Methodology-21: what do we do in the afterward?

Abstract

This paper asks “after what” and situates qualitative research in the present moment in the midst of various “deaths” and “returns.” With a focus on fleshing out post-qualitative research, it first sketches efforts to discipline qualitative research via standards and rubrics as a part of neoliberal govenmentality and then elaborates what post-qualitative might mean via four exemplars. The first is from Sweden, a focus on relational entangled data analysis in the feminist classroom; the next two exemplars are collaborative studies from Australia at the intersection of Western and Aboriginal knowledge systems; the final exemplar is from Egypt, a feminist post-colonial study of the women’s mosque movement. The paper concludes with a call to “imagine forward” out of troubling a narrow scientificity and enacting an “after” of neoliberalism.

Keywords:

• post
• qualitative
• research

Acknowledgements

My title comes from Art: 21 blog in reference to art in the twenty-first century regarding Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 14 March–12 July 2009.

Notes

1. This is adapted from St. Pierre’s proposal to AERA 2012. For a more developed schema, see Lather (2007, ch. 4).

2. Deleuze is referring to sexualities in Grosz (1993).

3. www.Icqi.org.

4. http://ed.stanford.edu/suse/spencerfinalreport.pdf.

5. A particularly useful take on this is global justice movement theorist David Graeber’s “The Twilight of Vanguardism” (2007). Graeber is much involved with the Occupy movement.

6. The archive consists of material from 25 years of working with families of her young project members that connects with a local epistemology toward “embodied obligation” (Povinelli, 2011, p. 142).

7. Much of this comes from Povinelli’s talk, “Geontologies: Indigenous Transmedia and the Anthropocene,” Ohio State University, 12 October 2012. Sponsored by Precarity and Social Contract Working Group.

8. A group of academics, artists and activists met at the 2011 Banff Research in Culture seminar to pursue new modes of “being-acting-feeling together” in the contributions of art toward the production of new terms of belonging and new relationalities that interrupt neoliberalism’s imputed totalization (MacLellan & Talpalaru, 2012). See www.banffcentre.ca/programs/program.aspx?ed=1068. See Lather (2012), for a more developed sense of “post-neoliberal.”