Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Volume 31

In this volume, we ask what happens when the researcher in forms of intimate scholarship is decentered – no longer the focus, but merely one part of an entangled material-discursive formation collectively producing the “results” of the inquiry. In the midst of the current ontological turn in qualitative research, we argue that this form of scholarship offers the opportunity to address directly the question of the post-human subject and generate thinking for the field of qualitative research more broadly. In particular, chapters in this volume highlight ways that researchers of teaching and teacher education practices can advance conversations and knowledge in education while exploring theories with an ontological view of the world as fundamentally multiple, dynamic, fluid, and co-constituted by entangled material and discursive forces. Authors “put to work” post-human, nonlinear, and multiplistic theories and concepts to disrupt and decenter the “I” or researcher-subject in self-focused methodologies, and/or to analyze knowledge and practice as co-produced by multiplicities of human/material and incorporeal elements in which the self is but one temporally “individuated” or “subjectivized” component. In the introduction, we provide brief discussions of intimate scholarship and post-human perspectives, followed by an orientation to the content of the this book.

This chapter decenters the methodological unfolding of a qualitative research study on mainstream teachers of English learners, shifting from a sociocultural emphasis on individuality and agency towards affect as a productive post-structural concept. The researcher, participants, and findings are positioned as mutually constituted elements in an enmeshed entanglement of discursive processes, material contexts, animate bodies, and social norms and practices. The work employs concepts introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (1987): the rhizome, assemblage, and affect. The chapter discusses how the activity that constituted the research study was informed and influenced by affect that reverberated beyond the scope of the immediately observable. The multiple positionalities, past history, and values of the researcher and participant contributed to the methodological decision-making during data collection and analysis in conscious and unconscious ways. Affective distributions permeated throughout the study, contributing to the functioning of activity among and between the elements of the study. Ultimately, elements of the study contributed in ways that extended beyond the normative constructions of research, researcher, and participant. Elements affected and were affected, contributing to methodological excess, insights beyond the scope of normative systemic inquiry. This chapter demonstrates the productiveness of rhizomatic concepts to decenter the elements of a research study and affect as a productive construct to understand systematic inquiry. This move intentionally disrupts traditional conceptions of research and researcher objectivity, explicitly attending to the affective interplay among elements of the research assemblage and how this interplay functions as a primary means of scholarly engagement.

This chapter is the actualization of an experimentation of two second language (L2) teacher educators (the authors) with(in) Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ontology and the associated concepts of agencement, desire, rhizomes, becoming, and affect to contribute to the everchanging knowledge base associated with the work and experiences of teacher educators at a time when such contributions are urgently needed. More precisely, this chapter sought to illustrate what could happen when, as teacher educators and researchers, we become “intimate” with the various elements of a research–teaching–learning–writing agencement. To do so, the chapter presents research based on material collected as part of a study on a mentoring experience between the authors. The second author was preparing to teach an online graduate course in L2 education to in-service teachers for the first time, while the first author had more experience with online teaching. Through the rhizoanalysis of three vignettes, the authors engaged with(in) their experiences by considering how various elements of the research–teaching–learning–writing agencement – particularly the most intensively affective ones – impacted and were impacted by other elements. With(in) this process, desire emerged as a praxis and a force capable of generating new knowledge in part by encouraging teachers and teacher educators (1) to experiment with learning, teaching, and conducting research with(in) the productive energy of desire, and (2) to disrupt affective powers as well as the role played by the body in such a process.

In this paper, we take up an autoethnographic review of literature on doctoral programs in order to engage notions of doctoral subjects. While the paper basically proceeds by taking up and entwining these methods, it is neither/both an autoethnography nor/and a literature review. Rather, this work – like many spaces of a doctoral seminar – emerges as an uncontainable, unpredictable monster. We have also placed a kind of “I” at the center of this project, and yet use a posthuman reading of what this “I” might be. We search for a preconfigured “I” in the literature and create an “I/we” of doctoral experiences that never quite exists and yet moves and haunts us. We take up a tentative (post-)monstrous position that recognizes our cruel attachment to the “good” doctoral student, a subject that remains the inevitable (im)possibility of graduate school. Reviewing literature as an ethnographic practice and looking at ethnography as textual helps us smash these methods together. Yet, at any moment, we defy our methods – ignoring findings in the literature and possibly making up autoethnographic stories that never happened to us. Rather than sloppy academic work, this move intends to focus on thinkable and intelligible experiences as those belonging to doctoral students/studies/school instead of focusing on “authentic” experiences of well defined “researchers.” We hope our project provides space to question the very categories and credentials built into doctoral studies by decentering the “doctoral student” subject.

