Introducing postphenomenological research: a brief and selective sketch of phenomenological research methods

Abstract

In time, phenomenology has become a viable approach to conducting qualitative studies in education. Popular and well-established methods include descriptive and hermeneutic phenomenology. Based on critiques of the essentialism and receptivity of these two methods, however, this article offers a third variation of empirical phenomenology: Postphenomenology. The article introduces postphenomenology, a philosophy of technology that highlights the importance of technological mediation of experience: Technologies transform our perceptions (amplify/reduce) and translate our actions (invite/inhibit). Based on this framework, two approaches to empirical fieldwork are suggested: In-depth exploration of the typical use of a given technology and critical comparison of multiple versions of a technology. It is argued that using postphenomenology as a research method helps researchers explore technological mediation, a vital and oft-neglected aspect of educational practice, but the method simultaneously entails epistemological commitments such as multistability, reflexivity, and posthumanism. The article concludes by discussing future challenges for the postphenomenological method.

Keywords:

• Educational technology
• materiality
• mediation
• phenomenology
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Robert Rosenberger for our constructive discussions of postphenomenology. I also thank three anonymous relievers whose incisive comments have improved earlier drafts of this manuscript. All remaining errors, contradictions, and overgeneralizations are entirely my own.

Notes

1. This methodological hegemony does not include the relatively new phenomenological research method that is known as Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). IPA has become a rather successful method of its own, but research method books tend to discuss IPA in chapters and sections that are separate from the ones devoted to ‘plain’ phenomenology (Howitt, 2013; Smith, 2008; Willig & Stainton-Rogers, 2008).

2. This strictly descriptive logic has always confused me: If we accept the Husserlian premise that everyday experience is guided by a ‘realist’ natural attitude that needs bracketing plus Giorgi’s intimation that such bracketing requires a capability that we cannot expect from ordinary folks, why should we explore a phenomenon by sticking so closely to their descriptions? If material obtained from their descriptions is somehow deficient, wouldn’t our resulting claims be, too?

3. Postphenomenology also owes a great debt to Martin Heidegger, but has a rather ambivalent relationship to the German philosopher. On one hand, postphenomenology explicitly builds on Heidegger’s (2008) famous tool-analysis and his account of a tool’s transparency in use. On the other hand, postphenomenology has self-consciously distanced itself from later Heidegger’s ‘backward-looking’ (Verbeek, 2005) and ‘one-size-fits-all’ (Ihde, 2010) conception of technology.

4. A fine example of this discursive challenge can be found in discursive-gone-phenomenological researcher Willig’s (2007) qualitative study of extreme sports in which Willig notes how her phenomenological methodology left unexplored the fact that her participants described their experiences by drawing on a biomedical discourse (‘adrenaline buzz’) instead of using more existential terms (‘feeling alive’).