Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre

Poststructural feminism in education: An overview

Feminists in education increasingly use poststructuralism to trouble both discursive and material structures that limit the ways we think about our work. This overview of poststructural feminism presents several key philosophical concepts ? language; discourse; rationality; power, resistance, and freedom; knowledge and truth; and the subject ? as they are typically understood in humanism and then as they have been reinscribed in poststructuralism, paying special attention to how they have been used in education.Feminists in education increasingly use poststructuralism to trouble both discursive and material structures that limit the ways we think about our work. This overview of poststructural feminism presents several key philosophical concepts ? language; discourse; rationality; power, resistance, and freedom; knowledge and truth; and the subject ? as they are typically understood in humanism and then as they have been reinscribed in poststructuralism, paying special attention to how they have been used in education.

Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data

In this essay the author identifies transgressive data- emotional data, dream data, sensual data, and response data- that are out-of-category and not usually accounted for in qualitative research methodology. She also attempts to identify the methods that produced those data. In addition, she suggests that if data are the foundation on which knowledge rests, it is important to trouble the common-sense understanding of that signifier in postfoundational research that aims to produce di erent knowledge and to produce knowledge di erently. By using poststructural critiques and Deleuzes image of the fold, the author was able to think about data di erently in her study of the construction of subjectivityin the older, white, southern women of her hometown. Furthermore, her identification of transgressive data in this study suggests that other studies may also yield transgressive data that might shift the epistemologies that define the possibilities of qualitative research in education.

Standards of Evidence in Qualitative Research: An Incitement to Discourse

In a climate of increased accountability, standardization, federal control, and politicization of education research and scholarship, this article briefly reviews various positions outlined by qualitative researchers about quality in qualitative inquiry, showing how these are implicated in the acquisition, conceptualization, and use of qualitative evidence. It concludes by identifying issues in and challenges to setting standards of evidence for qualitative researchers in education.

Post-qualitative research

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 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 familiar 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 Aboriginal 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

The posts continue: becoming

This paper describes assumptions of representational logic and phenomenology that organize much of Enlightenment humanism and one of its knowledge projects, conventional humanist qualitative methodology. The author argues that the ontological critiques of “post” theorists, including Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari, were set aside in favor of epistemological projects following World War II and that, in general, the “posts” had little effect on that methodology. Those critiques are now being put to work and extended in the new empiricism and new materialism to re-imagine being, always an ethical task. Whether humanist qualitative inquiry can survive the ontological turn is a question to consider.This paper describes assumptions of representational logic and phenomenology that organize much of Enlightenment humanism and one of its knowledge projects, conventional humanist qualitative methodology. The author argues that the ontological critiques of “post” theorists, including Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari, were set aside in favor of epistemological projects following World War II and that, in general, the “posts” had little effect on that methodology. Those critiques are now being put to work and extended in the new empiricism and new materialism to re-imagine being, always an ethical task. Whether humanist qualitative inquiry can survive the ontological turn is a question to consider.

Circling the Text: Nomadic Writing Practices

The sixth moment of qualitative inquiry demands that researchers rethink traditional definitions of ethical research practices. In addition, the crisis of representation demands that researchers rethink the function of writing in qualitative research. In this article, the author illustrates how she used Deleuzes ethical principles as well as Deleuze and Guattaris figurations of the rhizome, the fold, the nomad, and haecceity to address both of these issues in her study of the construction of subjectivity of a group of older, White southern women in her hometown. Mapping how her understanding of subjectivity has shifted as she has employed these figurations in her writing, she suggests that texts can be the site of ethical work as researchers use writing to help them think differently—an ethical practice of postfoundational inquiry—about both the topic of their studies and the methodology.The sixth moment of qualitative inquiry demands that researchers rethink traditional definitions of ethical research practices. In addition, the crisis of representation demands that researchers rethink the function of writing in qualitative research. In this article, the author illustrates how she used Deleuzes ethical principles as well as Deleuze and Guattaris figurations of the rhizome, the fold, the nomad, and haecceity to address both of these issues in her study of the construction of subjectivity of a group of older, White southern women in her hometown. Mapping how her understanding of subjectivity has shifted as she has employed these figurations in her writing, she suggests that texts can be the site of ethical work as researchers use writing to help them think differently—an ethical practice of postfoundational inquiry—about both the topic of their studies and the methodology.

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:

Scientifically Based Research in Education: Epistemology and Ethics.

In this article, the author begins to trace the concept scientifically based research in federal legislation, in the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, and in the reports of...In this article, the author begins to trace the concept scientifically based research in federal legislation, in the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, and in the reports of several National Research Council committees. She also discusses how this concept has produced a certain scientism that has been deployed to attempt to control the field of educational research. She points out, however, that scientifically based research treats methodology as if it can be separated from epistemology and thus forgets that different bodies of knowledge and thought make different sciences possible. Thus, science is not one thing, as those who support scientifically based research often claim. Finally, the author suggests that our task as education scholars, researchers, and policy makers in this age of accountability is to engage rather than exclude epistemologies not our own that may help us produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently.

The Appearance of Data

This paper explores conditions that allow data to appear, to come into being, in both conventional and more radical approaches in empirical social science research. Conventional qualitative inquiry that uses a positivist ontology—even when it claims to be interpretive—treats qualitative data, words, as brute, existing independent of an interpretive frame, waiting to be “collected” by a human. However, a Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology that does not assume the subject/object binary might not think the concept data at all. The author resists recuperating data in the collapse of the old empiricism and is content to pause in the curious possibilities of a normative ontology that imagines a superior, affirmative, and experimental empiricism in which all concepts, including data, must be re-thought.This paper explores conditions that allow data to appear, to come into being, in both conventional and more radical approaches in empirical social science research. Conventional qualitative inquiry that uses a positivist ontology—even when it claims to be interpretive—treats qualitative data, words, as brute, existing independent of an interpretive frame, waiting to be “collected” by a human. However, a Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology that does not assume the subject/object binary might not think the concept data at all. The author resists recuperating data in the collapse of the old empiricism and is content to pause in the curious possibilities of a normative ontology that imagines a superior, affirmative, and experimental empiricism in which all concepts, including data, must be re-thought.

Comment: “Science” Rejects Postmodernism:

The National Research Council report Scientific Research in Educationclaims to present an inclusive view of science as it responds to federal government attempts to legislate educational research. This author argues, however, that the report in fact narrowly defines scienceas positivism and methodologyas quantitative. These definitions are made possible by the outright rejection of postmodernism and the rejection by omission of other theories including queer, feminist, race, postcolonial, critical, and poststructural theories. The chief issue in this report is, in fact, not “science” but the larger issue of epistemology, from which methodologies like conventional science emerge. After using postmodern analyses to illustrate the danger of the report’s normalizing and totalizing discourse, this author urges researchers to be on guard against those who would reject diverse epistemologies and methodologies in educational research