Research journal
Human(ism) rules. This is what powers social sciences research, it is the iron that smoothes out the many wrinkles in the onto-epistemological fabric of conventional qualitative inquiry for sure.
is solid assumption is the iron that does not just smooth every wrinkle in the , it makes the fabric . Postqual displaces the human but unplugging the iron
the disturbance that makes postqualitative research not qualitative. It is easier to articulate than to do
The Hegelian tradition links desire with recognition, claiming that
desire is always a desire for recognition and that it is only through the
experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted as socially
viable beings. That view has its allure and its truth, but it also misses
a couple of important points. The terms by which we are recognized
as human are socially articulated and changeable. And sometimes the
very terms that confer “humanness” on some individuals are those that
deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status,
producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human. p. 2
” I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. This is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an
interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open
up the possibility of different modes of living; in other words, not to
celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions
for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation.” p. 3
“The human is understood differentially depending on its race, the legibility of that race, its morphology, the recognizability of that morphology, its sex, the perceptual verifiability of that sex, its ethnicity, the categorical understanding of that ethnicity. Certain humans are recognized as less than human, and that
form of qualified recognition does not lead to a viable life. Certain humans are not recognized as human at all, and that leads to yet another order of unlivable life. If part of what desire wants is to gain recognition, then gender, insofar as it is animated by desire, will want recognition as well.” p. 2
My comment: it gets recognition!
“If I am someone who cannot be without doing, then the conditions of my doing are, in part, the conditions of my existence. If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an “I” depends upon my being able to do
something with what is done with me.” p 3
The masked Philosopher Foucault Kritzman 1988
“Our attention tends to be arrested by the activities of faces that come and go, emerge and disappear.
Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard. With the potential reader, the surface of contact was unrippled. The effects of the book might land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of. A name makes reading too easy.” p. 323, 324
“Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to through of familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.” p. 328
“I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means; the desire is there; the people capable of doing such work exist. So what is our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate. We mustn’t adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop “bad” information from invading and stifling the “good.” We must rather increase the possibility for movement backwards and forwards. This would not lead, as people often fear, to uniformity and leveling down, but, on the contrary, to the simultaneous existence and differentiation of these various networks.” p. 328
“…what we are suffering from is not a void, but inadequate means for thinking about everything that is happening. There is an overabundance of things to be known: fundamental, terrible, wonderful, funny, insignificant, and crucial at the same time. And there is an enormous curiosity, a need, a desire to know.” p. 327
“Books, universities, learned journals are also information media” p. 329
“The problem is to know how to exploit the differences [between teaching and popularization, see two paragraphs above], whether we ought to set up a reserve, a “cultural park,” for delicate species of scholars threatened by the rapacious inroads of mass information, while the rest of the space would be a huge market for shoddy products.” p. 329
“The right to knowledge must not be reserved to a particular age-group or to certain categories of people, but that one must be able to exercise it constantly and in many different ways.” p. 329
“What is philosophy if a way of reflecting, not so much on what is true and what is false, as on our relationship to truth?” p. 330
Philosophy in activity: “the movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules–that is philosophy. The displacement and transformation of frameworks of thinking, the changing of received values and all the work that has been done to think otherwise, to do something else, to become other than what one is–that, too is philosophy.
(…) it should also be added that [philosophy] is a way of interrogating ourselves: if this is the relationship that we have with truth, how must we behave?” p. 330
“Those who, for once in their lives, have found a new tone, a new way of looking, a new way of doing, those people, I believe, will never feel the need to lament that the world is error, that history is filled with people of no consequence, and that it is time for others to keep quiet so that at last the sound of their disapproval may be heard…” p. 330
I consider myself fortunate: unlike numerous other researchers, I had the privilege of taking a “formal” Postqualitative Inquiry course. Those who dabble in postqual came to it on their own.
