Atmospheres of violence and becoming bad researchers

On the day that Roe v. Wade¹ was overturned, Nancy texted Stephanie, “feels like slow death.” The phrase slow death refers to the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence (Berlant, 2011, p. 93). With slow death, Lauren Berlant emphasizes the biopolitically shaped “endemics” of illness, the management of productive bodies, and the violence regularized toward bodies that are deemed ungovernable or unproductive. Slow death describes the regularity of and tolerance for violence in schools that debilitates queer/trans youth, youth of color, and those with disabilities (Morris, 2016; Pascoe, 2011; Wozolek, 2020). Slow death involves the hyper-surveillance of bodies–manners of walking, pitch of speech, and normativity of clothing (Butler & Yancy, 2019; Keenan, 2017)– and the administrative violence of everyday institutional practices (Spade, 2015).

Slow death is the space and time “where life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable” (Berlant, 2007, p. 754). In addition to the shock of recent gender and sexuality politics, we see a carving out of schools as sustaining sites for teachers and students to build lives. Teachers are worn out and leaving classrooms at the highest rate since World War II (Kraft & Lyon, 2022). The 2022 Condition of Education report showed that students are also leaving and erasing the gains made in US public school enrollment over several decades (NCES, 2022). Enrollment in graduate schools of education and in undergraduate education programs are shrinking and education graduate schools “sounded the alarm” (Will, 2022) of diminishing interest in education courses soon after most public schools reopened from pandemic-forced closures.

The ordinary yet crushing affects of teachers’ daily work were brightly illuminated and scrutinized in Zoom rooms all over the world during the Covid pandemic, in ways that families and other caring adults were not usually privy to. Administrative violence, such as sudden demands for students to attend virtual classes with computer cameras on, reverberated globally. Teaching and learning for all ages and in all kinds of schools was a worldwide spectacle of awe and disappointment. This mediated presence in school lessons triggered a collective “ah-ha” moment for many outside of classrooms and schools. Online schooling during the crisis of the pandemic was a “domain of revelation where an upsetting scene of living that has been muffled in ordinary consciousness is revealed to be interwoven with ordinary life after all, like ants revealed scurrying under a thoughtlessly lifted rock” (Berlant, 2007, p. 761). Public recognition of how difficult the work of teaching is had its moment during the pandemic.

The Institute of Education Sciences (2021) initiated a new study called The School Pulse Panel to collect data on the impact of the COVID pandemic on education. The September 2021 data show that the most often used support for addressing students’ social, emotional, and mental well-being was “encouraging existing staff to address student well-being” (86%) and one of the least used supports was “creating community events and partnerships” (20%). One observation from these statistics is that teachers were expected to support their students’ escalating emotional and academic conditions without new resources or input from their local communities.

Our optimism for imagining other approaches to schooling has likewise frayed. In the every day of school life, mitigating violence has been a long-time ordinary practice for racialized and poor youth and for those with recognized disabilities. Differences have always provoked, as well as been produced by, uneven experiences in schooling. Overly deterministic notions of “school failure” have needed unfastening in light of children and youth’s different ways of life building; in the regularity of debilitating processes in schools, what failure looks like is up for grabs. Normative notions of agency are unreliable within the toll of daily violence in school. Surveillance of girls, queer youth, and Black and brown bodies has received significant attention in critical analyses of schooling for decades (for example, Love, 2019; Morris, 2016; Pascoe, 2011; Wozolek, 2020), but the ways in which educators, administrators, journalists, researchers, and policymakers have become accustomed to surveillance and biopolitical violence is worth new attention. Connivance and complicity–which might look like researchers getting on with it, turning away, getting used to it in order to survive it–demand new analysis.

