“Do the next thing”: an interview with Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre on post-qualitative methodology

Abstract

Professor Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre’s work focuses on critical and poststructural theories of language and the subject and what she has called post qualitative inquiry or post inquiry. She asks what might come after conventional humanist qualitative research methodology. She’s especially interested in the new empiricisms/new materialisms as well as new research practices enabled by the ontological turn.

During St. Pierre's visit to the Finnish Educational Research Association (FERA) Conference in Oulu in November 2014, we had the opportunity to talk with her about post qualitative research around some questions we had sent her beforehand. We then transcribed, edited, and translated the interview, and published it in the Finnish journal Kasvatus (Education) in spring 2015. In this interview St. Pierre talks in the US context, where qualitative methodology is turning—or being pushed to turn—back to positivism with normalized and formalized practices, St. Pierre encourages researchers to constantly question the prevailing truths and the traditions they have learnt too well.