people to say certain things and not others. As Spivak (1988) explained in Can the Subaltern Speak, because human subjects are produced in structures, their voice is most often only a reproduction and echo of the structure. Therefore, to deconstruct the structure it does not make sense to rely on the participants’ voice.

Beginning:

After Deleuze and Guattari thinking about begining is impossible. Unlike, conventional qualitative research that is driven by methodology, post-qualitative research is guided by theory.  Similar to positivist research, in conventional qualitative research the validity and reliability of the research is guaranteed through pre-given, taken-for granted structures of methods and practices. However, post-qualitative research does not begin with method or methodology but with theory(ies) and/or concepts that, as Claire Colebrook (2013) explained, “reconfigure or reorient” our thinking. Theory not only provides a framework to problematize the topic of the study but also determines what “to do” next.  

Data Collection:

The concept of data collection in qualitative research is based on the humanist subject that can exist separate from “data.”  In post-qualitative research the researcher does not exist prior to doing the research.  The researcher lives in an entanglement with what s/he studies.  It is also impossible to bracket out prior knowledge, experiences, or feelings. Scholars in the field of science studies have shown long ago that many advancements in science have occurred when the researcher was not in the research setting.  The classical examples are Archimedes while taking the bath, Newton while lying under tree, and Kary Mullis (1993 Nobel prize winner for inventing Polymerase Chain Reaction) while driving.

Analysis:

In post-qualitative research, data interpretation and analysis does not happen via mechanistic coding, reducing data to themes, and writing up transparent narratives, considering such approaches as too simplistic, thus precluding dense and multi-layered treatment of “data.”  In post qualitative inquiry, it is not clear what “counts” as data or whether the concept “data” is thinkable. Coding, which is labeling text by text, can only be done when we believe that language is transparent.  However, in a flattened ontology, language discursively and materially creates and generates meaning.  As in philosophy, thinking and writing count as analysis.

Contributions to the Literature:

The idea of contribution to the literature, which is expected from conventional qualitative research, is based on the concept that knowledge accumulates; a feature of logical positivism.  This epistemological feature is what Kuhn (1970) called incrementalism, the idea that knowledge steadily accumulates.  The accumulation of knowledge in science means one bit of knowledge builds on another and then another, correcting errors along the way, until there is a solid body of scientific truth.   Kuhn’s work showed that what is claimed to be a scientific truth in one paradigm at one historical moment will no longer be true after a paradigm shift.  Therefore, in post-qualitative research this language of contributions to the literature is not useful.

Limitations:

Since post-qualitative research is thinking, the limitation of thinking is unthinkable. As soon as the researcher thinks of a specific limitation it becomes part of the research and therefore is not a limitation anymore. Therefore, in post-qualitative research this term is not used.