Jasbir Puar’s theorization of debility as ordinary processes of “injury and bodily exclusion that are endemic rather than epidemic or exceptional” (2017, p. xv) helps flesh out slow death. Puar connects the broadening of the rights of persons with disabilities with the simultaneous expansion of processes of debilitation. She writes that the “biopolitical management of disability entails that the visibility and social acceptance of disability rely on and engender the obfuscation and in fact deeper proliferation of debility” (p. xv). The key concept here is debilitation, that is, to make someone weak or infirm, to hinder or delay (New Oxford American Dictionary). Puar explains that “disability rights…recognize some disabilities at the expense of other disabilities that do not fit the respectability and empowerment models of disability progress” (p. xvii). While capacity-building (think empowered girls and STEM students of color) and supporting disability (think Special Olympics, Invictus Games, and Temple Grandin) both tend to highlight individual actions and achievements, debilitation “massifies” people. Debility creates a population or group that can be surveilled, assessed, and taught/neglected in relation to those weaknesses, delays, and limitations. Puar adds that debilitation creates a “population available for statistically likely injury” (p. xviii), which might include unhealthy school environments, lagging literacy, math frustrations, punitive discipline, and outdated textbooks. Injuries are also likely to include a sense that one is neither smart nor worthy of dignity and respect (Sennett & Cobb, 1972/1993). Reading across Puar and Berlant, we think that the endemic violence of schooling participates in the debilitation of large numbers of children and youth; schooling becomes a slow death, a constricted horizon, state betrayal (Fine, 2018), a maiming of mind and spirit, which erodes life-making and contributes to how youth claim “our school sucks” (Alonso et al., 2009). The emphasis on debilitated populations also shows the simultaneity of violent exclusion and slow death at the same time as progress and empowerment are touted (Stanley, 2021).

Violence as endemic

We assembled the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education special issue (2023) on becoming bad researchers² as US policies aggressively criminalized trans/queer youth and undermined women’s reproductive rights (Goodwin, 2022). The US Supreme Court also restricted states’ control over guns, and firearms are now the primary cause of death for children and adolescents (Goldstick et al., 2022). The cruelty of these decisions infiltrate our daily activities, our imaginations, our teaching, and our research, and this atmosphere, or collective cultural mood (Anderson, 2014), shapes the horizon and what is thinkable and plausible (Flatley, 2008).

In situating violence as central to the educational structures and practices within which our research takes place (cf. Dernikos & Lesko, 2023), we recognize multiple material and symbolic forms of violence. We also emphasize the direct, historical linkages of violence with anti-Black racism (Pasque et al., 2021) and with settler colonialism (Jordan & Dykes, 2022). Before Eric Stanley’s book, Christina Sharpe (2016) described the omnipresence of violence and terror of Black exclusion in the wake of slavery as “always present and endlessly reinvigorating brutality in, and on, our bodies” (p. 15). Sharpe’s language–on-going, insistent, staying, endlessly, endurance–implores us to reimagine violence, and in particular anti-blackness, as everyday, mundane, ordinary–“breathed in like air” (p. 3).

The resurgence of book bans is an example of debilitating students by curtailing the books, ideas, and vocabulary that they can access. An editorial in the NAACP journal, The Crisis, asserts that “book bans represent acts of policy violence that further codify anti-Blackness in the DNA of America” (Moss, 2023). The symbolic violence of book banning and library censorship wrenches knowledge and vistas from children, youth, and teachers, who build lives with and through ideas in these books. School librarians have also “hit their breaking point” (Hinds, 2023) with record levels of anxiety, stress, and depression.

Bringing these threads together–Stanley and Sharpe’s insistence that violence is endemic and atmospheric, Berlant’s emphasis that slow death muddies the experiences of prospering and declining, and Puar’s concentration on the production of debilitation–we reconsider the ideas of agency and personhood, which ordinarily anchor qualitative research in education that aims to promote and support social justice. We emphasize a biopolitical orientation in our consideration of endemic violence and the withdrawal of resources and opportunities for children and youth deemed “at risk,” “willfully defiant,” “challenged readers,” or “too sexy/not innocent.” When “less than” labels stick to many students, we want to consider how such endemic, debilitating assaults prod us to reconsider our starting assumptions in qualitative research. Endemic violence, slow death, and debilitation interrupt the assumed agency and individuated rational actions that researchers often document in narrating violent events, their lead ups, and aftermaths. Berlant (2011) explains,

we need to think about agency and personhood not only in inflated terms but also as an activity exercised within spaces of ordinariness that does not always or even usually follow the literalizing logic of visible effectuality, bourgeois dramatics, and lifelong accumulation or self- fashioning. (p. 99)

In other words, we consider how within the context of “ordinary violence” conventional ideas of agency, resistance, strength, or courage may fall short in describing intersectional, embodied experiences and responses. Saying that something “feels like slow death,” then, pushes us to sense subjectivities and affects as moving “sideways” (Stockton, 2009), that is, in unexpected directions accompanied by varied affects and narratives. Some scholars shift to looking at minor gestures (Manning, 2016), a register of sensed, temporary actions and feelings that are unlikely to solidify into something certain or recognizable.

