Alecia Youngblood Jackson

Qualitative Data Analysis After Coding

In 1991, Patti Lather (1991) called data analysis “the ‘black hole’ of qualitative research” (p. 149), and, as co-editors of this special issue on qualitative data analysis after coding, we suspect it still is. In fact, we think analysis—”thinking with theory” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012)—is so difficult to describe and explain to the non-positivist—and to teach to our students—that we have resorted to equating qualitative data analysis with coding data. In other words, we teach analysis as coding because it is teachable. The critiques’ qualitative methodology endured during the debates about “scientifically based research” in the first decade of the 21st century surely intensified its already confused epistemological and ontological commitments. The incommensurability in this methodology is that a social science approach that claims to be interpretive supports a positivist, quasi-statistical analytic practice—coding data—that has, unfortunately, been proliferated and formalized in too many introductory textbooks and university research courses. A question we might ask at the outset is whether one would code data if one had not been taught to do so. We should state here at the beginning that we are not referring to the kind of analysis MacLure (2008) described as follows:

Plugging One Text Into Another: Thinking With Theory in Qualitative Research

In this article, the authors describe the work of their recently published book, Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. The purpose of this article is to show how they use theory to think with their data (and use data to think with theory) in order to accomplish a reading of data that is both within and against interpretivism. The authors put to use a concept picked up from Deleuze and Guattari to capture their thinking with theory in qualitative research: “plugging in.” They engage “plugging in” as a machinic process that works against conventional coding in qualitative data interpretation and analysis by explaining and enacting the methodological maneuvers taken up in their thinking with theory. The authors conclude that “plugging in” positions both data and theory as machines and reveals both their supple substance and their machinic potential to interrupt and transform other machines, other data, and other knowledge projects.

New Empiricisms and New Materialisms Conditions for New Inquiry

This article, which introduces this special issue on new empiricisms and new materialisms, focuses on two of the many conditions that enable this new work: first, an ethical imperative to rethink the nature of being to refuse the devastating dividing practices of the dogmatic Cartesian image of thought and, second, a heightened curiosity and accompanying experimentation in the becoming of existence. The article includes a brief description of how matter matters differently in this new work, of Deleuze and Guattari’s description of philosophy as the laying out of a plane that enables new concepts, a discussion of the “new,” and how/if methodology can be thought in the “new.”

Deleuze and the girl

In this article, I seek to represent something that must be lived. It feels impossible to represent that which is described by Deleuze and Guattari as movement that is simultaneous, asymmetrical, instantaneous, unfinalized, zig‐zag. This movement is Deleuze and Guattaris concept of difference, that which they name becoming. To put this concept of becoming to work, I use three texts. One is chapter 10 of A Thousand Plateaus, the second is Brian Massumis book A Users Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and the last is a short excerpt from my fieldnotes taken during my ethnographic research on the subject formation of adolescent girls. Specifically, the girl is Jesse, a senior cheerleader whose daily school life involved seeking and expressing her difference, or her becoming. She struggled against the over‐coded, essentialized category of cheerleader and the discursive and material expectations of that category at her high school. Deleuze and Guattaris concept of becoming allows me to explore Jesses unique difference, to privilege her specificity. So rather than looking on the surface to ‘see’ the uniforms and uniformity of Jesse (or try to ascertain how she is ‘like’ a cheerleader, or ‘fits into’ the category), my task here is to work with the girl as an event, to represent how Jesse unfolds herself through micro‐particular movements with her others. Her specificities were single, concrete instances of how she dressed, how she behaved during practice, how she moved her body, how she expressed her desires. These ‘singular and concrete forms’ make up the activity of her becoming.

Posthumanist data analysis of mangling practices

In this paper, I argue against traditional coding in interpretive data analysis and offer a posthumanist alternative that offers qualitative researchers a new way to create ontological becomings in their reading of data. I begin with an overview of how humanism enables us to think qualitative data analysis as coding, and then counter human-centered inquiry with a description of Pickering’s mangle and its potential as a both a figuration and a different tool for analysis. I then give an example of a reading of data as/in/of the mangle. I show the agentic features of both human and non-human elements of the mangle to move away from epistemological representations of the “real” to practices of decentering the human in social science inquiry. I conclude that using Pickering’s posthumanist ontological theory of agency is one gesture toward the becoming of what the editors of this issue call post-qualitative research.

