Re-turning feelings that matter using reflexivity and diffraction to think with and through a moment of rupture in activist work

Abstract

Over the past three decades, calls for alternative forms of qualitative research that require of the researcher to think deeply, differently, disruptively and diffractively have been gathering momentum. This article adds to a growing bank of possibilities for this type of work by re-turning feelings that emerged while doing insider activist work related to issues of gender in an isolated rural Australian community. The original five-year study drew on emancipatory, poststructural feminist and critical research paradigms; however, this paper takes a paradigmatic leap to fold in posthumanist and new materialist thinking as it re-turns feelings that mattered and were produced as part of the mangle of doing activist research. The paper foregrounds a different way of knowing by embracing a researcher identity that is an assemblage of shifting feelings, thoughts, physical realities, identities, temporalities, speech acts and practices. This postmodern paradox is a superposition of knowings and unknowings; certainties and uncertainties; power and powerlessness; an entanglement of relations and productions that are troubled and troubling, determined and indeterminate, comfortable and uncomfortable.

Keywords:

• Post-qualitative
• new materialisms
• posthumanism
• reflexivity
• diffraction
• re-turning
• activism
• gender
• affect

Notes

1. A euphemisim for a farmer’s wife.

2. A euphemism for a female teacher.

3. Pseudonym.