863005
research-article2019
QIXXXX10.1177/1077800419863005Qualitative InquirySt. Pierre
Article
Post Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal
of Method, and the Risk of the New
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre1
Abstract
This article is a slight revision of a keynote lecture presented at the 15th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in
Illinois in 2019. It argues that to experiment and create the “new” in post qualitative, post humanist, and other “new” forms
of inquiry invented for the 21st century, social science researchers may well need to refuse conventional humanist social
science research methodologies created for the problems of previous centuries.
Keywords
post qualitative inquiry, poststructuralism, postmodernism, posthumanism, philosophy
I’m especially happy to be here at the University of Illinois
with you today on the occasion of the 15th meeting of the
International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. I emailed
Professor Denzin earlier and asked him how many people
attended the first Congress in 2005, and he reported there
were 550 registered attendees. I imagine this year’s regis-
tration is double that number. I was here then, and I wonder
whether anyone else here today also attended the first
Congress in 2005? Does anyone have perfect attendance—
has anyone attended the Congress every year?
I must say that we qualitative researchers surely needed
a place to gather in 2005. Those of us in education had,
for several years, been battling the scientifically based,
evidence-based police who determined that qualitative
research could not be “scientific” because it was only
descriptive and used narratives (see, for example, Shavelson,
Phillips, Towne, & Feuer, 2003). If you remember, in 2000,
the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act mandated in federal law
that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of
educational research, although an article in the current
issue of the American Educational Research Association
journal, Educational Researcher, reported, almost 20 years
later, that rigorous large-scale educational randomized
controlled trails are often uninformative (Lortie-Forgues &
Inglis, 2019). I wonder if we’re surprised? So we desper-
ately needed to come together and decide how to defend
qualitative inquiry from neopositivism. Norman organized
that first Congress, and we came to Illinois in 2005, to the
campus of this distinguished American public land grant
university and to the Illini Union, this beautiful building
from another era, to help each other think about the future
of qualitative research.
And we’ve continued to come, year after year for 15
years. I, for one, come knowing I’ll find my people here,
Qualitative Inquiry
2021, Vol. 27(1) 3­–9
© The Author(s) 2019
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sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1077800419863005
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journals.sagepub.com/home/qix
knowing that Norman and his colleagues who do the hard
work of organizing the conference and are committed to
inclusion and diversity, will once again make all of us, from
all over the world, welcome, whether we’re mainstream
qualitative researchers doing what Sven Brinkmann (2015)
called “good old-fashioned qualitative inquiry” or whether
our work seems “too way out there,” barely recognizable to
the mainstream. Of course, the Congress welcomes sea-
soned and new researchers. Quite a few of my students have
presented their first conference papers here, have met the
senior scholars they call their academic crushes, and have
returned to University of Georgia (UGA) with plentiful evi-
dence that qualitative research is strong and vibrant, no
matter what they may hear to the contrary. So many thanks
at this 15th Congress to Norman and his colleagues who
host us each year, to those who’ve served as officers of the
Congress, those who’ve served on Congress committees,
those who’ve organized and chaired sessions, and to every-
one else who’s made all these Congresses possible.
Again, I’m very happy to be back in Illinois in May with
my people—with those of you here this week who helped
to invent qualitative inquiry decades ago and those of you
who are new and perhaps can be reminded that it was,
indeed, invented in journal articles, book chapters, hand-
books, textbooks, in university methodology courses, and
in conference papers like those we’ll hear this week.
Perhaps it’s good to remind ourselves that we did, indeed,
1
University of Georgia, Athens, USA
Corresponding Author:
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, Critical Studies, Educational Theory and
Practice, University of Georgia, 604E Aderhold Hall Athens, 110 Carlton
Street, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
Email: stpierre@uga.edu
4 Qualitative Inquiry 27(1)
invent qualitative methodology, we made it up, and we’ve
repeated it again and again so it seems normal, natural, and
real. The onto-epistemological arrangement of what I’ve
called conventional humanist qualitative methodology has
been able to accommodate interpretive, emancipatory or
critical, and even post-positivist inquiry that rely on a par-
ticular description of human being. In this way, qualitative
methodology has been a big tent, supple enough to serve as
a methodology for different kinds of research that begins
with the humanist subject.
