Eight Points for Reflection: Revisiting Scaffolding for Improvisational Humanist Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Grounded in current shifts toward postqualitative conversations, we provide methodological scaffolding for qualitative scholars and students based on our use of improvisational inquiry. We have attempted to balance the fine line between postpositivist expectations for overdetermined structure and improvisational, postqualitative expectations for fluidity by creating a scaffolding sous rature, that is, a scaffolding that simultaneously provides support and possibility with the recognition that such structure is strategic, inadequate yet necessary, but also must continuously be opened up and reimagined (Derrida, 1974). We feel that our eight-point scaffolding for improvisational inquiry provides scholars and students with a strategic way to satisfy traditional expectations of methodological design, yet also push research toward the forefront of the current postqualitative conversations.

Keywords:

• critical analysis
• narratives
• qualitative research

Notes

We problematically include posthumanist, Qual 4.0, possibilities as potentials within the overarching points of our scaffolding with the clear recognition that posthumanist work itself would dismantle such categorized points and work outside of such structure. We have chosen to include such possibilities within this scaffolding to show their potentials, and to help talk across paradigms by showing where “humanism” might best make sense of them and from where we might depart as one shifts into new becomings.