I am also fortunate because I am a mother of three, a wife, an immigrant, and also a graduate student. Research questions are around me. I never lack ideas for research. Those that make to the surface and are fortunate enough to stand out, make to the next level where they compete with one another, evolve, and ideally, find their way to the pages of my research journal. More often then not, they fizzle out by the time the long pickup line at my son’s school is over. I noticed many of my ideas do not get completely forgotten. They echo and come back to the surface of consciousness in no particular order or pattern and remind me of multiplicities.
At some point, I decided to assemble a few short thought experiments and musings into a book. I envisioned the assemblage as a primer for students new to Postqual. Of course the idea of a primer reinforces the method, a method of instruction in this case, and method, of course, is at odds with the very idea of postqualitative inquiry. Nevertheless, I did it because I recalled my own struggles with breaking away from the logic behind the more conventional research methods.
I first engaged with postqual in Qualitative Inquiry II class, a year before postqualitative. The word “postqualitative” was never uttered; yet, the course was built around Jackson and Mazzei’s “Thinking With Theory in Qualitative Research.” We went through the chapters sequentially, one by one–Derrida, Spivak, Foucault, Butler, Deleuze, Barad… I thoroughly enjoyed the readings and my professor Dr. Richards, who let me experiment with the format of our weekly class assignment. I dusted off my husband’s huge, long-forgotten set of Prizmacolor pencils and sketched; I put together collages that documented my thought. I had no trouble with the concept of “plugging in” and the theory. In the same class, I experimented with autoethnography and wrote several short excerpts about mother my autistic daughter. I wrestled with painful issues–who I am as a mother and what does it mean to be a good one. I thought about normality and how my daughter and we as a family perceive it. I have made amazing discoveries and deconstructed personal ideas about research and researchers. Somewhere toward the end, I talked to Jenni who pointed out in passing that poststructuralist thought seeks to decenter the human. This struck me like lightning in the clear sky–the entire semester I labored under the thought that qualitative research is all about humanity. How then, do poststructuralist theories fit in my conclusions? I obviously did it all wrong, but somehow, it did not feel like a disaster. That summer, I wrote a lot in my researcher/journal blog and read half of Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization.” In the fall, I took Arts Based Research class and struggled with the very concept of research, particularly, with its purpose. I wondered what counts as data and how can art possibly pass for research. Then I started reading Manning’s The Minor Gesture and came across
“In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture.
All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage.
A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable.” pp 3, 4
“A Thousand Plateaus”
Trans. Massumi 1987, ISBN 0-8166-1401-6
“The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available— always n – 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n – 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.
I have been trying to stay away from politics, but it is a difficult thing to do–they sip through interactions with others. I hate it because it demands of me a political stance, and I resist it because I know the world is much more complicated than that. I could care less where I stand–I have become wary of choosing packs and having to conform to the conventions, expectations, and rules that come with its membership. I tried belonging–grew up as a Soviet, then later, I was a Christian; enough said–I do not like memberships.
…I am not a troublemaker, I am simply curious. And now, way beyond my passionate twenties, I no longer want to change the world–I just want to make it better, help everyone co-exist, find ways for everyone to get along and thrive somehow. Yet, Trump’s election broke me–I became so emotionally invested that the night Trump won, I felt dead. Specifically, what died was the part that believed in human’s virtue, respected opposing points of view. In its wake, I felt disgust, disbelief, disappointment with other fellow humans, and anger. With time, the pain had subsided, but not the disgust, nor the constant awareness of my ethically problematic position as a Russian national and a permanent resident of the United States. Once again, I feel like I am forced to choose camps, and I refuse to do it.
When I became aware of the term “neoliberal academy” about a year ago, I knew in which camp I belong. My enculturation into the academic persona was easy–I am easily persuaded and sensitive to the affective power of the written word, and academic literature is no exception. When I read, I always search for the protagonists, the antagonists, for stances, philosophies, messages, and so forth; I like to know where I step next.
Neoliberal is bad. The principle of parsimony is impotent. Complexity and ambiguity are the answer. If I had a bow, I’d slap it on this neat package and put it on display to enjoy it.
