Opening commentary to the special issue “becoming ‘bad researchers’: putting affect theories to work as ethical processes of disruption”

The call for papers for this special issue invited researchers to engage post-qualitative researcher desires for “promiscuous” methodologies (MacLure, 2013), or what has alternatively been thought to be spurious or “bad” research. The editors, Bessie Dernikos, Nancy Lesko, Stephanie McCall and Alyssa Niccolini asked how becoming bad, as a kind of “live method[s]” (Springgay & Truman, 2018, p. 87), may help us to stay “(in)tension” with data as well as the turbulent and, at times, violent space-times we currently traverse. As an editorial team they have curated a set of six articles, including one by themselves, to speak to these curiosities and call for promiscuous methodologies.

The call for papers, directed to educational researchers, was issued at a troubling/troubled time across geopolitical contexts, both in the United Kingdom with the continuing effects of Brexit and right-wing government, and the US with anti-science post-truth politics put forward by Trump during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the concomitant denial and rejection of all forms of vulnerability. This climate helped to escalate the increasing proliferation of overt expressions of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other demonstrations of hate which continue to haunt education and its enduring inequities.

Such turbulences in the thick now of the present, through which the past and the future is always already threaded and enfolded (Barad, 2017), provided the impetus for this special issue. The special issue editors invited papers which considered how affect is being put to work in educational research, in different geopolitical contexts. This call thus flagged the necessity to re-visit and re-turn to affect in relation to politics, research, and justice issues, through the possibility of “becoming bad” by shifting from reporting on the world to ways of being in the world and being open to experimentation (Springgay & Truman, 2018, p. 87). Below we share what each article produced for us and what lingering curiosities we have as we engaged in dialogue with each other.

As editors of the volume, Dernikos, Lesko, McCall and Niccolini frame the issue by thinking about how to become “bad researchers” in times of endemic violence. In their piece entitled “Atmospheres of Violence and Becoming Bad Researchers”, they pay particular attention to the toxic environment in the U.S. that became all pervasive during the process of editing this issue. Transqueer, reproductive and gun violence were the foregrounded issues which impacted the doing of research. In this framing paper, the editors/authors ask the readers to consider how research might be done differently in these circumstances, as bad researchers.

The editors/authors argue that violence needs to be acknowledged as a fundamental part of current life and thus also of research. Lesko et al. view the overturning of Roe vs. Wade as a form of what Lauren Berlant would call “slow death”, by which she means the “biopolitically shaped “endemics” of illness, the management of productive bodies and the violence regularized toward bodies that are deemed ungovernable or unproductive”. The editors/authors reconsider notions of agency and personhood which are usually operative in qualitative research. They recognize how “shocks to the system” about the violence directed at queer/trans youth and at women’s bodies is actually only shocking to some bodies and not others. For example, those living endemically with violence – such as scholars familiar with trans, black, colonial and patriarchal violences – are aware that it is endemic, central to institutional policies and practices, rather than exceptional or transitory.

In the light of these endemic violent conditions, Lesko et al. consider various theoretical resources as steps to “becoming-bad” researchers. Firstly, they are enthusiastic about what Jack Halberstam calls “low theory” by which he means “thinking from places that are maligned, undervalued or disavowed. Low theory is willing to fail or to get lost, to pursue difficult questions, and to offer counterintuitive forms of resistance”. Bad research thus benefits from using undervalued or marginalized approaches and concepts.

Secondly, the editors propose that bad research might fruitfully use Berlant’s notion of intuition as the contact zone between individual experiences and broader societal experiences for experimental and intuitive research practices. This would mean being attuned to and navigating situations suffused with violences. Bad research practices then, would attune to affective forces and material embodiments.

A third generative approach for Lesko et al. for becoming-bad researchers, is Nyongo’s invitation to think against representation through afro-fabulations where the bad researcher recognizes silences and elisions as important and the new forms which violence and death might take.

Practical steps for becoming bad researchers which Lesko et al. see as important are witnessing, becoming, becoming-unhinged, storytelling and speculative approaches to writing up research such as fictocriticism which mimics conventional qualitative research writing but adds wild elements. The notion of “with” and its intimacies rather than “about” at a distance is a vital step for bad researchers - which makes possible “research as encounter”.

Building on her recent writings of witchcraft and divination in post-qualitative methodology, in the article “Resistance, Desistance: Bad Girls of Post-Qualitative Inquiry”, Maggie MacLure proposes the figuration of witch for post-qualitative research in the Anthropocene. For MacLure, this is useful for efficacy and affective relationality in that divination does not seek to understand but transforms from within “by sensing and redirecting the flows and intensities of that which is coming into existence”.

