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International Journal of Qualitative

Studies in Education
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Post-qualitative research
a b
Patti Lather & Elizabeth A. St. Pierre
a
Cultural Studies in Education, Ohio State University , Columbus ,
OH , USA
b
Educational Theory and Practice, University of Georgia ,
Athens , GA , USA
Published online: 06 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Patti Lather & Elizabeth A. St. Pierre (2013) Post-qualitative
research, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26:6, 629-633, DOI:
10.1080/09518398.2013.788752

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788752

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 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2013
Vol. 26, No. 6, 629–633, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788752

INTRODUCTION
Post-qualitative research
Patti Lathera* and Elizabeth A. St. Pierreb
a
Cultural Studies in Education, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA; bEducational
Theory and Practice, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
(Received 19 March 2013; final version received 19 March 2013)

There are three aspects of this special issue that we as co-editors want to draw to
your attention. The first is that we are, finally, “after” the decade of SRE able to
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ask what comes next for qualitative research. Out from under the neo-positivist
upsurge, we are pleased to be able to turn to what becomes possible in the sense of
“lines of flight” that open up in not having to over-attend to external pressures and
developments. We are, of course, keenly aware that qualitative research is still very
much “in relation” with neo-positivism in an era of “big data” and “metric mania,”
but we conceived this special issue as a refusal space in order to think within and
against the weight of such a context.
Secondly, what might the “post-qualitative” look like in such a space? This has
been our particular focus as we invited educational researchers to join us in opening
the future up to possibilities. Based on our experience during the last few years of
attending conferences and surveying journals, we are pleased to bring together both
familiar and new voices to address such issues across an international frame. We
are especially pleased that Jennifer Greene accepted our offer to respond, building
on her much concerned queries to a presentation from many of the contributors at
the Eighth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. Jennifer’s considered
responses help us understand how we operate within and against tradition so that
we might, collectively, serve the movement of qualitative research toward useful,
doable, and critical ends that help us all grapple with the implications of the
“posts.”
Finally, we note across the contributions an evocative mix of revitalizing famil-
iar frames, what might be called “the old new,” and, especially interesting to us, the
bringing into being of the new new. That latter phrase comes from Spivak (1999) in
speaking of the “new new” (p. 68) of the “indigenous dominant” (p. 67). In this,
much of the “edge” in what follows comes from such places as Australian Aborigi-
nal cultural practices, the new (to education) area of animal studies, and what goes
under the name of the “new materialism” so ascendant in contemporary feminist
theory. We hope, then, that this special issue will be a bit of a primer in the turn to
ontology and how it might take us to some place of the “always already” that is
neither too late nor too soon.
Authors writing for this special issue make it clear that rethinking humanist
ontology is key in what comes after humanist qualitative methodology. If we cease