But I’ve argued for some time that neither humanist
qualitative nor quantitative nor mixed-methods social sci-
ence research methodologies can accommodate the posts—
postmodernism, poststructuralism, posthumanism, and so
on. Two of the scholars we now call postmodern or post-
structual engaged the human or social sciences very early in
their careers and found them problematic. In 1966, Foucault
(1966/1970) published his best seller, The Order of Things:
An Archeology of the Human Sciences and, that same year,
Derrida (1966/1970) presented his famous lecture on decon-
struction, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences.” So poststructuralists have not been
strangers to the human or social sciences. As Derrida
explained, one must know intimately what one critiques.
Why are the human sciences and their methodologies prob-
lematic in poststructuralism? There’re several reasons, but
I’ll mention two today. The first and most obvious, I think,
is that they are inevitably human-centered. Second, post-
structuralism refuses preexisting method and methodology.
Foucault (1997/2003), for example, wrote,
I do not have a methodology that I apply in the same way to
different domains. On the contrary, I would say that I try to
isolate a single field of objects, a domain of objects, by using
the instruments I can find or that I forge as I am actually doing
my research, but without privileging the problem of
methodology in any way. (pp. 287-288)
So Foucault wrote that he used no preexisting methodology,
which he then applied in his research. Instead, he made it up
as he went.
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1991/1994) philosophical con-
cepts, such as the rhizome, are deliberately anti-method,
and Deleuze (1962/1983) argued that “thought does not
need a method” (p. 110), that method will, in fact, shut
down thought, capture it, and consign it to the strata, to the
normal, to what everyone knows, to the dogmatic image of
thought (Deleuze, 1968/1994) that prohibits experimenta-
tion and creation. Furthermore, as they explained, Deleuze
and Guattari’s (1991/1994; St. Pierre, 2017b) philosophical
concepts are composed of specific components which
change when the concept is taken from its specificity on the
plane on which appears, so those concepts don’t travel. That
is, they cannot be taken from Deleuze’s plane of immanence
which is pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-subjective, and
pre-conceptual and then be sprinkled throughout a conven-
tional humanist qualitative study that’s grounded in an
onto-epistemology and an empiricism that is not Deleuzian.
Deleuze and Guattari also made it clear that their philosoph-
ical concepts cannot be applied to organize, contain, and
describe human experience as do concepts in the applied
social or human sciences, like the concepts role in sociol-
ogy and culture in anthropology. DeleuzoGuattarian con-
cepts are philosophical, not intended for application to lived
human experience but for re-orienting thought.
Derrida (1967/1973), another scholar we’ve call post-
structural, wrote that deconstruction, one of his major phil-
osophical concepts, “is not a method and cannot be
transformed into one” (p. 3). For Derrida, a thinker with a
method has already decided how to proceed and is simply a
functionary of the method, not a thinker.
And Lyotard (1979/1984), who wrote that he found post-
modernism in America, explained that postmodernists work
without preexisting methods or rules to create what does not
yet exist.
Given these examples, it seems pretty clear that those
poststructural scholars refused preexisting methods and
methodologies. But it took me some time to really under-
stand that because of my training as a qualitative method-
ologist. One of the lessons I’ve learned is how very hard it
is to escape our training. We academics come to the univer-
sity for our doctoral studies at a particular time in our lives
and learn the truth about this or that from the professors
who happen to be there at the time. If you study with a prag-
matist, you’ll likely be a pragmatist. But if you come to the
university the year after the pragmatist professor retires,
you might study with a Marxist, and you’ll likely be a
Marxist. If you learn quantitative methodology, you’ll
likely use that methodology in your research and teach it to
your students. We learn what we’re taught, and then we
teach what we know.