In this chapter, we deliberately attempt to reframe the “self” in self-study of professional practices by focus on how “self” can be conceptualized in ways that do not equate “self” with “I.” Drawing insights from Deleuze and Guattarian’s (1987) rhizomatic philosophy, and particular the concept of assemblage, the objective was to engage with a research assemblage to investigate its function and production. We – i.e., a doctoral candidate, who was researching his practice of teaching pre-service teachers, his two supervisors, and his critical friend – engaged with audio data from our meetings conducted throughout a four-year period. Zooming in on the research assemblage at times when we were provoked to reorganize, adapt, and enhance our systems of thinking (Ovens, Garbett, & Hutchinson, 2016), we highlight the nonlinear and fundamentally relational process of constructing knowledge in self-study of professional practices. We argue that the researcher-self became only one of multiple human and non-human components in a joint construction of knowledge. We suggest that self-study researchers can decenter the researcher-self by embracing a research stance of “coming into composition” (Strom & Martin, 2017) where the researcher engages with a research assemblage to construct joint understanding of teaching and learning. This stance to self-study requires researchers to make themselves into a rhizome.

This chapter explored how authenticity and objectivity in autoethnography research are viewed from a new materialist perspective. The study is framed within Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism, which reconceptualizes how objects are examined, and knowledge created in scientific activities. The findings showed that in terms of authenticity, new materialism suggests a non-representationalist voice, which argues against the need to exactly mirror pre-existing phenomena in some metaphysical world through language in traditional research paradigms. This means the researchers must give up the authority of their narrative voice as a privileged source of knowledge with a valued property of authenticity. The study suggests performative voice as an alternative. The performative narrator is concerned not with identifying who researchers are, and how they are similar or different from the Other, but how their experiences constrain what they know and how they represent participants or themselves in their worlds. Writing autoethnographies now is less a way of telling than a way of knowing in being. An agential-realist account of objectivity posits that “distance is not a prerequisite for objectivity, and even the notion of proximity takes separation too literally” (Barad, 2007, p. 359). So objectivity does not mean to be removed or distanced from what we, as individual subjects of cognition, are observing. Objectivity, instead, is embodied through specific material practices enacted between the subject and the object. This entails that “objectivity is about accountability and responsibility to what is real” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). This understanding of objectivity engenders a reconfiguring of data as diffractive phenomena and reliability as axiological intra-actions in what I now call an auto-ethico-ethnography.

Post-structural autoethnography is untidy. Our ability to write about our own experience is hindered both by the very idea of “the self” as well as by the hope that, even if such a thing exists, we could possibly know it. Rather than abnegate self-writing, however, in this chapter the author uses the construct of story-as-identity in order to create a kind of map of the self – a map that can be used to trouble tidy notions of the autonomous “I”. Specifically operating out of a context of racial identity, the author – a white man – (re)tells several stories from his experience, introducing three questions that are central to the idea he is calling narrative mining: a method to get behind the paradox of post-structural autoethnography (Gannon 2006) and the barriers to autoethnography (Wamsted 2012). In this act, he is accessing something close to an authentic self – not what we say we believe about who we are, but something approaching our actual operating systems. Two stories are (re)told – the story of his first racial memory and the story of his first black friend – and a demonstration of how autoethnographers could trouble tidy notions of the self is provided in the form of an exploration of the three questions. The chapter closes with a look at how narrative mining could be of benefit not only to autoethnographers but also to the education community writ large; operating in alterity is a fundamental skill for the public school teacher, and this method could be a powerful tool for both pre- and in-service teachers.

Since the publication of Schon’s (1984) landmark text The Reflective Practitioner, there has been a surge in research literature demonstrating reflection as an essential “best practice” for teachers. However, it often feels as if reflection is forced into our lives or we happen upon it at inopportune times, creating a contradiction of un/predictability – it is touted as crucial but afforded only particular spaces or purposes, while it sneaks into our lives at inappropriate times. From our perspective, this indicates underlying flawed modernist and humanist logics at work in conceptualizations of teacher and teachers’ work –we cannot plan on bodies in motion being predictable, and just because reflection seems located in the mind, does not mean the human is solely involved in reflection. The purpose of this chapter is to explore reflexivity as un/predictable in order to generate new possibilities and potential that are not bound by modernism’s penchant toward structure and humanism’s myopic self-awareness. Via co/autoethnography, we present individual narratives illustrating our relationships with reflexivity in various spaces of our lives. By using various types of mirrors (e.g., classic mirror, interrogation mirror, window as mirror, water as mirror) as analytical devices, we illustrate reflexivity as embodied processes that emerge un/predictably as we traverse various geotemporal–political locations and engage with other human, non-human and material bodies. By recasting reflexivity as dynamic and fluid, we raise possibilities for spontaneously incorporating reflexivity into teaching–learning and research, thereby untethering critical reflection from modernist and humanist logics that attempt to corral reflection into discrete activities and truncate its potential for transforming praxis.

Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students enrolled in a Masters program at an Australian university are often invisible or less visible in class; however, what is visible is their academic practice, which is often viewed as a deficit. Instead of comprehending how CALD students can become productive members of a community, research regularly examines ways to upgrade their academic literacy practices. This study contends that these students have much to offer, and if these students are to be considered valuable members of the higher education context, the learning community needs to perceive their difference as positive. This implies going beyond the institutional assessment of their academic practice as a deficit and examining spaces of learning as rhizomatic. Drawing on the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, this study highlights how the process of becoming for the students and the teacher teaching them is never static, but is one constituted of deterritorialization and subsequent reterritorialization, resulting in the rhizomatic principle of variegated subjectivity. Data collected over two years illustrated how, for the researcher/teacher, molecular level difference was possible within the molar level academic expectations. Themes of being and becoming and rhizomatic reimaginations demonstrated the desire of the students to achieve as a positive attempt to celebrate their difference and, for the researcher, her academic positionality as a fluid, ongoing process where the molar and the molecular interact to illustrate teaching as a productive venture.

This writing is performed with and about disappointment in moments of failed research and teaching. The bulk of this chapter was written some years ago and describes, reflects on, and analyzes a self-study inquiry about the phenomenon of pedagogical reading. Having returned to and studied this earlier work, I offer a posthuman postscript that rereads the initial inquiry primarily through the work of Deleuze. Rereading intimate scholarship through a post-human lens decenters the self as knower, writer, and teacher, making possible otherwise ways of imagining reading, writing, and studying together. In my case, posthumanism provides tools for rereading two concepts offered for understanding teaching literature, naked and belated pedagogy. While these concepts were somewhat productive in helping me understand what I was experiencing as a researcher and writer, they reproduce and justify traditional, text-centered teacher identities and practices. They are a product of and themselves reproduce what Deleuze and Guattari (2003) called “arborescent” thinking. Ultimately, naked and belated pedagogies reinforce traditional curriculum practices, sidestep students’ lives, and position the teacher as final authority in matters of curriculum control and interpretation. Disappointment includes those affections and emotions that arise through a posthuman rereading of the research scene – including what I, the researcher and teacher, failed to do, say, think, and teach.

Further Education in England today is over-regulated, over-inspected, and has suffered from an increasingly interventionist government agenda. Trainee teachers entering the sector are required to undertake regular reflective work, traditionally in the form of a written journal. However, where trainees use creative methods for reflection, such as stories, films, drawings, photography, and models, greater “reflexivity” and connection of theory to practice become apparent. This led me, as a teacher-educator, to inquire further into our practice, examining the impact that creative reflective expression might have on the teachers themselves, their resilience, and their ability to subvert the oppressions of the current education system. Drawing on a collaborative inquiry between myself as teacher-educator, and student/colleague David Ball, this chapter recounts the story of a year of experimentation through the coming together of a student-teacher artistic assemblage which pushed the boundaries of our teacher training curriculum and formal notions of “research”. We found that we moved in new configurations of “teacher-artist”, “student-curator”, and “audience-class” towards a notion of ourselves of “cosmic artisans” (Delueuze and Guattari, 1987) to share with the world our painful, emergent and embodied experiences of “becoming teacher”.

Care-fully attending to the ontologies embedded within educational research, this chapter provokes readers to consider the epistemic worlding of qualitative research. Drawing on the intersections of feminist poststructuralism, post-humanism, and new material feminisms, educational research can be seen as happening to worlds while also making worlds. As such, educational researchers are invited to care for the ethical entanglement among the research, researcher, researched, and reader. Bringing diverse mo(ve)ments into conversation, a minor sequence for decentering the educational researcher is presented. One example is the destabilization of conventional data triangulation through “Talking Triads.” Thinking with/in a multimodal triad gestures toward the possibility of engaging all scholarship as an intimate endeavor. More specifically, this chapter begins to illuminate how textual re/presentations of becoming-minor inherently raise tensions between nonhuman structures (e.g., time, tradition, concepts, mirrors, literature) and the human experience of being-educational researcher. From mirrors to monsters, the manifestation of “I” becomes-with/in that which is more than human.

