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research-article2017
QIXXXX10.1177/1077800417732634Qualitative InquiryLenz Taguchi and St.Pierre
Article
Using Concept as Method in
Educational and Social Science
Inquiry
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi1 and Elizabeth Adams St.Pierre2
Abstract
This article introduces this special issue of Qualitative Inquiry focused on using concepts as methods in educational and social
science inquiry to account for an ontological arrangement in which humans are not seen as the only beginning of inquiry
and in which transcendental and/or radical empiricism is in play. With the articles of this issue, we would like to offer a
partly new or reconceptualized way of doing educational inquiry: a way where concepts—acts of thought—are practices
that reorient thinking, undo the theory/practice binary, and open inquiry to new possibilities.
Keywords
concept, ontology, Deleuze, Guattari, Colebrook
This article, which introduces this special issue on the pos-
sibilities of using concept as method in educational research
and in social science inquiry more broadly, was inspired by
Claire Colebrook, a scholar of literature and philosophy
who joined a group of feminists in education invited to
attend a postconstructionist theory/methodology sympo-
sium in Stockholm in 2013. A recurring concern during the
symposium was how to “do research” using, for example,
postconstructionist, posthumanist, and new feminist mate-
rial/empirical approaches theorized in the humanities
which are enabled by an ethico-onto-epistemological
arrangement that does not begin with the cogito of preexist-
ing, formalized, systematized, instrumental empirical
social science research methodologies commonly used in
educational and social science inquiry (e.g., quantitative,
qualitative, mixed methodologies).
Clearly, there is a disconnect between, for example, phi-
losophy’s transcendental empiricism (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p.
143) and radical empiricism (James, 1912/1996) and the
empiricisms of social constructionism and logical empiricism
used in the research methodologies we teach and learn in edu-
cational research (see, for example, Lenz Taguchi, 2013; St.
Pierre, 2016). One incompatibility is that there is neither a
human person nor a preexisting research methodology at the
beginning of the “new” work coming out of the ontological
turn (“new” though its forebears are, for example, Spinoza,
Leibnitz, and Nietzsche). Another incompatibility is that the
philosophical concepts of Butler, Foucault, Derrida, and
Deleuze and Guattari that Colebrook and others think with
(e.g., subversive repetition, power, deconstruction, body
Qualitative Inquiry
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without organs) are quite different from familiar concepts of
education and the social sciences (e.g., cognition, race, cul-
ture, role, free market) that can overdetermine inquiry as
much as method because philosophical concepts do not iden-
tify, organize, consolidate, and represent experience under the
sign of the concept. Instead, they reorient thought.
Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) wrote that a
concept is “an act of thought” (p. 21). The philosophical con-
cept, then, exists in a different order than concepts in educa-
tion and the social sciences. Rather than reinforce and
perpetuate a long-standing image of thought—for example,
the Cartesian image of thought—philosophical concepts can,
in fact, produce an entirely different image of thought in
which existing concepts, such as the concept of methodology
itself, cannot be thought and in which others we have not yet
imagined can. In this way, philosophy is experimental and
creative and not, as is often thought, mere “contemplation,
reflection, and communication” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1991/1994, p. 48). Philosophy is active, completely practi-
cal—a “practice that thinks” (Manning, 2016, p. 27)—and
differently empirical. With Colebrook’s encouragement, we
wondered whether it would be possible to tilt educational
1
Stockholm University, Sweden
2
University of Georgia, Athens, USA
Corresponding Author:
Elizabeth Adams St.Pierre, Professor, Critical Studies, Department of
Educational Theory and Practice, University of Georgia, 604E Aderhold
Hall, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
Email: stpierre@uga.edu
2 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
inquiry, deeply imbricated for some time with the Cartesian
image of thought that grounds the social sciences, their con-
cepts, and their methodologies, toward philosophy, its con-
cepts, and its conceptual-based practices.
What a concept is and what it can do changes from disci-
pline to discipline. Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) wrote
about the specificity of the philosophical concepts they
invented and argued that those concepts disappear if their
components change and if they are taken from their milieu.
Culler (2000) and Bal (2002), on the contrary, wrote about
concepts that “travel” from one discipline to another. Culler
traced the concept performativity from philosophy to litera-
ture to cultural studies and then back to philosophy. Bal
(2002) described using a concept-based approach in teach-
ing, helping students on all levels understand that concepts
take on different meanings in different disciplines and in dif-
ferent historical periods. Following Deleuze and Guattari
(1980/1987), we might say that such concepts are deterritori-
alized and reterritorialized as they travel among disciplines,
as they become transdisciplinary. In similar fashion, the
authors of the articles in this special issue do not think of
concepts in the same way. Their ideas about how and the
extent to which a concept can “be” (ontologically and episte-
mologically) material, performative, and agentic are different
and that changes their practices in relation to the “real.”