In The Inconvenience of Other People, Berlant (2022) explores the “ordinary ways to lose, unlearn, and loosen the objects and structures that otherwise seem intractable” (p. xi). “Inconvenience” describes a feeling state that registers one’s implication in the pressures of coexistence. When we feel inconvenienced (or outraged, disgusted, sentimental, or piqued), the body is paying attention. Berlant believes that the strong attunement to those persons and ideas deemed inconvenient “affirms that what’s in front of you is not all that’s acting on or in you” (p. 3). Inconvenient others demonstrate that no one is sovereign and that ideas of autonomous, independent research participants and sovereign researchers keep us stuck to intractable objects and structures. Berlant elaborates:

At a minimum, inconvenience is the force that makes one shift a little while processing the world…. It might be triggered by anything…. It might be spurred by ordinary racism, misogyny, or class disgust, which can blip into consciousness as organic visceral judgements…The important thing is that we are inescapably in relation with other beings and the world and are continuously adjusting to them…. The biopolitical politics of inconvenience increases the ordinary pressure of getting in each other’s way, magnifying the shaping duration of social friction within the mind’s echo chambers and the structuring dynamics of the world. (pp. 2–3)

The inconvenience of others might register through a punch to the gut, a shock to the nervous system, a touch that reverberates on the skin, a sense of disgust, or a muted offense. The inconveniences of others are frictions, threats, disturbances, or abrasions, and they are registered through momentary surges or silences, through a sound or taste, a touch or an offhand comment. The vivid feelings and strong pulls of such involuntary responses can initiate reconsiderations of our staunch assumptions and definitions of school participants, agency, and happy/satisfying dimensions of schooling. In consciously considering the entanglement of our subjectivity with inconvenient others, we have to face our complicity in schooling structures. Berlant speculates that by allowing violent events to become “inconvenient to us” we open the possibility of noticing when “our positive attachments produce queasy-making roils and intimate violence” (p. 6) and responding otherwise.

Reckoning with research within endemic violence

How do research practices and products take shape within atmospheres of violence? School has never guaranteed safety for all teachers and students, and we may be seeing what it looks like to manage the collective affects of insecurity. But in staying with violence as ordinary and “inconvenient,” we allow violence and debilitation to further affect us. As Eric Stanley (2021) advises, “Thinking atmospherically reminds us that there is no escape, no outside, or place to hide, yet through techniques of struggle collective life might still come to be” (p. 17, emphasis added). Since there is no escape and no outside of this violence, we consider how changes in conventional research practices can recognize its modalities and not reproduce the violence.

In these biopolitical contexts, with what range of affects do we approach these atmospheres of violence as researchers? What are our capacities to research in educational structures awash with violence and slow death? Some researchers will sidestep or tune-out the shocks of violence in order to focus their attention elsewhere. Others may re-adhere to realistic ethnographies and data collection approaches. Here we speculate on how normative researcher practices might be reimagined within atmospheres of violence, slow death, and debilitation. We allow the “inconvenience” of being in the world, within relations of violence and debility, to stick to us and our research in order to experiment with alternative ideas, investments, and processes.

In accepting violence as endemic and as “inconvenient” to scholars of education, we chide ourselves for not recognizing this sooner. How were we encapsulated in relatively innocent views of education/schooling? In her analysis of war photography that “shocks and awes,” Susan Sontag (2003) writes, “Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality [of injury and death] in mind “(p. 8). As researchers, we forget that which is not in front of us or what is too painful to regard for too long.

These shocks to our nervous system also compel us to revisit the centrality of biopower, since the attacks on trans/queer youth and the overturning of Roe v Wade place us firmly on the terrain of biopower. Foucault’s idea of biopower “brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/power an agent of transformation of human life (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983, p. 134). Schuller (2020) describes biopolitics as a style of governance that aims to “maximize the biological quality and productive capacity of a population by dividing people into subcategories that are either valuable to the stability and profitability of the nation-state or not” (pp. 22–23).

