Lisa A. Mazzei

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.

A voice without organs: interviewing in posthumanist research

In keeping with the editor’s call for this special issue, this paper discusses how a posthumanist stance has enabled me to materialize a different conception of the interview and interview data in postqualitative inquiry. More specifically, I am thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, the Body without Organs, one they use to enact thinking without a subject and to liberate thought from overcoded images in order to confront a reliance on objects or material representations to understand and explain. Using this concept, I theorize a Voice without Organs (VwO) as a voice that does not emanate from a singular subject but is produced in an enactment among research-data-participants-theory-analysis. The article concludes with an analysis of data from a recent interview project that illustrates how VwO is both produced by and producing different knowledge and suggests implications for thinking interviewing and interview data differently.

Complicating Voice in a Refusal to “Let Participants Speak for Themselves”

In this article, the authors respond to the editors’ call to challenge simplistic and mechanistic approaches to qualitative research that preclude dense and multilayered treatment of data. The editors assert that such practices can lead to (over)simplified knowledge claims, something especially risky when participant “voice” is presented as an expression of “experience” devoid of context. The authors approach the methodological project of a simplified voice in qualitative inquiry that attempts to offer an authentic essence or voice that is present, stable, and self-reflective. Aided by Deleuze to conceive a voice without an image, the authors specifically challenge simplistic treatments of voice that beckon voices to “speak for themselves” or that reduce complicated and conflicting voices to analytical “chunks” that can be interpreted free of context and circumstance. The authors conclude with illustrations from their research that demonstrate how they put such complicating practices to work and how they serve to open up previously unthought questions.

Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research

This special issue that we are calling, ‘Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research’, presents writings from qualitative researchers across various disciplines and contexts who are attempting to work with these new analytics and practices made possible through their engagement with Deleuzian concepts and processes. These researchers engage epistemological questions and try out methodological practices inspired by thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research. In response to our call for proposals, contributors to this issue are using or thinking with the philosophical concepts and processes of Deleuze, not focusing on them in the abstract, but instead engaging the implications of those concepts and processes for research methodology and ethics in educational research.

Beyond an Easy Sense A Diffractive Analysis

In this article, I use Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction as a methodological practice of reading “insights through one another” in response to the editors’ call for examples of analysis after coding in qualitative inquiry. A diffractive reading of data through multiple theoretical insights moves qualitative analysis away from habitual normative readings toward a diffractive reading that spreads thought in unpredictable patterns producing different knowledge. In response to the editors’ pedagogical approach for the issue, the article focuses on an example from previously collected interview data and how a diffractive analysis produces questions and knowledge that are only possible in analysis after coding in qualitative inquiry.

Silent Listenings: Deconstructive Practices in Discourse-Based Research:

In this article, I respond to Wanda Pillow’s (2000)challenge to Educational Researcher and other educational journals to provide more working examples of postmodern research not in an effort to contain such research, but in an effort to irrupt or break apart efforts at containment. Specifically, I present a methodological approach for listening to the “silences” revealed in my conversations with White teachers regarding their racial identity. Those silences, present both in the absence of speech and in speech acts, were “heard” through the use of a deconstructive practice for listening to the conversations. This deconstructive practice allowed the silences to disrupt the tranquil assurance of the spoken word.

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.”

Inhabited Silences: In Pursuit of a Muffled Subtext

In the conversations in which qualitative researchers engage, silences often occur, particularly when researchers pursue issues of race and culture in education. The author proposes that qualitative researchers not dismiss silence as an omission or absence of empirical materials but rather engage the silences as meaningful and purposeful. To do so, the author attempts to call attention to what has been absent in an analysis of conversations with research participants—namely, silence. Specifically, this text presents a poetic understanding of silence out of which researchers may explore the significance of silences present in the conversations of discourse-based research.

Materialist mappings of knowing in being: researchers constituted in the production of knowledge

In keeping with the editors call for this special issue, this paper demonstrates how reading data with and through a new materialist lens opens up different ways of seeing and thinking. Drawing on material feminist theory, the author presents an illustration of how such practices produce a different encounter with data, research settings, and participants as she is made and unmade in intra-actions with matter, both material and discursive.

Thinking data with Deleuze

In this paper the author is thinking with Deleuzes philosophical concept of the ‘image’ of the speech‐act in cinema and the implications for methodology and ethics in qualitative research. Drawing on research in the USA with white teachers, this paper will specifically engage with Deleuzian concepts presented in his two books on cinema and his philosophical concept of the ‘image’ toward a re‐imaging of voice. To think with the ‘image’ of speech‐acts and how voice is conveyed in a cinematic sense, particularly if one is to consider silent films, is to think about ‘viewing’ voice in qualitative research, and how such viewing might make it possible to ‘read’ the image of voice from a multi‐dimensional perspective.