At the symposium in Sweden, Colebrook responded to
our question about how to think educational inquiry differ-
ently by suggesting that we consider using concepts as
methods, though some authors in the special issue leaned
toward using concepts instead of methods, preferring to
forgo methods and methodologies entirely. In either case, in
her article that leads this special issue, Colebrook makes us
aware of the different ways in which Foucault and Deleuze
and Guattari, in particular, enact their philosophical prac-
tices using concepts. In doing so, she is explicit about why
using concept as method might be an especially important
enabling condition for educational research that, after the
ontological turn, must refuse the human exceptionalism,
our Cartesian epistemologies and methodologies demand.
How educational researchers might use concept as method
cannot be determined in advance; in other words, there can
be no textbook titled, Four Research Designs for Using
Concept as Method. No one can predict in advance how/
when/why/where a philosophical concept or the world itself
might interrupt and reorient our thinking. On the contrary,
Deleuze (1968/1994) wrote that “something in the world
forces us to think” (p. 139). In similar fashion, Barad (1999)
wrote that “the world kicks back . . . without assuming some
innocent, symmetrical form of interaction between knower
and known” (p. 2). No systematic sequence of research
courses in using concept as method can prepare us for this
“something,” this “shock to thought” (Massumi, 2002),
because what happens is neither intentional nor the product
of an enforced systematicity. Neither the intentional cogito
nor what Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) called “the
strange persona of Investigator advanced by the empiricists”
(p. 72) is in charge at the beginning of thought and practice.
In fact, there is no beginning of this work that is always
becoming, spreading from the middle. As Derrida (1990)
wrote about deconstruction, “it is what happens” (p. 85).
Using concept as method is “experimentation in contact with
the real” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 12) which is in
continuous variation and therefore unpredictable.
Scholars who take up the idea of working with concept as
method in inquiry, then, will not think the same way about
either concepts or how to use them as methods so they won’t
“do” the same things. Our invitation to write for this special
issue included a short text written by Colebrook about her
thinking on concept as method. But we did not instruct
authors to follow Colebrook or to do anything in particular
except to think about that possibility. Not surprisingly, given
their histories, their training, their desires, and their projects,
authors interpreted that challenge differently, illustrating in
their very different articles what we believe are the spectacu-
lar possibilities of this approach to educational inquiry. As
they were writing, several authors wrote us about both the
freedom and the anxiety of inquiring without “applying” a
preexisting methodology, about going down rabbit holes and
staying there, about having to read and read and read before
they could think and write, and about their many revisions.
We are reminded of Foucault’s (1984/1985) comment about
the work of thinking differently:
As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to
attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from
top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to
the next—as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of
uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can
say is that clearly we are not from the same planet. (p. 7)
This fruitful disorientation seemed characteristic of the
scholars who wrote for this special issue, and we will briefly
sketch their individual articles. Before we do that, however,
we focus on Claire Colebrook’s article that leads the issue.
As we know, education is not easily categorized among
the traditional academic disciplines because the field
attracts scholars from all those disciplines who bring their
disciplinary knowledge to bear on educational problems.
Thus, we find scholars trained in chemistry, sociology, eco-
nomics, law, medicine, linguistics, and so on in education.
Sometimes education is subsumed under the social sciences
and sometimes it isn’t. In her introductory essay for this
issue, Colebrook addresses the discipline of education sepa-
rately as she calls on educational researchers to begin to
think concept as method instead of relying on conventional
social science research methodologies. She did not attempt
to answer the question the title of her article poses, “What is
This Thing Called Education?” Instead, she examines the
Lenz Taguchi and St.Pierre 3
specific transversal connections between the arts of philos-
ophy and education and what might be produced between
them. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1991/1994), the-
orizing of the philosophical concept as well as their descrip-
tion of the production of sense articulations, scientific
knowledge, and artistic expression, she shows how educa-
tion is different from the social sciences.
Colebrook points out that the humanities and especially
the social sciences in their desire to mimic the natural sci-
ences must define an object of study or an object of knowl-
edge in advance of inquiry. But Colebrook argues that
education, or rather pedagogy, is understood as the task of the
concept and thus, in a specific sense, of philosophy itself.