Thinking biopolitically, we recognize that groups deemed to be assets receive greater state resources—such as good healthcare and meaningful education. Those groups who are seen as superfluous or as parasitic are marked for disposal or for slow death through exhausting labor and debilitation. Part of the shocking disturbance of slow death and debilitation involved seeing ourselves as among those targeted for disposal and with negligible social value. The shocks of anti-trans policies, Trump’s brand of settler colonialism (Jordan & Dykes, 2022), the revoking of Roe, and the refusal to stem the plague of guns by putting more guns in school (Everytown, 2019) woke us up from liberal dreams of democracy and a social safety net (Brown, 2018; Moten, 2014). These affective shocks thus disrupted remaining beliefs in protection, exceptionalism, and the safety of schools. A National Research Council report titled Deadly Lessons (2002) studied six lethal cases of school violence in the broader patterns of violence in America between 1985 and 1995 and noted, “In more of these new cases, communities that had previously thought of themselves as insulated from lethal youth violence discovered that they, too, were vulnerable” (p. 1). To experience violence as endemic is to be jolted by affective connections with other marginalized groups and jarred out of a dream of safety.

Conducting research in atmospheres of violence also provokes questions about researchers who inhabit their own difficult histories and bodies haunted by violent pasts (and presents) and dangerous methods. Shocking encounters with endemic violence call into question normative relations and conditions of safety for researchers and participants (Wozolek, 2020). These shocks to the nervous system can trigger terror, interrupt healing, and return us to the scene. For many, standing outside of violence has never been possible. For some, standing outside of violence would mean standing outside of one’s trauma or one’s home (Finley, 2021; McCall, 2023), community, country, nation, religion. The trauma of violence lives in and on bodies making biopolitics that much more volatile and proliferating inconveniences (i.e. the affective drives and pressures of co-existence).

Acknowledging the inescapability of violence may allow those qualitative researchers who have lived with their own violent pasts, in their bodies and through schooling, to reconstruct their subjectivities and finally be able to ask the questions that haunt them and excise the knowledge that matters to their potentially untenable relation to normative views of agency (McCall, 2023). Researchers who embody their violent pasts and inhabit trauma could be freed from shame and, thus, their desires for legitimacy. We might more readily explore the knowledge within atmospheres of violence that “good” researchers eschew as dangerous (see Baird, 2018). We can imagine an anti-methodology closer to running with scissors than tidy designs of inquiry. Reckoning with violence as endemic could make life more livable for those who have become exasperated by the aspirational life that requires living well to prove your agency.

Assurances and guarantees of safety are no longer possible if we accept that we are never outside of violence. A lack of assurances in education research could be considered methodological failure. If we hold to ubiquitous violence, then we must be prepared for difficult or inconvenient knowledge to potentially wreck us, derail our protocols, and blow up the boundaries between researcher and participants. Difficult questions arise about what and who are considered safe in education research. Ann Cvetkovich’s (2003) writing about sexual violence through a combination of memory, trauma, and becoming may sound frightening as she explores the promises and dangers of returning to the scene of violence. Yet, Stephanie has found her way to queer healing (Cvetkovich, 2003) that eviscerates the most enduring logics of knowledge and agency (see McCall, 2023). Similarly, in this issue, a group of researchers in London experienced antifeminist-charged harassment and digital violence from Twitter trolls when they tried out new forms of PhEmaterialist practices in sex education research (Berger-Correa, Ringrose, Xie & Cambazoglu, 2022). Images of play dough vulvas from their virtual sex ed course resulted in an onslaught of “networked affects…configured through power relations” (p. 5). Sexual politics clearly play a part in marking “bad” research. Scholarship on methodological practices of “ethnographic safety” in contexts of conflict and violence abounds (e.g. Baird, 2018; Frank-Vitale, 2021), yet we wonder if trying to be outside of violence collapses back into normative assumptions about subjects, the good life, and educational research. Might avoiding the spaces of conflict through “following the locals” (Frank-Vitale, 2021, p. 147) reproduce the endemic violence and our distance from those who are maimed? Being bad researchers means affectively rethinking our practices and relationships without guarantees of success or effectiveness.