Today, I question the evilness of neoliberal. What would my world, my time look like without the efficiency, the productivity of the neoliberal paradigm? Would I be able to reconcile my yearning for a simpler life on a small farm with my desire to be a part of bustling city life, the modern conveniences and comforts afforded by financial security? How do I work out the gravitational pull of adventure and cultural explorations through food and long-distance travel while I worry about the pollution I create when I fly or drive, or enjoy imported foods? I am as much a product of the environment as the producer of the environment. I am a phenomenon, and so is the neoliberal order, and the ecologies, and the species, and all the things, concepts, and events that I hate, love, or constantly interrogate in order to decide whether I should hate or love them.
I am entangled with politics and world orders, but I do not need to hate them, love them, or devote my life to changing or preserving them–I want to live in the moment, becoming with the world around me as it becomes with me. I do not want to be anxious about my employability after graduation–I want to stay curious and see where it takes us as a family.
In the beginning of postqual, I realized that my epistemologies change as I progress through the day and perform the numerous roles as a mother, a wife, a neighbor, a friend, a student, a daughter, and so forth. I have been “sitting” on this discovery for over a month and made it my own. I asserted this belief since then several times and even came up with a narrative: “If I were not a postpositivist in the kitchen, my family would go hungry. If I was not an interpretivist with my husband, I would be divorced. With my kids, I am a constructivist. I have to be!” and so forth… Today, while driving home, I thought that I should call myself on these assumptions so I thought of a study:
Method: progress through the day and take note of what type of knowledge I typically encounter and what epistemological beliefs help me process the information, and in what way. I will create a map, then try to create an outfit, a costume (or at the very least, a hat, or an accessory depending on how strong the belief is) to represent (constructivism? already?) each belief.
If clothes help construct our identities and are the material part in our performativity, then why not tap into the potential or wardrobe research?
“A clever, beautiful quote will go here. Some day.”
Unlike some authors of postqualitative genre, I am privileged–I am a doctoral student taking an inaugural course in Post Qualitative Inquiry. I have a proper instructor and a syllabus to nurture my inner post-structuralist, peers to validate Vygotsky and Piaget, a body of literature to roam, and three credit hours to justify reading and experimentation. I know Jenni had no such opportunity, and neither did (…).
Yet, perhaps, my greatest fortune is that I am getting acculturated into postqual before the two fontanelles of quantitative and qualitative thinking in my want-to-be-a-research-methodologist head had fused together to form a hard, thick, boney casing around my thoughts. Presently, I have nothing to lose as I have no idea when, where, or even whether I will hold an academic position, or even publish. Therefore, this piece, written from a student-stepping-into-postqual perspective, is a mixture of risk-free wonder, care-free play, and of defiant confusion. I offer you a glimpse into my train of thought as I pondered my options for the final project. It took place somewhere in the middle of the semester.
It began with a discussion of the final project on our second day of class. The tentative topic is Mentoring in PostQual. Lost in thought, I probably missed something. Why mentoring? We exchanged some ideas; a couple of students offered examples of mentoring relationships in their lives, and it was wonderful because I got a feel for what kind of people these new classmates of mine are, but the topic… the topic is meh. I am not excited about it. No, really, why mentoring? Clearly, Jenni is the mentor in the spotlight here, but why a mentor and not a teacher? This is a rhetorical question–I believe I know what she will answer; she likes to point out that she is not there to deposit knowledge into her students’ heads. …is this what she believes teaching is–depositing? Wait… this is my rendition of what Jenni thinks of teaching. How does Jenni define “teaching”… Actually, she does not teach, she facilitates. Never mind, teaching is irrelevant because the topic is mentoring. Is she a mentor? Why not a Sherpa, or a coach, or even a doula? I am resisting the impulse to explore the meaning of the word “mentor,” to operationally define “mentoring.” Much to my excitement, I realize that by refusing to go there, I skip over a pile of imaginary manure even as I preemptively reach for the shovel of Derrida’s linguistic differance and Spivak’s discourse on hierarchies. Oh, the cleverness of me! Is this the evidence of me becoming?