MacLure is concerned with how divination might provide potential for doing post-qualitative research in ways which go beyond language and counter human exceptionalism. She takes this further by thinking-with the figure of the crone, whose uselessness provokes a disruptive force, with which she self-identifies. In African culture, ancestors and elder women are revered as guardians of the secrets of life, and as repositories of wisdom and memory, but have now become maligned and reviled in the geopolitical north. MacLure calls for the wildness of a crone methodology, a crone whose perceived uselessness as a has-been, might be a disruptive force for invention. A crone’s disinterest in conforming to meaningless societal conventions makes possible her ability to desist such conventions. In this way, the figure of the crone might offer different modes of thinking, acting and relating to post-qualitative research.

Bad girls and other mischievous women have been useful liminal figures for poststructural research, in challenging essentialist truths and notions of progress. MacLure, however, is rather skeptical about the resonance of the bad girl researcher for post-qualitative research. Her reservations stem from the problem that bad girl as transformative agent has always been more available to some groups of women than others (white women for example), while others without such privilege risk punishment and dismissal as bad girls. She also worries that in claiming such identities bad girls might not be as transgressive as they think they are. Transgression itself is a concept which needs rethinking, as it presupposes going beyond something which already has a given ontology - which is something that feminist materialism troubles. This is why MacLure prefers the figure of witch and witchcraft practices to the bad girl, as the former pertain more to planetary transforming than transgression. Witchcraft experiments spiritually, materially and incantationally with indeterminacy of the cosmos, bringing forth the new, and offering ways of resisting neoliberal patriarchal privileging of abstract reason. MacLure sees the resonance between witchcraft and speculative philosophies informing post-qualitative inquiry in that they might be seen as minor knowledges, involving divination processes of sensing forces of which one is a part.

Through witchcraft it is possible to craft efficacious (concerned with doing rather than meaning-making) propositions where language is no longer signifying but is a material force used in ritual practices. MacLure follows Stengers in seeing witchcraft as a practice of nurturing and bringing things into being. It is also diagrammatic practice – drawing lines from the known to the unknown by divining affect forces which circulate in events. The witch or sorcerer is also able to finely tune into the preconscious, a useful skill for the post-qualitative researcher. MacLure proposes divination involving the tapping into forces or intensities in events, rather than coding or thematic analysis, using instead a form of immanent critique, which is practiced from within rather than judging from the outside.

“In Mapping Affective Circuits of a Twitter Trolling Attack Against Feminist Arts-Based Pedagogy”, by Bárbara Berger-Correa, Jessica Ringrose, Xumeng Xie, and Idil Cambazoglu, the authors illustrate affective publics of networks and trolling swarms, in response to online social media postings from a Zoom teaching of a module “Gender, Sexuality and Education” during a COVID-19 lockdown. Their examples illustrate what is produced from Twitter posts and the relational, connected ways that academics are trolled and attacked in the current conservative socio-geo-political climate in which a number of academics find themselves. This begs the question, what is bad research? An ontological question focused on the word “bad”. What makes research bad? Who decides that research is bad and in relation to what? Is it connected to the intentions of the researcher, a plan to be bad? And/or do others decide, sometimes not even peer academics but trolls on social media, decide what is bad.

Bad connotes a binary of good vs. bad. And maybe the question isn’t so much about what is bad, but what these Twitter postings produced—a shaming of feminist arts-based pedagogies which has the effect of implying publicly that they (the authors) are bad. We wonder did the authors/teachers set out to be “bad” in these pedagogical moves? What did they hope these pedagogies and social media posts would produce? In other words, were they intending to be “bad researchers” and/or “bad pedagogues” or was this what was produced in the relations and becoming from lively social media? Key, as the authors write, “it is crucial to consider trolling as violent, digital, networked, hate-based harassment and as collective acts of piling up aggressions” - this is so even though many posts were under the guise of banter and humor. These authors provoke us to consider “bad research(ers)” in a globally connected world, through social media, and what these online spaces produce for us as teachers/researchers, our students, and …

Longtime writing partners, Katie Strom and Tammy Mills, consider ways of doing academia differently through a collaborative project which happened during the early COVID-19 pandemic period in their paper titled, “Enacting Affirmative Ethics through Autotheory: Sense-making with Affect During COVID-19”. The focus of the paper is affect, autotheory and affirmative ethics. Strom and Mills are acutely aware of the neoliberal post-truth era in which they find themselves working in the higher education sector. The affirmative ethical approach they propose in the paper is autotheory, which they purport, provides alternative ways of making meaning by entangling art, theory and method, whilst simultaneously accounting for a relational self. Autotheory is a response-able approach to writing in a critical posthuman way. They make use of autotheory in a series of vignettes sharing their sense-making of affect, and how affect enabled them to practice an affirmative ethics. This was done through using their experiences of isolation and trauma in the COVID-19 pandemic to produce knowledge through hopeful encounters with each other and with theory. The second part of the paper documents a collaborative project on affirmative reviewing as an example of critical posthuman praxis which can provide some hope in the late capitalist era.