The contact zone: endemic violence and bad researchers

As people experiment with ways to proceed through precarity, and with intuiting how to have a less-bad life, conceptions of agency must shift from liberal and neoliberal fantasies of self-management, self-governance, sovereignty, and empowerment to ideas of just keeping one’s head above water. Berlant describes this agentic shift as moving from melodramatic (that is, highlighted, recognizable, and emphatic) genres of success to ordinariness and minor gestures. Despite the continuing expectations for creating productive, recognizable, and reliable lives associated with “a good life” within neoliberalism, scholars portray modest lives and minor gestures that are variously called shaping wayward lives (Hartman, 2019), dog paddling (Berlant, 2011), swimming in circles (Halberstam, 2011), and fabulation (Brown, 2018; Nyong’o, 2018). When violence is everywhere, it can be difficult to distinguish “life-building and attrition” (Berlant, 2011, p. 93). The speculative slant of Hartman’s (2019) portrait of young Black women’s life-making evidences an amalgam of research, intuition, conjuring, and a willful refusal to produce a narrative that reproduces violence. In this section, we consider strategies of low theory, intuition, and afro-fabulation in order to retheorize subjectivities and agency.

A recent headline charging that “kids still aren’t showing up” illuminates the idea that chronic absenteeism has not improved during the most normal year since the pandemic year of 2020 (National Public Radio, 2023). A student featured in the story offers many reasons for not going to school and eventually says, “I don’t feel ok.” Students have lost connections to peers, lost their stamina for the traditional school schedule, lost, lost, lost. Almost 70% of public schools reported an increase in the percentage of students seeking mental health since the pandemic, and only 56% of public schools agree that they have the resources to provide mental health services to all students (Institute of Education Sciences, 2021). Boaler and Bond (2023) offer a systematic literature review about student absenteeism since the pandemic that sustains the view that “kids still aren’t showing up.” Students may be re-crafting their ways of living after an alternative of not going to school was presented during COVID and responding responsibly to grief. Chronic absenteeism might be a new mode of individual agency and self care for youth illustrated in what is normatively termed “school refusal” in education psychology and medical-therapeutic discourses (Stroobant & Jones, 2006).

School refusal most often implies deviant behavior and, thus, individual failure. Youth who refuse school may also be refusing more than school. Typical medical and psychological responses keep the individual child as the target of rehabilitation instead of rehabilitating the institutional relations and conditions of school. For example, students who refuse or withdraw from school could be rejecting the highly normative view of school as a social good (Stroobant & Jones, 2006) or using their imaginations to create the next norm for themselves (Kanzaki & Suzuki, 2023). Students’ obedience legitimates normative schooling relations. Disobedience—school refusal or “ditching”—legitimates the unbearable. Berlant posits that optimism needs to become more complicated and understood as not opposed to depression, tuning-out, or binging. We find optimism in the willfulness of “the school refuser” (Stroobant & Jones, 2006), whose absence from school might be a press for empowerment, a rescue from burnout (Yoneyama, 2000), or a complaint about the ordinariness of administrative violence. Ahmed (2014) captures our optimism, writing, “The effort to acquire a will to disobey is the effort not only to say no but to say it publicly, to say it loudly, or to perform it through one’s own bodily action or inaction” (p. 141).

Berlant (2022) argues that we are operating in experimental, intuitive ways, using our emotional antennae and knowledge of material contexts to plot our next steps in a broken world (p. 12). Using intuition to navigate atmospheres suffused with violence can involve feeling one’s way through situations that offer no good or clear options, no distinctive wins or failures. Berlant explores intuition as the contact zone between the individual experiences of living in the impasse and broader historical contexts. Berlant pushes back on the underlying idea of sovereignty that is normative in considerations of individual or practical political agency. In the impasses that she describes, sovereignty—and its companions of strategic self-making, rational decision-making, and future-orientation—becomes almost a cruel joke. Bad researchers may jettison the ideas associated with sovereign agency and look for happenings that support optimism in minor ways. The self-making that is promoted in schools and chronicled in qualitative research may be accompanied by happenings that are not recognizable as learning, self-construction, or aspirational futures, such as, floating, moving sideways, and tuning out, among others (Berlant, 2011).