*Corresponding author. Email: Lather.1@osu.edu

Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis

 630 P. Lather and E.A. St. Pierre

to privilege knowing over being; if we refuse positivist and phenomenological

assumptions about the nature of lived experience and the world; if we give up rep-
resentational and binary logics; if we see language, the human, and the material not
as separate entities mixed together but as completely imbricated “on the surface” –
if we do all that and the “more” it will open up – will qualitative inquiry as we
know it be possible? Perhaps not.
We always bring tradition with us into the new, and it is very difficult to think
outside our training, which, in spite of our best efforts, normalizes our thinking and
doing. The categories we have invented to organize and structure humanist qualita-
tive methodology (e.g. the chapter headings in introductory textbooks) – research
problem, research questions, literature review, methods of data collection, data
analysis, and representation – assume depth in which the human is superior to and
separate from the material – Self/Other, subject/object, and human/non-human. We
surely bring Descartes’ invention, the cogito, the knowing subject, with us, and that
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human is not only at the center of but prior to all those categories of qualitative
inquiry. The doer exists before the deed, so the researcher can (and must for IRBs)
write a research proposal that outlines the doing before she begins. The assumption
is that there is actually a beginning, an origin, that she is not always already becom-
ing in entanglement.
But, entanglement makes all the categories of humanist qualitative research
problematic. For example, how do we determine the “object of our knowledge” –
the “problem” we want to study in assemblage? Can we disconnect ourselves from
the mangle somehow (Self ) and then carefully disconnect some other small piece
of the mangle (Other) long enough to study it? What ontology has enabled us to
believe the world is stable so that we can do all that individuating? And at what
price? How do we think a “research problem” in the imbrication of an agentic
assemblage of diverse elements that are constantly intra-acting, never stable, never
the same?
What about the categories “interviewing” and “observation,” the privileged face-
to-face methods of data collection in humanist qualitative inquiry? If we give up
phenomenology, we can no longer privilege the immediacy, the “now,” the “being
there” of qualitative interviewing and observation that assume both the “presence”
of essential voices and the foundational nature of authentic lived experience.
Where/how do voices from post-humanist humans fit into the new inquiry? Are
they voices after all? (Does that word work?)
If we give up the scientism of positivist social science, we can no longer think
many descriptors we believe we need to guarantee the value and rigor of humanist
qualitative inquiry – for example, systematicity, process, audit trails, the clarity of
language, value-free knowledge (objectivity, bias), the accumulation of knowledge,
triangulation, coding data, and data itself. Without these, how do we know that
what we are doing is science? Does it matter in the new mattering? And who gets
to define science anyway? The natural sciences seem to be telling us it has always
been about entanglement. Perhaps we are behind and need to catch up!
If we give up both phenomenology and logical positivism, we also give up rep-
resentational logic. What would we do at the end of our studies if we academics
who are charged with publication really, truly, no longer believed in the language/
reality binary that presumes a structure of depth – that language (secondary) can
stand in for the real (primary)? Would the goal of our work continue to be “to rep-
resent,” to tell it like it really is out there in rich, thick description? Why else would
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 631

we inquire if not to find and know and then represent? Of course, the theory of
representation used in humanist qualitative inquiry was not always thinkable (see,
e.g. Foucault, 1966/1970), so there is a precedent for thinking other theories.
And the big, risky, question is the one that enables all the rest. If we give up
“human” as separate from non-human, how do we exist? Can there be there an
instituting “I” left to inquire, to know? Dare we give up that “I,” that fiction – the
doer before the deed? How are we anyway in entanglement? How might we
become in becoming? Isn’t this question affirmative? Experimental? Ethical? Insis-
tent? Are we willing to take on this question that is so hard to think but that might
enable different lives?
All these questions are enabled by the “post” ontologies. So what will happen,
is happening, to inquiry in this afterward? The authors of the papers in this special
issue illustrate that the limits of humanist qualitative inquiry become sharper as we
put “post” ontology to work. At some point, we have to ask whether we have
become so attached to our invention – qualitative research – that we have come to
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think it is real. Have we forgotten that we made it up? Could we just leave it
behind and do/live something else? Spivak (1989) wrote that “what I cannot imag-
ine stands guard over everything that I must/can do, think, live, etcetera” (p. 153).
The ethical charge of our work as inquirers is surely to question our attachments
that keep us from thinking and living differently. Those who write for this special
issue show us how thinking differently changes being – which was, perhaps, always
already different all along – and that is the goal of the new ontology, the new
inquiry after the “posts.”
Patti Lather leads the special issue by situating qualitative research “after” the
many turns, returns, and deaths that have characterized methodology talk for the
last several decades. After sketching various efforts to discipline qualitative research
via standards and rubrics, she fleshes out the post-qualitative via a narration of
methodology of four exemplars and concludes with a call to imagine forward in the
afterward of neo-liberalism.
Elizabeth A. St.Pierre argues that the “post” critiques of the epistemology and
ontology of Enlightenment humanism had little effect on what she calls “conven-
tional humanist qualitative research methodology.” She believes that its structure
remains committed, at the same time, to assumptions of logical positivism and phe-
nomenology, both of which are structured by representational logic. Taking up and
extending “post” ontological critiques, the new materialism/new empiricism renders
humanist qualitative research as we know it unthinkable.
Maggie MacLure also addresses representation and moves strongly toward imag-
ining a materially informed post-qualitative research through working Deleuze’s
Logic of Sense. MacLure brings into presence a post-representational research prac-
tice through reading a fragment of “what would have been called” data and asks
what qualitative research might be becoming in the process of being unrepresent-
able to itself.
Adrian D. Martin and George Kamberelis continue the critique of representa-
tional logic in humanist ontology by putting Deleuze and Guattari’s concept
mapping to work to transform research practice and the nature of the real. They
describe two studies that used mapping in analysis and enabled researchers to locate
linkages and connections that reconfigured local realities. A simple tracing of reality
in representation, on the other hand, assumes the world is static and resistant to
change, not becoming.
 632 P. Lather and E.A. St. Pierre