Strom and Mills also make reference to the research which is expected from academics in the neoliberal university - research which is considered to be “good” by those in authority - i.e., the dominant version of conventional qualitative research. Strom and Mills feel constrained (and more than this, paralyzed) by such views and are anxious that their research might be considered “bad” both by the institution and arts-based researchers operating from a conventional paradigm. Rather than relish in being a “bad” researcher, Strom and Mills are worried about being measured against what is considered to be “good” and found lacking. This is an interesting point for us writing the editorial for this special issue - why is it that some authors seek out and even revel in becoming “bad researchers”, whilst others shy away from it? Could it be that more established researchers are more bold and have less people to answer to - there is less at stake for them in taking on a “bad” ways of doing research, and earlier career researchers are more constrained in this way? Or is it the difference in higher education institutions/sectors or geopolitical contexts? Strom and Mills propose a way of getting around the good/bad binary through processing the pain created by the toxic conditions of late capitalism by producing ways of becoming-otherwise.

In the article, “Perversity, Precarity, and Anxiety: Tracking a “More Precise Typology” of the Affect of Neuroqueer Failure in an In-School Research-Creation Project, by David Ben Shannon, the author prompts us to sit with the complexity of failure, which has resonances with Lesko et al.’s inclusion of Halberstam’s theory which speaks of the importance of embracing failure. Specifically, the ethical and political intersections of failure. Perhaps most provoking is the distinction that within the academy some failures are seen as successful or defensible, Shannon notes this is failure without failing. However, Shannon urges us to think, sit with, and/or attend to failures that don’t sit within the successful failures. Shannon embraces failure as methodology and begs us to consider the question: What does methodological failure do to knowing?

Shannon illustrates failure through two projects: (1) a vocal improvisation by Kwodwo (name of a child) where failure is mobilized through what Shanonn calls “racist-ableist politics of neurotypicality, disproportionality in special education, and refusal” and (2) through transdisciplinary courting of failure through Shannon’s “critical-use” of electrodermal activity. From the illustrative examples and writing, we are left with a key take away: the hopefulness or imagining and being otherwise because of failure. Failure can be generative, productive, and mobilizing that as Shannon says, “might get you to places you otherwise couldn’t”. In a special issue on bad researchers, Shannon’s writing invites researchers to embrace methodological failure as a generative space of be(com)ing otherwise, specifically transdisciplinary meshings that produce unexpectednesses. Drawing on Nyong’o, Shannon writes that failure is “less a question of choosing failure than choosing what to do with the failure that has chosen us”.

Rachel Holmes and Amanda Ravetz in their article, “Spitting Open the Sky: Eruptions of Difference in an Early Years Classroom”, focus on the relational nature of odd-ness and attune themselves to the movement of affect in a UK primary school. These authors also trouble the notion of “bad” researcher specifically for researchers coming from privileged positions. This echoes sentiments noted above by MacLure’s article.

Ravetz took up “position of child” in a nursery school and engaged with sitting with peers (children) on the carpet, finding playmates in the sandbox, playing dress up, and so forth. The children noted her differences and asked questions about her size, age, hair, teeth, and so forth. Some might label this practice of taking up “position of child” as a different sort of research practice. The authors use the term unconventional. They follow the affect produced from this unconventional research practice and ponder phrases such as “good” and/or “bad” conventional standards. The authors also think about another binary “adult” and “child” and how research and teaching often privileges the “adult” position. The authors state that taking up the “position of child” as a research practice produced a space for Ravetz to be “released from her over-coded adult researcher habituations of perception and action…”

In closing, each article in this special issue takes up the editors’ call to consider “bad” research – What is it? Who gets to be a “bad” researcher, especially in relation to affect and what is produced in “bad” research. This collection of articles invites us each to go beyond dualistic thinking and a reappropriation of the word “bad” to as a marker of a new form of the politics of thinking, doing, and becoming otherwise in educational research as ways of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) in the troubling times through which we are living.