Ungovernable bodies of children and youth have much to offer to education research as revised ways of living in unbearable conditions. Halberstam (2011) borrows from Stuart Hall the idea of “low theory” or 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. Halberstam sketches SpongeBob and Dory from Finding Nemo as low theory figures. In more recent work, Halberstam (2020) and Halberstam and Nyong’o (2018) have argued for wildness and for becoming ungovernable as vital components of queer activism. These scholars foreground that when political actions aspire for recognition, they are often incorporated into administrative violence (Stanley, 2021).

From performance studies, Nyong’o (2014) issues an invitation to “unburden representation” or to find tools and techniques to think against representation. He calls his approach afro-fabulation and recognizes that the “promiscuous” definitions of fabulation will make it suspect to many. Nyong’o explores a broad array of narrative genres that play with authenticity/inauthenticity. He seeks a critical poetics in which blank spaces—silences and elisions–are not sutured, recovered, or repaired but allowed to evoke innovative enactments of “angular socialities,” “impossible histories,” and “cryptic futures” (2018, p. 175). Nyongo’s afro-fabulation suggests that bad researchers hold in-check their desires to fill silences and elisions and consider how violence, death, and agency may take new forms.

Acknowledging endemic violence is not inherently nihilist; it is as much an opening as a closing down. Stanley asserts that endemic brutality “opens up our histories and futures of practicing interdependency otherwise” (Stanley, 2021, p. 17). Perhaps we look to the crisis of encounters that we cannot name as “findings”? What we know as “data” may not hold. Are there different promises of inquiry in a methodology of “witnessing” (Allegranti & Wyatt, 2014), “becoming”, “becoming-unhinged” (Henderson, et al. 2021), or autotheory (Strom & Mills, 2022)? Our optimism persists in more speculative fabulations (Haraway, 2016) and in the everyday cyborg that reshapes itself (Lizárraga, 2023).

Different genres of “writing up” qualitative research may also support a reconceptualization of what we know and can know within atmospheres of violence. Speculative approaches to writing up research have been proposed as offering greater nuance and refusing mastery, for example, fictocriticism, which tries to merge likeness and contagion by mimicking a traditional research presentation but adding wild elements (Ehret, 2018; Lesko & McCall, 2023). Multimodal presentations including images, sounds, poetry, and artwork also provide opportunities to play with diffuse and unstable meanings (e.g. Gershon, 2018; Ohito, 2020). Springgay and Truman (2018) have suggested that qualitative researchers consider how to be with unease and to undo the logic of procedure and extraction in a push for more speculative methods (p. 204; see e.g. Menning et al., 2021; Nxumalo, 2021). Attempting to provide the “intimacy of the with” rather than the distance of the about (Muecke, 2019, p. 152) or the sensibility of “things coming into being” is what Berlant and Stewart (2019) propose is vital. The value of these methodologies is in their responsiveness to new terms of agency “that mediate learning a world in need of repair” (Lizárraga, 2023, p. 23).

Becoming bad researchers

Slow death is “a condition of being worn out by the activity of reproducing life, agency can be an activity of maintenance, not making; fantasy, without grandiosity; sentience, without full intentionality; inconsistency, without shattering; embodying, alongside embodiment”

(Berlant, 2007, p. 759).

Acknowledging the inescapability of violence challenges qualitative researchers to reimagine assumptions regarding victimhood, sovereignty, rationality, neutrality, and efficacious actions in the contexts of ordinary violence in institutional settings like schools. As part of their pedagogy, Berlant (Berlant & Evans, 2018) tattooed a question on their arm, “What would it mean to have that thought?” Since people often cannot bear to be changed by what they see and hear, their materialized, embodied question persists in posing, What might it mean to see the world through “those lenses, that framework, that proposition?” (n.p.) What could it mean to hold onto what we hear from devalued sources about violence and walk around with it and test it out? Testing out the ordinariness of violence could help us rehearse, intuit, and fabulate original and vitalizing openings in our research methodologies and writing.

