New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the research-assemblage

Abstract

This paper discusses issues of research design and methods in new materialist social inquiry, an approach that is attracting increasing interest across the social sciences as an alternative to either realist or constructionist ontologies. New materialism de-privileges human agency, focusing instead upon how assemblages of the animate and inanimate together produce the world, with fundamental implications for social inquiry methodology and methods. Key to our exploration is the materialist notion of a 'research-assemblage' comprising researcher, data, methods and contexts. We use this understanding first to explore the micropolitics of the research process, and then -along with a review of 30 recent empirical studies -to establish a framework for materialist social inquiry methodology and methods. We discuss the epistemological consequences of adopting a materialist ontology.

Hidden Present, Visible Absent in the City of Dreams: Assembling the Collective Imagination

“…2. New Materialism (Fox and Alldred 2014). The rediscovery of matter after decades of deconstruction, ontology following epistemology, where the air, street, objects are all part of the assemblage that we float around with, decentred but still pursuing meaning.…”

Implementation of Eclectic Method on Arabic Teaching and Learning

“…The next problem is how to teach easily or effectively. Usually teachers mastering materials feel more easily to teach when they have knowledge about methodology of Arabic teaching (Fox & Alldred, 2015). The third is the protégé.…”

Early childhood education teachers and leaders becoming the leadership(s)

“…(cf. Fox & Allred, 2015). However, in working with the post-structuralist theoreticians (if they would even succumb to being labelled as such), and attempting to think with their concepts, one is always walking on a minefield of sorts, as St. Pierre (2016) cautions of not using Deleuze's and Deleuze and Guattari's concepts too casually in an empirical sense.…”

“…Tsoukas & Chia, 2002;Linstead & Thanem, 2007) and to the social research done within the posthumanist and post-structural theoretizing (e.g. Fox & Allred, 2015). Second, approximately a year ago I engaged in a discussion with my colleague, where we discussed time and temporality beyond education and our research interests, and in that discussion I recalled a paper in linguistics by Rafael E. Núñez and Eve Sweetser (2006) in which the linearity of Western understanding of time was challenged or questioned.…”