Post-critical writing praxis as a qualitative researcher

Abstract

The intention of this paper is to unsettle our habits of scholarly writing and reading, from within the grids of intelligibility of Western, rationalist materiality, so as to make visible what we/I no longer often see: the academic writing and publishing constraints that discipline our assemblages of knowledge. Taking poststructuralist articulations of the ‘critical’ and ‘ethical’ as heuristics for developing a praxis of critical deconstructive authoring, where agency is coterminous with, not external to, the event of writing, it puts to work Foucault’s perspective that the subject is a form, not a substance, (Foucault, 1984, p. 290) to explore one way of crafting ‘an academic subject yet to come’ (Ball, 2016, p. 2). Beginning with a brief consideration of the normative mechanisms that govern scholarly writing, it then uses some of the conceptual tools of Foucault, Derrida and Spivak to unfold and vindicate spaces in the grids of governance for reforming the subject.

Keywords:

• Western
• rationalist materiality
• writing praxis
• qualitative research
• deconstructive authoring

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Theresa Lillis for her approaches to re-legitimating academic writing practices which inspired the textual practices in this paper and Mary Deane for her collegiate comments on first versions of this paper.