Neo-positivist intrusions, post-qualitative challenges, and PAR’S generative indeterminacies

Abstract

Although committed to PAR’s overarching aspirations, many advocates also have noted myriad complexities of engaging in PAR, where ambiguities and disarrays – all kinds of inconclusive evidence – can proliferate. Uncertainties especially can erupt if PAR education-focused projects are positioned, oxymoronically, as expected to produce ‘high performing’ PAR researchers whose ‘successful action outcomes’ are determined via audit-culture versions of accountability. I here examine ways that market-logic distortions threaten to foreclose generative potentials of education-focused PAR projects. In so doing, I also point to various post-foundational perspectives that acknowledge the unknowable, the ineffable, as entangled with and in all human and non-human entities and endeavors. I specifically attend to potentials generated by de-centerings of foundational assumptions that permeate particular iterations of conventional qualitative research, including some PAR education-focused projects. I thus further consider current post-foundational perspectives, including those comprising affect theories as well as the ‘new materialisms and empiricisms,’ that posit indeterminacies as always becoming productive aspects of inquiring, teaching, and learning.

Keywords:

• Participatory action research
• post-foundational theories
• audit culture