Speculative methodological subjects

ABSTRACT

Times of (post) health crisis, global unrest, and political turmoil, a reliance on conventional methods, which potentially lack radical imagination and future orientation, experimentation, and open-endedness, might not be enough. Furthermore, within the discourses of conventional qualitative inquiry, methodological subjects are often seen as overly pre-determined, singular, and static. In this paper, we approach the conceptual and practical challenges of imagining and creating speculative methodological subjects by asking, how might speculative research, including processes of radical imagination and scenario building, shape qualitative scholars’ relationships to the formation of methodological subjects and their politics. By sharing scenario-building examples and experimenting with speculative tasks, we explore methodological possibilities for ‘subjects’ and their entanglement with the lives of qualitative researchers. While collectively thinking about the methodological subject, we encountered relational, non-stable subjects that crossed bodies, sounds, affects and time-spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Speculative approaches
• methodological subject
• radical imagination
• scenario building

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mirka Koro

Mirka Koro (Ph.D., University of Helsinki) is a professor of qualitative research at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Her scholarship operates at the intersection of qualitative inquiry, methodologies, philosophy, experimentalism, and socio-cultural critique. She has published in various qualitative, methodological, and educational journals. She is also the author of Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodology (2016), Knowledge production in material spaces: Disturbing conferences and composing events (2022) and co-editor of Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the Post-Critical and Post-Anthropocentric (2017) and Intra-Public intellectualism: Critical qualitative inquiry in the Academy (2021).

Anani Vasquez

Ananí M. Vasquez, PhD (Arizona State University) is Education Research Officer at the Neurodiversity Education Research Center (NERC). Dr. Vasquez is a former elementary teacher, teacher coach, and teacher educator who combines her experiences in general, bilingual, gifted, and special education(s) to envision an inclusive education. Her research specialization is Neurodiversity and Creativity in Education and Research Methods. Dr. Vasquez draws on creativity theory, disability studies in education, the neurodiversity paradigm, process philosophy, and arts-based inquiry while working with others towards post-oppositional educational transformation. She has presented at several conferences, including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and the Conference on Research in Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT). Her work has been published in Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (RERM), Gender, Work and Organization (GWO), the Journal of Visual Impairments and Blindness (JVIB), and as several book chapters. Dr. Vasquez is co-editor of Writing and the Articulation of Post-Qualitative Research (2023) by Routledge.

Timothy Wells

Timothy C. Wells (PhD, Arizona State University) is a postdoctoral research scholar at the Teachers College at ASU. His work resides in the field of curriculum studies, qualitative methodology, and the learning sciences, exploring how histories, cultures, and philosophies shape the experience of knowledge, embodiment, and disability. His dissertation explored the modernization of student misbehavior and teacher pedagogy in nineteenth-century teacher manuals. He has published in Teachers College Press, Qualitative Inquiry, and Discourse: A Journal of Culture and Education.

Mariia Vitrukh

Mariia Vitrukh (Ph.D. in Education Policy and Evaluation, Arizona State University) has published her work mostly in higher education and policy research, qualitative inquiry, post-humanist research, arts-based, and embodied research. She has a special interest in lived experiences, mapping inconvenient and quickly forgotten stories of forced migration, tracing, and collecting live accounts and archival data.

Jorge Sandoval

Jorge Sandoval, (PhD) received his PhD from Arizona State University. Jorge’s academic and professional work history includes a focus on arts-based qualitative research methods, in which his dissertation work involved exploring the subjectivities of LGBTQ+ youth and their cultural citizenship through art creation. Jorge has also worked as a public-school educator in social sciences, as well as a graphic designer/illustrator in the print industry.