Labors of Reading in Post Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

This paper considers the role reading plays in post qualitative inquiry, arguing that because post qualitative inquiry is a derivative of poststructuralism, the philosophies of reading that are foundational to poststructuralism are then axiomatic to post qualitative inquiry. This is evidenced by Elizabeth St. Pierre’s relentless reminders to become students of poststructuralism before using post qualitative inquiry in one’s scholarship. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s philosophy of reading, this paper deconstructs post qualitative inquiry’s deep relationship to reading in order to critique the way this genre at times risks falling for glamour of high theory and foundational misconceptions about poststructuralism’s interrogation of subjectivity.

Troubling the Troublemakers: Three Challenges to Post-Qualitative Inquiry

“…According to Latour, meta-reflexivity also has a tendency to become quite caught up in itself: "The reflexivists spend an enormous amount of energy on the side of the knowing, and almost none on the side of the known" (p. 173). As already mentioned, this critique also applies to PQI, whose messy texts and experimental writing often end up instantiating a paradoxical "obsession with the self" (Kuecker, 2020). The hyper-reflexive nature of PQI means that one rarely gets a sense of whatever materiality its scholars seek to analyze.…”

Conventional and Postqualitative Research: An Invitation to Dialogue

“…Pierre, 2014, 2019a, 2019b). If the reader is not familiarized with the postqualitative turn, such readings are recommended, although one should bear in mind that reading an article or two or a book or two is not sufficient to understand the conditions that enable postqualitative work (Kuecker, 2020; St. Pierre et al, 2016).…”

“…As I wrote, I realized such confessional tale had some aesthetic merit and could meaningfully affect an audience, even readers who have no direct experience with the topic considered. For instance, the story could show rather than tell how approaching PQR takes time and thorough readings of poststructuralist philosophy, which is open to multiple interpretations and hard to read (Kuecker, 2020). Likewise, it could show how sometimes research emerges from situations of astonishment, mystery, and breakdowns in one’s understanding that inevitably arise in life’s situations (Brinkmann, 2014).…”

Nomadic Ethics

“…Rosi Braidotti's nomadic ethics (2008;2013;, and concepts of ghosts, hauntology, and disjointed time posed by Jacques Derrida (1999), Karen Barad (2010), and Shantel Martinez (2016) will help me as I work through these questions of ethics and representation. As I endeavour to become an embodied, embedded, and accountable nomadic subject, I ought to consider the ethics of my engagement with the more-thanhuman assemblage of the text ought to be considered (Guyotte et al, 2019;Kuecker, 2020). To me, Derrida's conception of a hauntology adds depth to Braidotti's nomadic ethics with regard to the assemblage of the text and how I might reanimate, re-embody, and re-embed the ghosts in the text.…”

“…Roland Barthes (2001, p. 143) argued that the "death of the author" is necessary for the rising subjectivity of the reader; however, this act of violence of reader against writer, perpetuating a binary distinction between the self and the other, demands a reconsideration of the ethics of reading. Similarly, there is a burgeoning literature regarding the life of the text as agentic and as an assemblage; framing this discussion in terms of a competing reader and writer ignores the life of the text (Kuecker, 2020). Elizabeth Adams St.…”