People often ask me where post qualitative inquiry came
from, and I tell this origin story. When I was a doctoral stu-
dent in the early 1990s, I studied conventional, humanist
qualitative research methodology on one hand, and, on the
other, I studied postmodernism and poststructuralism. It
didn’t occur to me that the two might not work together, that
they are, in fact, incommensurable. From the beginning of
my doctoral research, my methodology training in qualita-
tive research trumped my theoretical training in poststruc-
turalism, which I confined to the literature review chapter
of my dissertation, and I automatically leaped to methodol-
ogy and implemented the qualitative research process. In
other words, I began with methodology and not poststruc-
turalism. It didn’t occur to me that methodology might not
be thinkable in poststructuralism. It didn’t occur to me there
might be a way to inquire without using a preexisting social
science research methodology. But my choices seemed to
be either qualitative or quantitative methodology. I certainly
St. Pierre 5
didn’t want to do a quantitative study, and mixed methods
had yet to be invented. Why methodology is so powerful is
a political question for another day, although the feminist,
Mary Daly, in 1973, warned us about methodolatry, the
worship of method. In 2016, Erin Manning wrote that
“method is an apparatus of capture” (p. 32), and I agree.
So I did a qualitative study for my dissertation research
that really didn’t require theory. I just followed the process.
I’ve learned one can do a qualitative or quantitative or
mixed-methods study without much theory at all—and I
didn’t actually use poststructuralism until I began to write
my dissertation, taking very seriously Laurel Richardson’s
(2000) belief that writing is thinking, that writing is inquiry.
So it was in the thinking that writing produces that I first
understood that poststructuralism and conventional human-
ist qualitative methodology are incompatible.
As I wrote the methodology chapter of my dissertation in
1995, poststructuralism finally kicked in, and qualitative
methodology failed. As Derrida (1993/1994) explained,
deconstruction is not necessarily intentional—it is what
“happens” (p. 89)—and categories like the research pro-
cess, the interview, the field, data, data collection, and data
analysis simply fell apart. I can’t overestimate Deleuze’s
influence on my thought from the beginning. I’ve said that
I read Deleuze too soon, so early in my academic career that
any preexisting research methodology could not survive his
ontology of immanence and his philosophical concepts like
the fold and haecceity that de-stabilized whatever certainty
methodology promised me.
By the time I finished writing that methodology chapter
of my dissertation, I had deconstructed so many concepts
and categories of qualitative methodology that it was in
ruins for me. Near the end of the chapter, I wrote this sen-
tence, “I believe the persistent critique urged by poststruc-
turalism enables a transition from traditional methodology
to something different and am not too concerned at this
time with naming what might be produced” (St. Pierre,
1995, p. 209).
But by 2003, I had a name for that “something different”
and developed and taught a new doctoral seminar I called
Post Qualitative Research to support students like me who
studied poststructuralism and then could not use the big
three social science research methodologies—even the
supple qualitative methodology. For example, they’d study
Foucault’s archaeologies and come to my office saying,
“Dr. St.Pierre, I just can’t do an interview study.” And I’d
respond, “Of course not,” because Foucault (1971/1972)
made it very clear in his book, The Archaeology of
Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, that he was
not interested in the speaking subject because he worked in
the order of discourse.
In 2010, I presented my first conference paper about post
qualitative inquiry here at the Congress (St. Pierre, 2010). In
2011, I finally used the phrase “post qualitative inquiry” in
print and published a handbook chapter called, “Post
Qualitative Research: The Critique and the Coming After,”
and I’ve continued to invent post qualitative inquiry in my
reading, writing, thinking, and teaching. I’ve written a dozen
or so papers about post qualitative inquiry (Lather & St.
Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2011, 2013a, 2013b, 2014a, 2014b,
2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2016d, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c,
2018a, 2018b, 2019; St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014; St. Pierre,
Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016; St. Pierre & Taguchi, 2017; Wyatt
et al., 2014). I’ve presented many conference papers about it,
and I’m writing a book about it now for Routledge.
It’s important to remember that, following Derrida,
deconstruction does not reject what it deconstructs. Rather,
it overturns and displaces a structure to make room for
something different. So post qualitative inquiry is not a
rejection of qualitative inquiry or any other preexisting
social science research methodology. It’s something differ-
ent altogether and cannot be recognized and understood in
the same grid of intelligibility as those methodologies.
