uOttawa.ca

Moving beyond conventional qualitative�deployments of method, methodology, and data

Martin Camiré

uOttawa.ca

���Plan��

1. What are humanism and posthumanism?
2. The current state of qualitative research in sport and exercise psychology
3. Eight tips for infusing posthumanist thinking in qualitative training
4. The problem of data

�1. What are humanism and posthumanism?�

Humanism

Product of the Age of Enlightenment:

• Historically concerned with human exceptionalism, human conquest of nature

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Offers a narrow rendition of life that severely overcodes the world’s varied histories.

• Colonialism
• Capitalism
• Neoliberalism

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Humanist Education Project

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Sustains neoliberal imperatives of:

• Self-Control
• Self-Discipline
• Self-Reliance

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Prepare humans for the demands of a very competitive and mostly unjust world

Goal = Upward Social Mobility

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Humanist Education Project

Educacene:

• Reproduction of narrow ideals of humanness
• Education has been swallowed into the goods and services industry
• Standardizing and universalizing curricula deemed necessary to sustain the economic apparatus

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Humanist Education Project

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• A disciplining assembly line process (intellectual incarceration)
• Forming docile subjects who fit in a tightly delimited conception of life

(Beier & Wallin, 2020)

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Posthumanism

The world is not static

• Existence is a constantly evolving performance
• Stability is an illusion; we need to abandon the search for an established order of things
• We must move our thinking from being to becoming

Existence is relational

• The world is a complex relational embroidery
• Things come to be by way of how they relate

Interaction Intra-action

Intervention Intravention

Interconnection Intraconnection

Starts with

a separation

Always already

in entanglement

Agency is not the sole property of humans

• We need to decenter the human (not at the top of the pyramid but within the cycle of existence)
• We need to account for the agency of the nonhuman (i.e., animals) and nonliving (i.e., technology)
• The world is not an unlimited resource ripe for human exploitation

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���Posthumanism��

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• A meshing of ideas (many posthumanisms)

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• Ontological becoming of humanist thinking
• Not an anti-humanism
• Not a time period after humanism
• Not a wholesale doing away with humanism

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• Offers a more liberatory educational project

�2. The current state of qualitative research in sport and exercise psychology�

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Qualitative Research in SEP

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Qualitative Research in SEP 2010-2017

Individual interviews = 85%

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McGannon et al. (2021)

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Qualitative Research in SEP 2010-2017

No declared ontology/epistemology = 61%

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McGannon et al. (2021)

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Stated Philosophical Position = 29%

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Almost all qualitative research (in SEP) has been conducted through

interviews, with little details offered on philosophical orientation.

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A Call to Take Ontology Seriously in Qualitative Training

“more [must] be done to contribute to its

pedagogical culture, particularly concerning…

innovative instructional methods” (p. 1).

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Humanist Qualitative Research

Preformed Methodologies (e.g., Grounded Theory, Ethnography, Case Studies)

• Prescribed apparatuses of inquiry
• Linear, mechanistic, reductionist
• Restrict our worldview

Why?

• Rely on voice (Mazzei & Jackson, 2017)
• Necessitate data collection/analysis (Beggan, 2022)
• Circumscribe inquiry to human subjects (St. Pierre, 2017)
• Focus on discourse and representation (Wallin, 2014)

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Difference by “Degree”

Preformed

Methodologies

Organise the world according to its prescribed formations

Processes of recognizing, fragmenting, and categorizing

Thematic Analysis

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Difference by “Kind”

Generate new

concepts that open

alternative horizons

for thinking and theorizing

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3. Eight Tips for Infusing Posthumanist Thinking in Qualitative Training

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1. Deconstruct the Human Subject

Abandon assumptions of the human subject as:

• Bounded, Autonomous, Agentic, Self-Regulating

Reality is an infinite relational network

“I” becomes “iii” (I think link therefore I am)

• Our existence is always plugged into the existence of others
• There are no “I”slands; the self is always a porous crowd

Humans are biological,

political, philosophical, and

technological composites of fluid

identities and distributive agency.

(Abblitt, 2019; Murris, 2022)

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2. (Re)envision:

• Learning
• Knowledge
• Skills

Learning

Human learners:

• Use language to mediate our understanding of the world.
• Accumulate knowledge as a crucial form of capital that acts as the currency necessary for succeeding in the competitive knowledge economy.

Lifelong Learning

Humans must continually engage in the knowledge economy to adapt to its competitive imperatives.

Knowledge

• Commodified product
• A form of capital
• Located in the brain
• Mobilized for integration by the masses (i.e., education system)
• Assessed and recognized through diplomas and degrees leveraging job opportunities

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• Actionable forms of knowledge
• Located in the human brain/body
• Come in many renditions
• Soft, Hard
• Technical, Tactical
• Personal, Professional, Life
• Have transferable features

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Learning ↔ Becoming

Learning retains a propensity toward static accumulation of content (i.e., knowledge, skills)

Becoming embraces relationality and change as hallmarks of existence

When process (becoming) supersedes product, we can better account for how life is dynamic and performative

Knowledge: From Product to Performance

Knowledge is not a stable entity encased in a human cognitive structure.

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Knowledge is not a product to be moved from one person/context to another (i.e., transfer).