In this conversation, renowned critical posthuman scholar Rosi Braidotti offers insights regarding what the posthuman turn means for intimate scholarship and broader questions of subjectivity. She discusses the methodological challenge of post-anthropocentrism for the humanities and stresses the need to move to a process ontology, which entails a non-essentialistic understanding of subjects as in process and connected up to networks of human and non-human elements, yet simultaneously situated and accountable. While acknowledging the possibilities of “auto” forms of research for keeping subjects politically located, she emphasizes the importance of practicing an outward-facing intimate scholarship – one not focused on one’s own pain and ego, but rather, one connected up and out, an affirmative becoming-intimate with the world, with otherness and diversity. To do so, she suggests we must think differently by experimenting with non-linearity, associative thinking, and transdisciplinarity. We must nurture intergenerational connections both for continuity of important knowledge and to create alternatives, all while using theory as a tool for counter-knowledge production.

In this chapter, educational philosopher Michael Peters discusses the emergence of new movements in thought and educational research practice in an “epoch of digital reason” that encompass the posthuman and decentered intimate scholarship. Peters describes changes that have occurred at the juncture of philosophy, culture, and science, probing the notion of a “coming after” of postmodernism in a post-truth era that has seen a rise in reactionary, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant reaction across the Western world. Peters provides insight regarding this collection of changes in thinking, to which the decentering of subjectivity is critical, and even, as he suggests, one of the foundations of modern philosophy after Descartes. This shift in thinking across disciplines entails a turn to systems and ecological thinking; an understanding of consciousness as situated, distributed, and enacted; and a view of the world as constituted by productive difference. Other changes include connecting affect and cultural dimensions to research, which is expanding our view of science and what shapes science. Peters notes that these shifts turn us to new questions about rethinking concepts that are grounded in the liberal, intentional notion of the subject, such as agency and responsibility for one’s actions. As we engage in this rethinking, Peters suggests that we learn from indigenous studies, as indigenous peoples have been putting to work different forms of posthumanism for millennia.

In this chapter, post-qualitative educational researcher Maggie MacLure discusses intimate scholarship and qualitative research within the new materialist turn, which has at its core a fundamental challenge to the humanist notion of the “self.” She suggests that, through new materialisms, we are much more intimately connected with human and non-human entities, which in turn requires us to continually push at the ways conventional research constructs researchers as sovereign subjects. At the same time, we must inquire into what these posthuman intimate connections might entail, reimagine the body outside the Cartesian mind/body dualism, and perhaps rethinking the notion of intimacy itself. She suggests that we might do so by explicitly attending to flesh and materiality in our research; focusing on affective intensities – the “hot spots” that continue to haunt us in our data; and aiming for difference, rather than sameness in our analyses, “dwelling with the data,” rather than trying to rise above it. Further, she contends that, rather than thinking of the data as something one dominates, we consider each instance with the data as alive, as an encounter.

In this chapter, posthuman feminist researchers Jessica Ringrose and Shiva Zarabadi discuss schizoanalysis and intimate scholarship as ways to moveaway from the rationalist, Eurocentric, masculinist “I” in order to enable new and multiple forms of subjectivity that do not rely on otherization from an ideal norm of the humanist man. Instead, following Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of difference and becoming, the subject is fractured and becomes different in each encounter with time, space, others, feelings, memories, and self. Rather than clinging to the notion of a unified identity, Jessica and Shiva suggest adopting a “becoming-minoritarian” movement and attempting to exceed the trap of identity. The authors further discuss post-qualitative research methods that help to decenter this “I/eye”, including those involving schizoanalysis, affective intensities, art-based inquiry, and walking methodologies. Moreover, Jessica and Shiva argue that these can, and indeed, must, be taken up alongside multiple more conventional methods and made accessible to a variety of audiences so to have the widest impact. In experimenting with posthuman and post-qualitative theories, researchers must ensure that they are putting these theories to work in ways that can combat the massive social justice issues we currently face. In times of precarity, they contend, we must think differently while also using every theoretical and methodological tool at our disposal to make a difference in the world.