Materialist mappings of knowing in being: researchers constituted in the production of knowledge

Abstract

In keeping with the editor's call for this special issue, this paper demonstrates how reading data with and through a new materialist lens opens up different ways of seeing and thinking. Drawing on material feminist theory, the author presents an illustration of how such practices produce a different encounter with data, research settings, and participants as she is made and unmade in intra-actions with matter, both material and discursive.

Keywords:

• new materialisms
• qualitative research
• data analysis

Notes

1. This work comes from my and Alecia Jackson's recent book, Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives (Jackson and Mazzei 2012). Our purpose in the book is to challenge qualitative researchers to use theory to think with their data (or use data to think with theory) in order to accomplish a reading of data that is both within and against humanistic practices of analysis and interpretation.

2. See Mazzei (2004, 2010) and Jackson and Mazzei (2012) for illustrative examples.

3. I refer here to John T. Malloy's, Dress for Success, first published in 1975 and updated to also include a New Women's Dress for Success, described by some in the 1980s as required reading for those in the business professions.

4. For a lovely discussion of this, see, Lenz Taguchi (2012).