Bronwyn Davies, Elisabeth De Schauwer, Lien Claes, Katrien De Mucck,

Inge Van De Putte, and Meggie Verstichele explore how acts of recognition and
non-recognition work on and through the bodies of individual subjects in post-
qualitative research. Using the work of Foucault, Butler, Deleuze, and Barad, they
work with data from a collective biography workshop to address the important topic
of human being after humanism.
Jerry Rosiek examines a recent renaissance of interest in pragmatist philosophy
for its relevance to the emerging ontological turn in qualitative research methodol-
ogy. He focuses on two themes within contemporary pragmatist philosophy: a com-
mitment to reflexive realism and a use of an ontology of the future as a guide to
inquiry. In these features, he sees the possibility of shifting some portion of our
inquiry practices from a focus on accuracy of description towards the development
of plausible and desirable narratives of the future.
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi situates her study of how a radical ontology shifts prac-
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tices of data analysis against the social constructionist postmodernism that is being
displaced by the new feminist materialisms. Distinguishing a renewed feminist
materialism from a new feminist materialism, she focuses on the kinds of researcher
subjectivities each produces. Putting Deleuze and Guattari as well as Karen Barad
to good work, Lenz Taguchi probes a collaborative research process and demon-
strates both how easily we are caught up in taken for granted images of thinking
and doing analysis and what else might be possible.
Helena Pedersen explores the post-qualitative in the context of slaughterhouse
pedagogy intended to prepare students to be veterinarians. In what she calls “zoo-
ethnographic fieldwork,” she shows how critical post-humanist qualitative research
can bring forth the edges of a pedagogy distributed across human and non-human
actants which uses affect and abjection in relation to the flows, movements, and
passages of a situated post-qualitative methodology.
Lisa Mazzei tackles the privileged phenomenological method of humanist quali-
tative inquiry, the face-to-face interview, designed to retrieve the authentic voice of
the essentialist subject. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s lead, she creates a new
concept, the Voice without Organs, similar to their Body without Organs, to illus-
trate how Deleuzian ontology enables us to rethink both the practice of interviewing
and the voices we “collect.”
Alecia Y. Jackson’s paper uses Pickering’s concept, the mangle, to argue
against the positivist practice of coding data and, instead, to create ontological
becomings in her reading of data. In her analysis of data from an interview
study, she shows the agentic features of both human and non-human entities that
help decenter not only representational logic but also the human in post-qualita-
tive research.
Jennifer Greene’s commentary closes the special issue from what she calls the
“outsider” perspective of one who remembers the beginning of humanist qualitative
research and has been conducting evaluation research for some time. She expresses
concerns: first, about whether post-qualitative research can still be considered
research; second, where it is going; and third, what is being lost in the new inquiry.
These are surely questions we grapple with as we reimagine inquiry.
We believe these papers offer much to think about theoretically and methodo-
logically in the second decade of the twenty-first century as researchers engage the
“posts” in their projects.
 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 633

Notes on contributors
Patti Lather is Professor of Cultural Studies in Education at Ohio State University where she
teaches qualitative research and gender and education. Her books include Getting Smart
(1991), Troubling the Angels (1997, with Chris Smithies), Getting Lost: Feminist Efforts
toward a Double(d) Science (2007), and Engaging Science Policy: From the Side of the
Messy (2009). She is a 2009 inductee into the AERA (Sister) Fellows and a 2010 recipient
of the AERA Division B Lifetime Achievement Award.

Elizabeth A. St. Pierre is Professor in the Educational Theory and Practice Department and
an affiliated professor of both the Qualitative Research Program and the Women’s Studies
Institute at the University of Georgia, USA. Her work focuses on poststructural theories of
language and subjectivity, on a critique of what she calls conventional, humanist qualitative
research methodology, and on the new empiricism/materialism, especially in feminist theory
and methodology.

References
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Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. (A. M. S.
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Spivak, G. C. (1989). In a word: Interview. (E. Rooney, Interviewer). Differences, 1,
124–156.
Spivak, G. C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing
present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.