So what, then, is post qualitative inquiry? Although the
label “post qualitative inquiry” will always be inadequate
and cannot contain the thought it gestures toward, it began,
as I just said, as a poststructural deconstruction and dis-
placement of conventional humanist qualitative research
methodology in my dissertation in 1995, and, over many
years, it enabled me think to something different. It’s cer-
tainly not another research methodology. It’s not a method-
ology at all. In fact, it refuses methodology. Notice that I
use the phrase post qualitative inquiry—I don’t use the
word methodology. So I want to be very clear that post qual-
itative inquiry does not begin with or use any preexisting
social science research methodology.
It begins with the onto-epistemological arrangement of
poststructuralism, with poststructural theories and concepts,
which I argue do not allow one to think methodology. A
study that uses qualitative methodology cannot be post
qualitative—the two approaches are incommensurable, as
I’ve explained. So post qualitative inquiry is not another
version of qualitative methodology, and it’s not qualitative
methodology with a twist. Adding a rhizome or an assem-
blage or a few references to Foucault or Derrida to a quali-
tative study cannot make it post qualitative. And a study
that begins as a qualitative study cannot be made post-qual-
itative after the fact. I suspect that if we taught and studied
onto-epistemology with as much fervor as we teach and
study methodology, that incompatibility would not be dif-
ficult to understand.
So post qualitative inquiry is not a methodology. It
doesn’t have preexisting research designs like case study
and ethnography. It doesn’t have a preexisting, formalized,
systematic research process that one can follow, thereby
guaranteeing validity. There are no post qualitative research
practices—except studying poststructuralism. Post quali-
tative inquiry doesn’t have preexisting methods of data
6 Qualitative Inquiry 27(1)
collection like interviewing and observation that begin with
the humanist subject. The concept data collection is itself
problematic because it points to an ontology that assumes
data are separate from human being and so can be “col-
lected.” Importantly, the concept data, as described in con-
ventional research methodologies, is simply not thinkable. I
first wrote about my troubles with data in my dissertation in
1995, and I’ve continued to do so (e.g., St. Pierre, 1997,
2013a).
Post qualitative inquiry doesn’t have pre-existing meth-
ods of data analysis like coding data or thematic analysis in
which themes somehow miraculously emerge from the
data. It refuses representationalist logic that relies on a two-
world ontology, which assumes there is the real out there
and then a representation of the real in a different ontologi-
cal order. The robust critique of representation in poststruc-
turalism is crucial in post qualitative inquiry because so
much effort in preexisting social science research method-
ologies focuses on how to represent the real, authentic lived
experiences of human beings. Representation is not the goal
of post qualitative inquiry. Its goal is, instead, experimenta-
tion and the creation of the new, which is very difficult.
Finally and importantly, post qualitative inquiry is aligned
with the humanities, with philosophy, history, the arts, the
sciences, and literature, and not with the social sciences.
I expect that the question “what is post qualitative
inquiry?” still lingers, however, because I’ve mostly noted
what it is not, but in philosophy, negative definitions are a
good place to begin. It’s where I and my students often
begin, attending to what we can’t think any longer and can’t
do any longer after studying poststructuralism. But the
“what is” question, Plato’s question, is essentialist and not
poststructural. It assumes something already exists, that
something “is,” is stable, and so can be identified and repre-
sented. The “what is” question denies immanence, the not
yet, the what is “to come” of poststructuralism.
Post qualitative inquiry, however, is immanent, as I’ve
explained in a recent paper (St. Pierre, 2019). It never exists,
it never is. It must be invented, created differently each
time, and one study called post qualitative will not look like
another. The goal of post qualitative inquiry is not to sys-
tematically repeat a preexisting research reprocess to pro-
duce a recognizable result but to experiment and create
something new and different that might not be recognizable
in existing structures of intelligibility.
