This article describes the object-interview as a Deleuzian space in which subjects and objects, living and nonliving, entangle together. I developed the object-interview to understand the connections that 11 Midwestern family history genealogists made between objects (e.g., documents, photographs, and other artifacts) and their ancestors. The objectinterview suggests an alternative way to think and do qualitative interviews informed by poststructural theories. The method draws on French philosopher Deleuze's concepts of the fold, events, and a life, as well as conventional qualitative interview literature. Deleuze's concepts offer a way to rethink objects and subjects as fibrous, connective, and folding entities in qualitative interviews. Such a rethinking offers an alternative to subject-centered conventional qualitative interviews in which subjects are teased apart from objects and subjects primarily produce knowledge. The object-interview, then, is a Deleuzian space in which the supposed distinctions between subjects and objects, as well as other binary divisions, become indistinct, or entangled, as both subjects and objects produce knowledge. That space enabled me to create the concept ensemble of life-a constantly shifting group of objects associated with a person's life. In this article, I describe the theoretical entanglement of the object-interview, the object-interview itself, the data it produced in my dissertation study, and the significance of the method to the field of qualitative research methods.
In this article, I explain antimethodology—a creative and generative methodology—and its resulting research conventions that were put to work in a study about an assemblage of humans, nonhumans, living, and nonliving in family history genealogy. Antimethodology is a middle space that is created between reterritorializing forces (e.g., conventional qualitative inquiry) and deterritorializing forces (e.g., poststructural and posthuman theories that throw positivist and interpretivist theories that ground conventional qualitative inquiry into radical doubt). Antimethodology, then, cannot be replicated or transferred to other studies. Rather, each iteration of antimethodology materializes from the forces at work in a research context. I offer research conventions, or contingent meetings between these forces, as a way to rethink methods, data, and other practices within qualitative inquiry/research.
In this article I describe data from my study about 11 family history genealogists and the objects they use to construct their ancestors as a Deleuzoguattarian assemblage, an entity that somehow functions together. In my study, I assembled object-interview data (Nordstrom 2013b), St. Pierre's (1997) dream and response data, weather data, spectral data (Nordstrom, 2013a), books written by participants, books recommended to me by participants, popular media about genealogy, my genealogy work, theories, and perhaps data—deconstructive data that problematize phenomenological certainty. Instead of thinking these data in discrete categories, the data functioned as lines that continuously moved and shifted together, thereby rendering the categories indistinguishable. The data assemblage is a dynamic onto-epistemological entity in which the constitutive lines open up new ideas of thinking about data in a study and what that data can do and become.
The purpose of this article is to throw into radical doubt the material-discursive practices of recording devices (e.g., tape and digital recorders) used in qualitative interviews. To do this work, I first present a Baradian diffractive reading, a reading across epistemological and ontological differences that matter, of recording devices in qualitative research. I explore how recording devices have become a normalized material-discursive practice in which recording devices are both part of and result from an objectivist epistemology and realist ontology. Then, I share four irruptive moments from my study about family history genealogists' use of objects (e.g., photographs, documents, and artifacts) that called into question such a material-discursive practice. Last, I situate recording devices in Barad's agential realism, an onto-epistemological framework in which recording devices intra-act with humans, nonhumans, culture, and discourse to generate entangled meanings and knowledge in a constantly shifting world(s).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.