I set out into poststructuralism a year ago, while in my Qualitative II class, and since then, I have clearly grown. I walk around this pile of manure, look at it one last time, wondering what my definitions of “mentor” or “mentoring” might sound like if I give it more thought; but as soon as an answer threatens to form, I run away with my nose pinched and enlightened: “an inquiry into mentoring in PostQual should not be about “What is mentoring;” otherwise, what am I doing in PostQual?!”
I remember the playful exchange we had during an earlier class–“How is […]? Where is […]?” The intentional disruption and absurdity of these questions made me laugh, and so I play along: if it is not “what is mentoring?” then it must be “where is mentoring?” or “how is mentoring?” because “why is mentoring” in the context of the classroom and instruction reeks of politics and of more manure. In fact, I would not even know what theorist to use to dig myself out of this one. Manning, perhaps?
I should press on just to see if I can turn the topic blahs into an opportunity for a methodological challenge.
A student of Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation, I dutifully take the inventory of my newest shiny set of PostQualitative tools: thinking with theory, writing in minor, tuning into minor shifts, thinking with concepts… Thinking with a concept is my natural mode of existence. I recently became aware that I think in images and that these images create a movie as thoughts die off, develop, interact with memories, recalls, conversations with others, and so forth. Sometimes, the movie is blurry, in the background of my conversations; other times, the movie becomes vivid and sharp, positioned front and center. Concepts are visuals. I visualize concepts. It turns out, I cannot think WITHOUT concepts.
A year ago, in Qual 2, I read Jackson & Mazzei’s “Thinking with Theory” and in the first week, I experimented with the idea of “plugging in” thoughts into concepts. I dusted off my husband’s beautiful set of Prismacolor pencils and sketched to make sense of the process. I loved it. The activity opened my eyes to the world of “plugs” and reminded me of mushroom-picking. First, you do not see anything, you only know where to look for them: different mushrooms like different trees. Then suddenly, you see one, hidden under a leaf; then another, and another, then more, and more. You do not choose your path–the mushrooms lead you–and you can certainly get lost in the woods. The activity is exhilarating and somewhat torturous–it does not end once your basket is full, as one should expect–the mushrooms are still all around you, one is more gorgeous than the other. They taunt you and tempt you to make space in your basket by dumping the unimpressive specimens you settled for in the beginning, back when you did not know whether you will find any mushrooms at all. Conceptual plugs are my mushrooms, and it is a fitting analogy because I suddenly realize that mycelia are a perfect example of a rhizome. Deleuze and Guatarri’s rhizome.
Ideas. Concepts… they buzz, and chatter, and crowd my head. Where was I? Ah yes. I was searching for an acceptable conceptual plug for my “mentoring in PostQual” topic. Since I am still not “feeling it,” I have to force connections with the PostQual scholarship rhizome that grew for me this semester from my thinking and readings. I am a will-be-methodologist, damn it!
Because I am not yet feeling it, the plug does not feel organic, like a mushroom or mole tunnels. I need a more mechanic assemblage with solid, well-defined, and hopefully, breakable edges, like those found in quantitative methodology. I am thinking of measurement. Let’s see if the model fits: I need to identify my latent variable, the construct, then connect it to the carefully boxed in observed variables. Yes, I am aware that “construct” and “concept” are not the same things, and no, I am not going to apologize for using these terms interchangeably because in PpostQual, I claim my right to experiment, play, stretch, and abstract whatever I wish. So all I need to do is identify my observed variables, complete the model, and test the “plug.”
I am amused to see the quantitative idea of modeling grow soft and lose its hard shape in my PostQualitative play; it reminds me of Dali’s infamous melting clocks. Measurement is still valid, but hardly recognizable. It is still measurement, but in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms: “Stratometers, deleometers, BwO units of density, BwO units of convergence” (Deluze and Guattari, 1987, p. 4).
Here, I can illustrate. See figure 1, or better yet, figure 2.
I wonder if this is what truly mixed method could be–quantitative and qualitative methodologies mixed like a cocktail, not like a bar trail mix. I should stash the idea into my PostQual methodological toolbox, or rather my new anti-Methodological un(-tool)box.