So I can’t answer the question “what is post qualitative
inquiry?” because that’s not a question one would ask in post-
structuralism. Nor can I answer another question my students
often ask, “Well, Dr. St.Pierre, what should I do if I want to
do post qualitative inquiry? How do I begin?” One of my col-
leagues recently chided me, saying, “Bettie, students need to
know what to do!” And I reply, why do we think we should
know what to do before we begin to inquire? Where did that
idea come from? From methodology, perhaps? I expect so.
But the poststructuralists did not tell us what to do; in fact,
they refused that question. For example, Foucault (as cited in
Miller, 1993) wrote,
It’s true that certain people, such as those who work in the
institutional setting of the prison . . . are not likely to find
advice or instructions in my books to tell them “what is to be
done.” But my project is precisely to bring it about that they
“no longer know what to do,” so that the acts, gestures,
discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying
become problematic, difficult, dangerous. (p. 235)
Likewise, Deleuze (1968/1994) wrote that the thoughts and
practices we’ve taken for granted should not be accepted as
natural or normal but that we must treat them “every time as
something which has not always existed, but begins, forced
and under constraint” (p. 136). But not prescribing what to
do in poststructuralism or in post qualitative inquiry doesn’t
mean there’s nothing to do. As Foucault (1981/1991)
explained, “And if I don’t ever say what must be done, it
isn’t because I believe that there’s nothing to be done; on
the contrary, it is because I think that there are a thousand
things to do, to invent, to forge” (p. 174).
I do suggest to my students a couple of things a post
qualitative inquirer might do. First of all, you must study
poststructuralism—that’s required—and I guarantee that
poststructural scholars will send you to many other theorists
who will help you think. Remember that no one can read for
you, and people who read a lot can always tell when others
don’t. If you read hard, you’ll likely find concepts that can
help re-orient your thinking so you can think differently
about whatever you want to think about. I’ve written a
paper (St. Pierre, 2017) about how, over many years,
Deleuze’s philosophical concept, haecceity, has reoriented
my thinking. I advise my students to read hard, write hard,
and think hard because all that reading, writing, and think-
ing gives them expertise and confidence and will very likely
point them toward something “to do.” Usually, a philosoph-
ical concept will get them moving: Bergson’s duration,
Foucault’s discipline, Lyotard’s paralogy. And if what they
do first and second doesn’t work, they can try something
else. If they get stuck, I advise them to read more and to
trust themselves, to remember that Foucault made it up as
he went, and if it worked for him, it might work for us too.
What they cannot do if they want to use post qualitative
inquiry is to drop down into a preexisting research method-
ology because they’re impatient or haven’t read enough or
are just lost. If they do, they’re not doing post qualitative
inquiry, which is fine with me, but they can’t make claims
that they are.
Some researchers think theory gets in the way of inquiry.
The idea that research can be theory-free comes differently,
I believe, from logical positivism and phenomenology, both
of which structure qualitative research. But I want my stu-
dents to be able to mobilize as much theory as they can to
St. Pierre 7
complicate their inquiry and not rely on methodology to
make it easy. I want them to study feminism, indigenous
theories, Marxism, pragmatism, social constructionism,
logical positivism, critical race theory, more feminism,
queer theory, phenomenology, theories of epistemology and
empiricism and ontology, poststructuralism, new material
theory, affect theory, the theories of the ancient Greeks,
Eastern thought, and on and on. I’m especially interested
now in Western theories that, for centuries, countered con-
ventional Western thought, the work of, for example,
Lucretius, Leibniz, Spinoza, James, Bergson, Whitehead,
Simondon, and Deleuze and Guattari. I lament that there is
so much to read and so little time.
These theorists offer us concepts and ideas that can
change the world. Why would we not read them and use
them? I think of the piles of books at my house that I haven’t
read yet. I know well that I can read any page in those books
and find an idea or concept that will be a shock to my
thought (Deleuze, 1985/1989). I know some word or phrase
on the page will send me spinning down a rabbit hole and
tear apart whatever comfort I’ve made for myself. But I’ve
learned over the years that the terrifying discomfort of being
unmoored and lost is what I most desire. I’ve learned I long
for what Elliott Eisner (1996) called working “at the edge of
incompetence” (p. 412) and what Patti Lather (1996) called
working in “rigorous confusion” (p. 539). What’s important
here is that theory should be unsettling, disruptive, confus-
ing, and perhaps that’s why we resist it. As Bell Hooks
(1989) asked, “Do we have to go that deep?” (p. 1).