Following Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994), she argues that
“the philosophical potentiality in education and an educa-
tional power in philosophy” is the “humble task of the peda-
gogy of the concept to be transformative and inventive” (in
this issue). She then adds that, for Deleuze and Guattari
(1991/1994), this potentiality and power is related to their
critique of fascism. More importantly, Colebrook (in this
issue) points out that Delueze and Guattari acknowledged the
potentiality of philosophy and education as “the positive task
of creation and invention.” In this way, pedagogy in educa-
tional practices can transform teachers and students, their
ways of knowing and being, and their lived and imagined
realities. Education, writes Colebrook, “is always self-forma-
tion, where our relation to what we objectify, learn and care
about is one aspect of a social formation” (Colebrook, in this
issue). For Colebrook, the constructivist, pragmatic, and ped-
agogical nature and practices of both philosophy and educa-
tion/pedagogy (e.g., thinking, researching, teaching) set them
apart from the humanities and social sciences. She explains
as follows:
I would suggest that there’s something salutary in this tradition
of thinking of education as something essentially distinct from
a human science, and of tying education to philosophy, where
the latter is not a discipline (in the sense of a specific terrain of
know-how or expertise) but a not knowing. (in this issue)
A shared purpose of education and philosophy, writes
Colebrook, is to actively bring forth a potential becoming of
what we not yet are and a future that we do not yet know.
Engaging in such experimental, playful, creative enact-
ments of nonrecognition and not knowing comes with “the
essential risk of stupidity” (Colebrook, in this issue) rather
than with the certainty of tracing the known and proven.
Colebrook cautions that both philosophy’s and education’s
focus on usefulness entails a potential harmfulness. In educa-
tional research, this is evident in its repeated turn to positivist
social science which mimics the predictive capacity of the
natural sciences to order and control knowledge and subjects,
to make both, as Foucault wrote, docile, self-disciplined sub-
jects, to normalize them and make them useful. Critical and
postmodern theories produced strong critiques of logical posi-
tivism/logical empiricism. Colebrook (in this issue) shows
how Heidegger (1967/1988), Foucault (1966/1970), and
Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) differently responded to
the humanization of human subjects that included the “shift
from paideia to humanitas” (Colebrook, in this issue). In our
reading of Colebrook’s article, this shift entails a deconstruc-
tion of education’s taken-for-granted desire of paideia as an
ideal development of children by reconfiguring that very
ideal. Instead of thinking about education as the production of
the perfectly enlightened, harmonious, and thus subjected
individual, the ideal becomes the enactment of inventive and
experimental processes that make possible potentially new
and different kinds of human subjects.
However, this shift from the management of knowledge
and humans to the positive task of creation and invention to
enhance self-formation can be a double-edged sword—
human potentiality to think and orient itself beyond itself—
also makes it possible to think the world without human
beings (see Colebrook, 2014a, 2014b) On one hand, this
potentiality might enhance creations of positive transforma-
tion for multiple agents. On the other hand, Colebrook
warns, it might activate a dismissal of the world in favor of
a radical futurity and practices of microfascism. Therefore,
processes of self-formation must entail a constructivism that
acknowledges the autonomous and individuating existence
of other agents—agents we as humans depend upon for our
own existence. “What something is is its self-formative and
self-transformative relation to the forces it encounters”
(Colebrook, in this issue)
Colebrook concludes that learning and self-formation in
education have the possibility of engaging an inhuman qual-
ity, namely, the differentiating forces and powers inherent in a
philosophy that engage in transformative encounters that open
up problems. As humans, we find ourselves on a plane of
thinking, and we engage science, art, and philosophy to grasp
the inhuman power or tendency of different kinds of prob-
lems, for example, what we call light (science), color (art),
and justice (philosophy). As Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994)
explained, we create scientific functives, artistic expressions,
and philosophical concepts not to represent something in the
actual world (although the majority of educational and social
science research does exactly that) but instead to create inten-
sive orientations for thinking that emerge from prehuman or
inhuman forces and qualities that transform reality.
Colebrook explains that transformative (educational)
research, art, and philosophy, then, begin and end with a
problem from which they emerge, a problem that can be
transformed in the pedagogical enactment of science, art,
and philosophy
It is in this respect we might begin to think of concepts as
methods, precisely because concepts are at once pre-human
(emerging from the problems or plane of thinking in which
4 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
we find ourselves), but that also reconfigure or re-orient the
plane precisely by being prompted by a problem. (Colebrook,
in this issue)
Concepts that emerge from problems derived from the plane
of thinking where we find ourselves are intensive. In both
philosophical thinking and educational (research) practices,
concepts “create orientations for thinking” rather than
answers to questions with a predetermined field of answers
(Colebrook, in this issue). As for education, thinking with
intensive concepts where the “concept operates itself as a
method drawn from the problem at hand” could make possi-
ble an education where learning is “something different with
every event of education,” as opposed to the repetition of the
same produced by using prescribed practices and materials
based on average outcomes (Colebrook, in this issue).