Voice in the agentic assemblage

Abstract In this article, we explore how a posthumanist stance has enabled us to work a different consideration of the way in which voice is constituted and constituting in educational inquiry; that is, we position voice in a posthuman ontology that is understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents that exceed the traditional understanding of an individual. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Barad, and Bennett, we present a research artifact that illustrates how this posthuman voice is productively bound to an agentic assemblage. The reconfiguration of a posthuman voice with/in an educational research artifact further enables us to explore various analytic questions: What happens when voice exceeds language and is more than (un)vocalized words emanating from a speaking subject? If the materiality of voice is not limited to sound (i.e. self-present language emitted from a human mouth), how do we account for it? That is, how might the materiality of voice be located in the space of intra-action among human and non-human objects? We conclude with implications for thinking qualitative methodology in education differently.

In the Threshold

In this paper, we describe our encounters in and passes through the figuration of the threshold as producing writing between-the-two: or, loss of the individual subject. We describe how in the threshold, we meet in that in-between space, a space of shared deterritorialization in which we constitute one another. Also, we describe writing between-the-two in the threshold as a site of embodiment, of affect. In thinking of how to articulate our way of thinking and writing together as between-the-two and as different than a collaborative project where two “I”s contribute pieces both with and independent of the other, we take our cue from Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatts (2009) Between the Two. In this book, they articulate a way of thinking and writing inspired by Deleuze and Guattaris collaborative work as that which is not a working together, but a working in the gap “between the two” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987/2002, p. 13). This spark of creativity in the gap is both like and unlike what we will explain in this article. Like Gale and Wyatt, we lean on figurations and concepts in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari as a referent; however, our between-the-two is pursued more deliberately through a materialist knowing in being that produces our becoming with and in a digital threshold.

Making matter making us: thinking with Grosz to find freedom in new feminist materialisms

In this paper, I offer a very close reading of Grosz [2010. “Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 139–157. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] thinking with Bergson in order to re-conceptualise freedom, matter, and the subject in new feminist materialisms. My central argument is that these free acts are mutually constituted in the intra-action [Barad 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] between human and non-human forces. The guiding questions for this paper are, ‘What if we locate freedom in doing, rather than being? How does associating freedom with acts, rather than attaching it to the subject, change how we think about ontology and agency?’ I use interview data from a research study with first-generation academic women in order to explore these concepts and put them to work.

Spaces of Power/Knowledge A Foucauldian Methodology for Qualitative Inquiry

In this paper, I argue for a consideration of Foucault’s power/knowledge doublet as a spatial, analytic methodology for the use of studying the productive effects of practices in education. A spatial reading involves disentangling the complex production of subjectivity as an effect of power/knowledge relations and practices. A power/knowledge reading of the multiple effects of social, cultural, and material practices within relations of power/knowledge illustrates how educational subjects are in a continual process of constructing and transforming their selves and their worlds through their interactions with others. In particular, I sketch what this spatial methodology looked like in the context of an ethnographic study that I conducted on southern girls’ subjectivity and education. I conclude that a Foucauldian spatial methodology that analyzes power/knowledge practices within educational contexts shows that people and their practices are not causal results of educational discrimination or injustice but are ever-changing, interpretive effects of complex relations of power/knowledge that converge and are made visible by people’s responses.

Thinking with an Agentic Assemblage in Posthuman Inquiry

During the autumn of 2014, a 50-pound standard-issue dormitory mattress made its way across various spaces on the campus of Columbia University in New York. At times, the dark blue foam mattress was carried by one woman, Emma Sulkowicz — a senior visual arts major at Columbia. At other times, Sulkowicz was joined by others on campus (friends and strangers) in a collective carry to share the burden of movement. These solitary and participatory carries were not merely acts of taking one ordinary object from one place to another. Rather, the thing — the mattress — is the focal point of a performance piece, Carry That Weight: the senior art thesis conceived by Sulkowicz as a protest against Columbia University’s mishandling of her complaint of sexual assault. Sulkowicz has asserted that, two years earlier on the first day of her sophomore year, she had been anally raped in her dorm room by a fellow student with whom she had previously had consensual sex. A university hearing found the accused ‘not responsible’, a decision that she appealed, yet was upheld.