Possibilities and the Unintended and Unanticipated Post Qualitative Researcher

Abstract

Inspired by Toni Morrison’s Sula (2004), this paper thinks through the use (broadly imagined) of literary texts that are experimentally read beside and through theoretical texts in order to prompt unexpected thinking. This approach places literature beside traditional research texts, rather than subordinate to such texts. The thinking and doing that occurs in relation to the tangle of texts, literary and otherwise, is already happening, even though often unrecognized. Differently attending to the jumble created by the multitude of texts that make up our reading lives might snag us in ways that open paths to new ways of thinking, resulting in novel approaches, or tangles of approaches, to post qualitative research. While literary texts are what is of interest here, the argument might extend to film, art, and other cultural texts not usually imagined as directly related to post qualitative inquiry.