It is time to plant a stick in the mud and think about mentoring. Jenni suggested the “stick in the mud” method to me today after I confessed that I am becoming way too fast to produce anything for a publication. Alas, all I have is fragments–reflections, notes, comments, mental images and video clips–the artifacts that fall into my wagon as I keep accelerating through and toward the unknown plateaus.
So what of the melting model of mentoring in PostQual? At this moment, I see it is a reflective model, the one where the latent variable(s) is/are said to cause the observed variables.
If the latent construct is “mentoring,” then my immediately obvious observed variables caused by mentoring are 1) growth in academic confidence; 2) intellectual growth; 3) academic acculturation. The more I reflect on each, the more I consider how much they are entwined, and so I must indicate that they correlate. I also became interested in mycology, rekindled my love of gardening and thing-making, and developed a kinder opinion of pigeons. Most important, perhaps, I found the experience of playing in PostQual therapeutic as for the first time in my life, I finally felt validated in my life-long propensity to live slowly. I like to walk fast, but I always think and I work–in every iteration of this word–slowly. Where in my model does this batch of observations fit?
The model is starting to look entangled: Jenni infected me with Manning’s “Minor Gesture” months before this semester, so I came to class armed with the vocabulary and a small working arsenal of PostQual concepts. I was also familiar with Thinking With Theory and therefore, felt confident from day one. On the other hand, Jenni challenged me–knowingly or unknowingly–to read beyond our syllabus and humored my consistently delighted reviews of these detours. I used these readings as my intellectual fuel or better yet, food,–and so I grew. As I grew intellectually, I also grew in confidence.
My reading detours virtually introduced me to the PostQual pantheon, the abstracted, mythical bodies whose names keep appearing and reappearing in journal articles, books, and our class discussion. Clearly, they have names, but also (probably, though not necessarily) faces and voices. They probably eat, drink, and sleep, laugh and shout when they get angry. They probably shop. I know that some of them go for walks and talk to animals. They are the assumed material bodies filling the void in the absence of their physical bodies. I imagine these scholars because their written words broadcast connections. These connections send me zig-zagging until I start to feel more familiar with some, but not the others. The growing familiarity helped make PostQualitative ideas less abstract, and when Jenni brought in our guest speakers whom I already knew and admired through the readings, I felt the kinship. The feeling of kinship led me to believe I have finally found my tribe, especially once I realized how familiar I have become with its language and its tradition to avoid traditions. I have been acculturated. Further, the effects of these big three variables that I now recognize to be the result of Jenni’s mentorship (whatever mentorship means–I still refuse to step there) created the entry point into the thinking of the material–the pigeons, the mushrooms, my garden, the numerous versions of cats, clocks, cameras and phones, pizza, snacks, beer, and bagels, things I made or consider making. I am plugged into a multiplicity that no longer fits on the page that holds my model, the multiplicity that exists above the surface only as shadows and fog in quantitative and conventional qualitative epistemological frameworks. It is ever changing; it grows as I grow. It is replete with holes, entry points, and cuts. I can enter it any time and anywhere I please, and I definitely please.
As I step further and further away from my pretentiously orderly, yet pregnant model, I think of mentorship in PostQual in terms of affects, or better yet as a chain of affects (Deluze and Guattari, 1987, p. 30). I also think of how grateful I am, just as Susan
.
remember
Saldana’s litmus test. Color
Why thank you notes? When I came to the States, I was not familiar with the concept of a thank you note. It was not a part of my culture. In Russia, we expressed our gratitude verbally, and I was amused why the Americans felt they had to express the gratitude in writing, and in prefabricated cards as well. I thought it was a strange custom, and I attributed it to economical/ marketing climate. I had a traumatic experience related to that, and it was a part of my culture shock. If epistemologies are vehicles/by-products/results of enculturation, then it is appropriate that I use thank you notes as artifacts of my enculturation.
“Dear Jenni, thank you for everything you have already done for me as a mentor, and what you are still going to do for me and with me. A more pressing thank you, however, is for providing this enabling constraint–thinking about mentoring in qual for my final project (and asking to make it fit on two pages. Huh!)