Becoming bad researchers involves interrogating our attachments to the arenas that we study and the links to belief in the good life (Berlant & Rand, 2019). A tremendous barrier to recognizing violence as endemic, therefore, are the challenges it offers to our beliefs about the nation, schooling, the study of English and math, teachers, and educational opportunity, among others. How have our backgrounds as educators, school administrators, or social workers led us to be invested in the goodness of schooling’s possibilities and outcomes? Why do we accept, for example, that youth can forego dignity, decision-making, and joy in order to have opportunities in STEM or to be prepared for college? Our investment in schooling as a necessary element in the good life can steel us against the violent exclusions built into the slogans of “college for all” (McCall, 2020) and “no excuses” schools. As Stanley recruits us to examine our beliefs in democracy and in progress, to see how the rhetorics may be out of joint with the material practices for gender nonnormative youth, becoming a bad researcher involves seeking out how violence adheres to seemingly neutral or beneficial schooling practices. Paying attention to the perspectives of people that the educational system deems as failures, challenges, difficult, or at risk is likely an important piece of attuning to ordinary violence. Interrogating administrative violence by looking at the ways policies devalue particular bodies is also important (Spade, 2015). In their exploration of neuroqueer failure, Shannon (2022) writes that “the perverse pleasures of failure in research should be understood less as desiring failure, but rather subverting the failure already attached to transdisciplinarity and young people at the intersection of racializing and disabling logics in schools, including those who attract or fail to attract the label “special education needs” (p. 12).

We began this paper with the recognition, however belated, that the violence against trans and queer youth and the policing of women’s reproductive bodies are not ruptures or accidents, but ordinary acts of violence that form part of the operative democracy. Such actions are constitutive of modernity and of “colonial humanism” (Stanley, 2021, p. 109). Eric Stanley leans into the incorporative exclusion, the “synchronicity of inclusive exclusion” and the suturing of those dynamics to the democratic dream. His book prompts us to wake from the dream and to perceive how strategies of incorporation and integration fail as long as the larger biopolitical structures remain in place. In the wake of the progress of gay marriage, the expansion of representations of LGBTQ lives and perspectives, and the rise of popular feminism (Banet-Weiser, 2018), surveillance and violence accelerate. Stanley urges us to reconsider our attachments to foundational ideas of democracy, fairness, meritocracy, educational opportunity, and administrative neutrality (Spade, 2015). Holding tightly to these principles keeps us stuck in ways of thinking that reproduce what we believe we are working against.

We can be lulled into interpreting the breakthroughs as corrections to the structures. Our ties to the system—as fair or neutral or slowly improving or necessary for the good life—are reaffirmed. If we are consoled by the corrections, we can turn our attention elsewhere. We may feel relief because the agitation of trans lives being degraded, of women jailed for a miscarriage, and of youth regularly maimed in schools is unbearable. The distress, alarm, worry, upset, or nervous excitement are hard affective states in which to dwell. Wellness gurus tell us that moving on from sorrow and grief is imperative: look for the silver linings. When some incorporation or element of progress arrives, often a settlement of an individualized case, we can lower our guard and some of the distress and upset dissolves. However, scholars of violence warn that violence and exclusion occur simultaneously with moments of inclusion and integration, and with indices of progress and breath-throughs. Bad researchers may place their optimism in refusing to be optimistic, that is, by staying attached to documenting slow death.

In the thinking-feeling about ordinary and extraordinary social events, our attachments to the good life and to education’s role in the good life also ground our research practices. Donna Haraway (2016) persuades us that “staying with the trouble” is a better course. Staying with the trouble operates on multiple conceptual and affective levels: expressing outrage (Brown, 2018), feeling the violence and its dynamics; attuning to the lead-ups to and normalization of violence; considering schooling as maiming; interrupting the supposed-neutrality of a policy; staying with the discomfort; refusing to move on. Haraway writes, “Staying with the trouble means making odd kin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become–with each other or not at all” (2016, p. 4). Staying with the endemic violence can seem nihilistic, but Stanley argues that his assertion of endemic brutality “opens up our histories and futures of practicing interdependency otherwise” (Stanley, 2021, p. 17). If we allow the inconvenience of violence to get close to us (with the myriad affective registers and embodied triggers), the entanglements with violence may allow us to review our scholarly investments and research attachments to particular educational objects and their promises (Berlant, 2011). If we cannot bear to hear and hold stories of violent exclusions, our research is likely to turn away, too.