How does one know if post qualitative inquiry is “good”?
This, of course, is the validity question that haunts the natu-
ral and social sciences. Systematicity is often used as the
chief criteria that determine whether scientific research is
valid, but systematicity is not thinkable in poststructuralism
and so not in post qualitative inquiry. People ask me, “So
does anything go in post qualitative inquiry?” and I respond
that anything always goes until someone draws a line. I
think our training determines to a great extent the lines we
draw, what we’re not willing to give up, and, of course,
that’s always personal and subjective rather than scientific
and objective. More to the point, given that post qualitative
inquiry is linked to the humanities and the natural sciences
rather than the social sciences, its standards of excellence
are more like those of art and literature and history and phi-
losophy and the sciences than those of the social sciences.
What makes a poem good? What makes a painting good?
Why does a philosophy take hold? What makes mathemat-
ics elegant? In any event, given that every post qualitative
study is different, generalities about its goodness are not
possible.
I conclude that post qualitative inquiry may not be for
everyone. It’s not for those who don’t want to study post-
structuralism. It’s not for those who want to use a preexist-
ing social science research methodology that tells them
what to do. Some people say it’s “too way out there,” and
students sometimes tell me they might not get a job if they
don’t use a conventional research methodology. I respond
by saying that when I was a doctoral student in the early
1990s, we students scared ourselves just like students scare
each other now. We told each other, “qualitative research is
just too radical, too way out there. If you do a qualitative
study, your dissertation won’t be accepted, and you proba-
bly won’t get a job.” Well, look at me and the people around
you. Our committees approved our dissertations, we got
jobs, and we’ve moved up through the ranks in academia. I,
and many others here today who’ve done something differ-
ent have made it, so be brave and resourceful like those here
who invented qualitative research decades ago.
My advice to students and junior scholars is—don’t be
afraid. Don’t shut yourself down before you even begin.
After all, we invented the big three social science research
methodologies in the last century, and they have roots in the
17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Today’s pressing, horrifying
difference that haunts me every minute is that even the
planet is not the same as it has been for centuries because
we’ve destroyed it. The posthuman will soon be all too
real—an earth without humans—and the ontological turn
that informs post qualitative inquiry seems especially press-
ing now. At some point, what “cannot be thought and yet
must be thought” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 60) is
no longer optional but an ethical obligation.
If those of you who are students and junior scholars need
permission to do something different, I and many others here
today can give you that permission and support your work.
There’re journal editors and book series editors and editors
from major publishing houses at this conference who seek
out exceptional work that’s different. You can also do the
work to make the space for difference: create your own jour-
nals, organize conferences, found a movement. After all, this
is your century. This is your turn. You have every right and,
I think, a responsibility to invent and create new approaches
to inquiry to address the problems of the 21st century. You
don’t have to do what previous generations of researchers
did. You can do something different from the beginning. If
you really take a look at the social science research method-
ologies that have become almost sacred, they look strange
indeed—way out there, in fact—and I truly don’t believe
they can accommodate the new post-humanist onto-episte-
mologies. I encourage you to read hard, write hard, think
hard and invent new forms of inquiry that might create a new
world and a people yet to come. It’s your turn, so dig in, go
deep, get that expertise and confidence, and do outstanding
work. We’ll be happy to help you.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
8 Qualitative Inquiry 27(1)
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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Author Biography
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre is professor of Critical Studies in the
Educational Theory and Practice Department and Affiliated pro-
fessor 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 human being from
critical and poststructural theories in what she has called post
qualitative inquiry–what might come after conventional humanist
qualitative research methodology. She’s especially interested in
the new empiricisms, the new materialisms, and the posthuman
enabled by the ontological turn.