‘The past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold’: a posthumanist performative approach to qualitative longitudinal research

Abstract

In this article I argue that in their current genealogical and philosophical configuration, qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) practices – and a wider regime of knowledge, ethical, moral, legal, technological, political and economic practices with which they are entangled – embed and enact representational assumptions in which the realities being investigated – time, change and continuity; the past, present and future – are taken as ontologically given and independent of these QLR (and wider) practices. My approach is to conceptualize QLR practices along nonrepresentational lines, through a philosophical framework that is able to materialize the constitutive effects of QLR (and wider) practices on the objects of study and knowledges produced. For this, I turn to Karen Barad’s posthumanist performative metaphysics – ‘agential realism’ – a framework that embodies and enacts a non-classical ontology in which entities are seen as constituted through material-discursive practices. On this account, QLR (and wider) practices are understood as an ineliminable and constitutive part of the realities they help bring into being.

Keywords:

• ontology
• representationalism
• Barad
• posthumanism
• performativity
• agential realism
• diffraction
• qualitative longitudinal research practices
• revisiting practices

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Julie McLeod, Rachel Thomson, and two anonymous referees for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Barad (2010, p. 260).

1. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK’s leading research and training agency addressing economic and social concerns.

2. For the current ESRC Research Data Policy see: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/Research_Data_Policy_2010_tcm8-4595.pdf.

3. Barad’s interpretation of quantum physics, and of Bohr’s work, is but one of many readings. As Barad (2014, p. 186) notes: ‘My account of Bohr’s philosophy-physics … is not faithful to Bohr (as if it could be), but rather is always already diffracted through my agential realist understanding of Bohr’s insights’.