As we wrote at the beginning of this article, the purpose
of this special issue was to explore the possibilities of using
concept as method in educational and social science inquiry.
In short, we asked authors to begin inquiry with a concept
instead of a preexisting methodology with a predetermined
process in which the researcher identifies a problem, con-
ducts a literature review, designs a study using existing
research designs (e.g., in qualitative research—case study,
ethnography, grounded theory), collects data, analyzes date,
and writes it up. The researcher using a concept would not
necessarily use conventional methods of “data collection”
(e.g., interviewing, observation, survey) or methods of
“data analysis” (e.g., grounded theory analysis, thematic
analysis, coding, statistical analysis). Instead, the concept
would orient her thinking and her practices, which might or
might not include conventional practices.
Next, we turn to the other articles in this special issue,
attending to the concepts (their components and their milieu)
authors used and how they reoriented their thought and pro-
duced something different. We wonder whether and how this
kind of conceptual, pedagogical inquiry might give the con-
cept “the forces it needs to return to life” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 28) and, perhaps, to help us exceed
ourselves? What new thought can make the concept appear
with a different radiance, ambiance, vibration, or tone? What
new problem does the concept respond to and what new
plane of thought might it and other concepts help lay out?
Two articles in this special issue, by Serge Hein and Alecia
Jackson, address the problem of thinking itself. Hein explains
that conventional qualitative research exists in the common-
sense, representational dogmatic image of thought that actu-
ally stops what he calls the “genuine thinking” of the plane of
immanence. In the dogmatic image of thought, we assume
we know what it is to think, that thinking begins with a
human subject, and that it is based on recognition. Hein
describes Deleuze’s image of thought, genuine thinking, and
reviews two examples of qualitative research that he believes
work against that dogmatic image of thought.
Jackson returns to an old encounter with the real she wit-
nessed during her dissertation research, a dissonant backflip
performed by a high school cheerleader, that she worked
over the years using the Deleuzian concepts, becoming and
refrain. During those years, she and Lisa Mazzei, who also
wrote for this issue, wrote a book, Thinking with Theory,
that stresses the need for qualitative researchers to use inter-
pretive theories to guide their studies rather than assuming,
for example, that data can speak for itself or that themes
somehow miraculously emerge from the data. In this article,
that returns again to the backflip, she explains how three
neighboring Deleuzian concepts—the outside, the encoun-
ter, and force—helped her create the “outside of method in
a space of emergent, fragmented strategies that mutate
according to the task at hand.” (Jackson, in this issue). She
calls this work thinking without method.
Like Jackson, both Mazzei and St.Pierre—all of whom
read Deleuze and Guattari’s work early in their academic
careers—realized that they had been using concept as
method for some time and tracked that work in earlier arti-
cles for this special issue. Mazzei, troubled by the humanist
understanding of “voice” in her dissertation research, had
already invented the concept “voice without organs” to sig-
nal that voice does not emanate from human subjects but
from an entanglement of various prehuman forces. In this
article, Mazzei rethinks voice again in terms of Deleuze and
Guattari’s concept, collective assemblage of enunciation,
and invents what she calls minor inquiry.
St.Pierre, like Jackson and Mazzei, returns to her disser-
tation research and ontologically dissonant encounters dur-
ing fieldwork which, together with the Deleuzian concept,
haecceity, helped her over many years deconstruct or deter-
ritorialize what she calls “conventional humanist qualitative
inquiry” and think post qualitative inquiry.
Together, these three articles illustrate how the long prepa-
ration involved in using concepts in relation with encounters
with the real can enable new thinking—thinking without
method, minor inquiry, and post qualitative inquiry—that
begin to lay out a plane in which educational and social sci-
ence researchers might think and do inquiry differently.
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi’s article tackles the how of using
concept as method. Based on a growing self-critique of what
is produced under the umbrella term of posthumanism in
educational research, Lenz Taguchi makes the concept of
posthumanism itself her “method.” She puts the concept in
play on, in this case, a feminist plane of thinking that involves
(a) a tracing-and-mapping of the problems and components
from which the concept takes on its dominant meanings and
practices and (b) putting to work an active play of asignify-
ing ruptures of the already traced lines of articulations on the
“map.” In this way, a reconfigured “face” of the concept of
posthumanism takes the shape of the ultrasoundfetusimage.
Lenz Taguchi shows how the new reconfigured components
of the concept give it a new radiance and vibe that might
Lenz Taguchi and St.Pierre 5
inspire some educational researchers to do or think posthu-
manist research differently.