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Knowledge becomes a performance (i.e., knowledging)

Knowledging is a constantly evolving process of becoming attentive to the world’s incessant reconfiguring

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If knowledge is no longer a product, the “gap-filling mindset” must be abandoned

• Based on a false premise that reality is stable, finite, and must be documented/categorized
• We should cease attempting to plug knowledge in gaps until the puzzle of existence is solved

3. Start Inquiry with Concepts

• Inquiry does not need to be empirical to be considered legitimate
• Concepts can act as philosophical devices for extending the field of reality

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(Some) of the concepts that shape the posthumanist terrain:

Agential Cut

Assemblage

Diffraction

Intra-action

Ethico-onto-epistemology

Thick now

Spacetimemattering

Rhizome

Worlding

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4. Readthinkwrite

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• Situate reading, thinking, and writing as a creative assemblage
• One big intertwined process of discovery

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• Ex: Comprehensive Exam = (Philosophical Apprenticeship)
• Great opportunity for students to encounter posthumanist concepts

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4. Readthinkwrite

We must rethink the “comprehensive” in comprehensive exams

• Wander, Be Creative
• Take Risks, Be Unboxed
• Not about being in “command” of a field of knowledge
• Replicates a finite reality
• Maintains knowledge accretion narrative

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5. Reconsider our Reliance on Interviewing

• Research is not only about:
• Extracting spoken words
• Gathering individual subjective perceptions

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• Consider inquiry as more than just data-driven games of “running around interviewing people” (Tuari Stewart et al., 2021, p. 1054).

• Intraview: Deployed not as a talk between subjects but as an event involving humans/nonhumans intra-actively producing material, discursive, and affective artefacts that nurture inquirers’ diffractive tracing and nomadic thinking.

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6. Think Beyond the Human

In the social sciences, we should:

• Move beyond the anthropocentric bias to correlate reality to human cognition
• Not fall for the epistemic hubris that because of our language and reason, we supplant and can control everything else that exists.
• Acknowledge that Earth contains innumerable ecologies of relations prior to/outside human thought that remain noncorrelative to human categorization.
• Realize that the world always already exceeds the idea of the world as it is for us. We must admit to the nontotalizability of human access.

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�7. Reimagine the Role of the Supervisor/Teacher�

• Support students’ philosophical apprenticeships
• Open ontological passageways for students to readthinkwrite
• Imagine inquiries that lie beyond the taken-for-grantedness of data

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�8. Make Kin�

We are inseparable from other life forms, even if our anthropocentric categories trick us into thinking otherwise.

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We must connect with a “we” inclusive of all living/nonliving matter

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Social Justice Multispecies Justice

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Consider in our inquiries:

Anthropocentric aesthetics we impose on nature with our sports facilities

Carbon footprint and landfill accumulation resulting from sport participation

All entities on earth are intraconnected. When we damage nature and animals, we are inevitably damaging ourselves.

4. The Problem of Data

https://www.uottawa.ca/research-innovation/data-literacy

�What data are not�

Not objective, impartial, or transparent accounts of reality

Data do not preexist researchers’ interpretive engagement

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We make data

Data are made rather than found, assembled rather than collected, and dynamic rather than static.

We make data in/through intra-acting bodies (i.e., researcher-participant) and technologies (e.g., digital recorders, cameras, computers).

We assemble data

We must conceptualize data not as sets, but as assemblages.

Data assemblages comprise researchers, participants, material objects, and cultural discourses all intricately and mutually entangled.

We become data

“Data are less like pebbles researchers gather on a beach and more like the beach itself—constantly shifting sands subject to an ever-changing landscape of rolling waves, sun, wind, and human and nonhuman activity. Data engagement situates all data as dynamic, as always already becoming, and this dynamic state both reflects and produces agentic data. Data remain always in motion and in relation; they brim with possibilities for ongoing engagement”. (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2020, 821)

Data do not leave researchers untouched, the porous “iii” ontologically shifts

Our responsibility with data

• Not merely about representing a given experience “grounded in the data”.
• We have, as researchers, a responsibility to animate new ways of thinking and bring about yet unimagined configurations of existence.

Our responsibility with data

• In a social justice seeking world, we must never see data as neutral but always imbued with discourses that perpetuate tenacious social and economic inequities.
• We must make, assemble, and become data that promote more just and sustainable ways of living on earth.

Researcher Positionality

“I myself am an assemblage, constantly navigating the assemblages that entangle me. The world does not revolve around me. I am not apart from my data or the world. I am assemblage, in the middle of vast connective assemblages, trying to make sense of the constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing entanglements”.

(Nordstrom, 2015)

Conventional humanist term “researcher” is laden with the binary insider/outsider.

In postqualitative inquiry, the inquirer making/assembling data sits in the middle.

Types of Data

Glow

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• Weighty silences that electrified a room
• Moments that escape language, verbal description, and propositional meaning but nonetheless have embodied aspects.
• Smothers researchers in an entanglement that generates creative spaces/moments of thought. Glow forces us to think with difficult questions and thus, the aftermath of glow are data.

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Dream Data

Data that refuse closure, keep interpretation at play, even in the unconscious.

Response Data

Participants, peers, audience members at conferences, social media comments on posts.

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Theory as Data

Thinking with and (re)reading theory is generative/constitutive to assembling data.

To creative more just worlds, we must assume methodological and epistemological risks

What does that look like?

• Face the uncomfortable
• Expose ourselves to the unknown
• Dilate the field of the possible
• Produce nonstandard modes of thinking
• Escape the cul-de-sac of logical resemblance
• Theorize what is not there yet
• Move beyond preformed methodologies

“what we need today is an education that

does not know where it is headed. This is

not its failure, but its virtue” (Snaza, 2013, p. 49)

Thank You!���