A necessary element in perceiving and holding onto ordinary violence is embracing a more complex or multifaceted view of violence and harm and what we expect of young and old people and administrative systems before, during, and after violent events. Berlant and Evans (2018) note that “we are fighting for new ways to care about, redress, and refuse the reproduction of the ordinary of violence”. Qualitative researchers can contribute to new ways to care about, respond to, and refuse the acceptability of ordinary violence. Stanley’s (2021) study of trans women of color portrays them as theorists, philosophers, and incendiaries, and his moving, emotional presentation counters the structures and practices that devalue their lives. His research remakes his readers’ relationship with trans women of color. As we have argued, in order to broaden our perceptions, responses, and narratives about ordinary violence, researchers need to question the conventions and structures that support violence. Qualitative researchers can also explore the sideways movements and sticky affects before, during, and after violent incidents. New narratives and genres of sensing, naming, describing, coping, losing, grieving, and uniting are necessary to help demonstrate the ubiquity of and long-term consequences of ordinary violence.

Becoming a bad researcher involves looking for a foothold, trying it out, slipping, trying another one: feeling around for the surface that is obscured by our bodies clinging to outcroppings for safety and life. Eventually we may make it somewhere even if exhausted from the slippage and fear. We wonder if we are more depleted by the qualitative research practices that, for some of us, impinge on living well than we are by being considered “bad”? It might be time for us to resist the mandates of legibility (Stanley, 2021). In their piece on “bad girls of post-qualitative inquiry,” Maggie MacLure (2023) offers desistance, the potential of being “freed from the hope and vanity of human aspiration”, and considers what it might be like “becoming imperceptible, enduring the shattering of the self” (p. 9). Desistance has its reverberations, and the consequences of refusing conventions and staying “bad” will be uneven.

Conclusion

In our recent past, we had strong ideas of what a person, a child, a teen, a teacher was, how their reasoning proceeded, and how particular words and questions allowed us access to their logical, productive, and negotiating selves (see Holmes & Ravetz, 2023). Since actions by trans/queer youth may be life-building or they might contribute to powerlessness, researchers have to recognize that we might not be able to prise apart actions that support or further tear down participants’ lives. As researchers we must face the unknowability of which actions, curricula, policies, and procedures will help and those that will hinder trans/queer youth and their teachers. Similar fuzziness exists around actions that might appear to be deliberate but that might be incoherent or distracted reactions. In these times and atmospheres in which people are being undone, we are less likely to recognize what is good and what is bad, as youth and educators experiment with coping, self-sustenance, tuning-out, or fighting back. We prize the willful children who may be affectively fraught–who “act out”, ditch school, and refuse the cruel attachments to futurity (Dernikos, 2018). They help us to rethink the multiple intersecting violences of neoliberal success and the hostile methods that grown-ups have used to promote it. “There are ways of growing that are not growing up” (Stockton, 2009, p. 11). The assumptions of self-consciousness, stable self-knowledge, and their representations in words, acts, and associations may no longer hold.

When the realist expectations of qualitative research for social justice are violated, critics often charge that research fails to contribute to hope or optimism. As we have suggested, optimism and hope are also likely to look and feel different, more subdued, more minor. But by sticking with violence as endemic, we are not giving up optimism. In Berlant’s view, all attachments are optimistic in that attachments offer promises. In their words: “Optimism is a scene of negotiated sustenance that makes life bearable as it presents itself ambivalently, unevenly, incoherently” (2011, p. 13). Doing qualitative research within atmospheres of violence can similarly be a “negotiated sustenance.” While we may not feel optimistic as we consider a new set of interviews, Berlant claims that being drawn to return to the research scene and to the promises that are attached to inquiry is the operation of optimism as an affective form. While our assumptions regarding violence, sovereignty, and schooling may have shifted, we believe that optimism is sustained in returning to questions, methods, and interpretive frameworks that help us feel out alternative ways of living/moving with the inconvenience of endemic violence, without reproducing its “ordinary viciousness.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On June 22, 2022, the US Supreme Court struck down the 1973 Roe v Wade decision, which guaranteed women the right to abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the justices declared that the constitutional right to abortion that was in existence for almost a half century no longer existed. State legislatures acted swiftly to curtail women’s reproductive options: in 2022 alone, state legislators introduced 563 provisions to restrict access to abortion, and 50 of those restrictions were signed into law the same year (Nash & Ephross, 2022).

2 Entitled “Becoming ‘Bad Researchers’: Putting Affect Theories to Work as Ethical Processes of Disruption” (Dernikos & Lesko, 2023). While all guest editors contributed to the special issue editorial process, Lesko and McCall are first and second author of this prelude.