In their articles, Jonathan Eakle, Pauliina Rautio, and
Stewart Riddle activate artistic thinking practices that both
directly and indirectly respond to Colebrook’s question,
what might education be? They also use Colebrook’s notion
of “thinking with intensive concepts” as a way to make pos-
sible an education where, as she wrote, learning is “some-
thing different with every event of education” (Colebrook,
in this issue).
Eakle imagines an “education without organs” that is
“made of pure affective intensities and is always a bit out
of reach.” Engaging in art and artistic practices—he painted
the picture featured in his article—Eakle moves between
art (particularly the Baroque) and philosophy (especially
Deleuze and Guattari) and among the strata that form and
reform sediment and refuse from the plane of immanence.
In this new education, the old static education based on
measurement, examinations, standards, outcomes, and so
on is not thinkable.
Rautio addresses the problem of self-formation as part of
education or of simply learning to be a human being in the
world with nonhumans and the more than human. In her
article, Rautio engages the work of Somerville (Somerville,
Rautio, & Taylor, 2013), who, following Deleuze and
Guattari, suggested that concepts can be thought of as
answers to questions posed by the world. Concepts are, as
Rautio suggests, “answers insomuch as they are certain
ways of thinking about and acting within the world.” Rautio
explores the cohabiting of human beings with nonhuman
pigeons as a possibility for posing new kinds of problems to
the world such as, “What did the world ask of us again, and
could there be other possible answers” than the rational and
logical responses we habitually produce to maintain nor-
malized practices in a normalized image of thought. In
doing this, she artfully employs the concepts refrain and
habituation in three #cases# of human–pigeon lives.
The experimental potentiality of music, writes Stewart
Riddle, is that it has the capacity to deconstruct itself and to
become imperceptible by the “dissolving of one within the
other while also retaining a sense of cadence, rhythm, and
harmony.” So, is it possible, he asks, to engage “a more
musical image of thought” in educational and social science
research? Though he does not focus directly on educational
practices, he activates the concept diagram in a musical,
pedagogical experiment of research creation that opens up
educational inquiry to new “forms of explorations and dif-
ferent configurations, discursive and non-sematic, through
music as diagram” (Stewart Riddle, in this issue). Using
concept as method in this article leads him to propose
“music as schizo-method in education research.”
In her article that concludes this special issue on using
concept as method, Elizabeth de Freitas engages Karen
Barad’s work to help her think about concepts, which she
explains are “working material assemblages rather than
pure forms subject only to recognition, imposed on form-
less and inert matter” (de Freitas, in this issue). In this way,
there is no ontological dualism between matter and mean-
ing because both are material and conceptual. De Freitas
tracks Barad’s thoughts about conceptual matter from her
early work on the experimental to her later work on quan-
tum field metaphysics. De Freitas’ task is to help us think a
different empiricism for education and the social sciences
that is creative and speculative, that recenters the philo-
sophical problem as a source of inquiry, and that posits what
she calls a “polyamorous field of concepts by which the
world performs itself” (de Freitas, in this issue).
In conclusion, we believe that you will agree with us that
the authors of the articles in this special issue on using concept
as method in educational and social science inquiry inspire us
to take the risk of thinking differently; of throwing off the
shackles of preexisting, methodologies that constrain us; and
of not knowing what “to do” next. We believe that these arti-
cles beautifully enact the “groping experimentation” (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 41) required for the “pedagogy of
the concept” in the spectacular energy gathered in sentence
after sentence in paper after paper that piles up and bursts
forth in difference—a difference that can, indeed, reorient
thought after the ontological turn.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
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Author Biographies
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, PhD (2001), is a professor of Education
and Child and Youth Studies and director of research studies in
early childhood education at the Division of Early Childhood
Education, Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm
University, Sweden. She is much involved with the theoretical
development and transgressive methodologies of the posthuman-
ist, new materialist and post qualitative turns. She has published
in international journals such as Feminist Theory, Gender and
Education, Qualitative Inquiry, International Journal of
Qualitative Studies in Education, Educational Philosophy and
Theory, as well as a book in English at Routledge (2010), Going
Beyond the Theory/practice Divide in Early Childhood Education:
Introducing an Intra-Active Pedagogy.
Elizabeth Adams St.Pierre is professor of critical studies in the
educational theory and practice department and affiliated profes-
sor of both the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Program and
the Institute of Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia. Her
work focuses on theories of language and the subject from critical
and poststructural theories in what she has called post qualitative
inquiry—what might come after conventional humanist qualita-
tive research methodology. She is especially interested in the new
empiricisms and new materialisms enabled by the ontological
turn.