Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology

Editorial

2023-12-26T16:00:14+01:00

This issue of Reconceptualising Educational Research Methodology offers the reader a range of insights from scholars located in different disciplinary spaces and geopolitical contexts. This collection of articles may at first appear to address very different topics: early childhood teachers’ stories about ‘culture’ in Australia; on-line YouTube followership as research in the USA; an Artographic approach to Theatre in Education situated in Finland; and the co-creation of data with young people in a Kulturskole in Norway. Yet a deep engagement with each reveals several threads to run throughout the collection that raise important questions when contemplating what else educational research can become when established conventions are questioned or put aside altogether in favour of approaches that foreground theoretically-rich methodologies that refuse formulaic implementation. Each paper invites the reader to question researcher relationships with ‘participants’; and to consider the possibilities available when mobilizing philosophy to reconsider what and how research might be undertaken otherwise.

The issue opens with an article written by Sonja Arndt and Clare Bartholomaeus that seeks to diffract early childhood teachers’ stories about culture in pursuit of more-than-only-social justice, and to reimagine research methodologies. The authors recount their multi-modal, multi-layered approach to researching with teachers that produced collectively entangled stories that reached far beyond anyone individual. They candidly recount the emergent and messy shape that their research project took, whilst finding themselves negotiating and working against research conventions (recognisable methods, ethics applications and so on). Their approach is described as a middling, where they recognise the significance of their own situatedness which found expression in surprising ways as the study took on unanticipated shapes. The article offers ‘philosophy as method’ by drawing upon the work of Julia Kristeva and Karen Barad to disrupt and reformulate ideas about both ‘culture’ and ‘research’. Theirs is a hopeful project that seeks to elevate the ways in which methodologies, when understood as always re-iterative, contingent and in response to relational context, can shift the ground on which research is conceived and takes shape.

Next, Maureen Lehto Brewster offers a phenomenological analysis of a researcher becoming a YouTube follower. The paper attends to the methodological implications of such a phenomenon by paying close attention, through event memories, to how and why this comes to matter. The author offers detailed reflections on YouTube culture and considers how it is designed to influence affective relations among creators and followers on the platform. Phenomenology, with its concern to study experience as lived, has the capacity for researchers to develop a lens that makes an ordinary lived experience quite extraordinary. Lehto Brewster pursues the extraordinariness of following with the help of Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology. The meticulous analysis throughout the article allows the affective dimensions of the phenomenon of on-line following to be intricately explored by asking: how is this phenomenon lived? Experienced? Productive? How does a feeling shape our worldview? Whose feelings shape the concept? The paper highlights the ways in which relating, knowing and trusting are fundamental to cultivating followers. Connections are then drawn between research and internet use (i.e. following) in which researchers mediate content based upon internal biases, predictive impulses and collaborative filtering. Like, Arndt and Bartholomaeus the inevitable and indisputable entanglement of the researcher is made explicit. Rather than being viewed as something that can (or should) be mitigated, reduced or somehow controlled – both papers make visible how such entanglements are produced, and how they can be embraced to enrich research and the claims that are made from such studies.

Nina Dahl-Tallgren then offers an account of becoming artography by attending to the movements of possibility in four evolving spaces: lingering in-between; transformation and affect; knowing and being; and encouraging diffractions with young people in a Finnish Theatre programme. Inspired by Baradian agential realism, the study takes up a diffractive methodology to read insights and discoveries that consider how ‘artist’, ‘researcher’ and ‘teacher’ intra-act through entangled practices. The theatre project sought to investigate how humans encounter global challenges, find ways to reduce risks and find new ways to think and work towards sustainable action. The role of the artographer was central to the project and facilitated reflection upon - what if, what is, what has been, what has yet to become and what matters - as new ways to understand, engage audiences, and provoke new learning through co-creation. Dahl-Tallgren’s close attention to ‘becoming artography’ allows for diffractive patterns to push all of those involved in Theatre in Education programmes to places outside usual comfort zones. The role of becoming artography then, highlights that when ‘artist’ is foregrounded a sensuous connection with human experience provides dramatic tension for participants; when ‘researcher’ is foregrounded genuine curiosity to explore and navigate through the process becomes pronounced; and when ‘teacher’ is foregrounded scope to be more engaged in what it sets in motions and what that means for participants is set free. With an agential realist lens artography is conceptualised and encountered as inherently dynamic, and constantly shifting and mutating. Like the previous two papers, Dahl-Tallgren makes visible the nuances, intricacies, tensions and affordances of embracing research as situated and relational. All three papers make explicit the potential that is set free when researchers refuse Donna Haraway’s ‘god trick’ and instead work with what the messy, middling of situated research might make possible.

Finally, Mali Hauen and Monica Klungland offer ‘trembling moments’ in their account of data-making with young people in a kulturskole in Norway. The authors co-creation methodologies with young people sought to reach understandings about what kulturskole does rather than what it is. Working with a small group of pupils it became apparent that methodologies that could reach beyond capturing accounts that represented their experiences were needed. Young people wanted to be heard, to tell their stories, and to offer embodied accounts of what being with the kulturskole potentiates. The approach taken brought together critical personal narratives, autoethnography, a/r/tography – which together became a methodology grounded in the physicality of making and creating. As the other papers in this issue gesture toward, following narrowly defined research conventions creates frustrations and false starts. Pushing against such conventions involves being adaptive and flexible; the authors draw upon existing and emerging examples of research-creation from the growing field of postqualitative inquiry. Their study underlines the importance in creating space for research to become something else, something more – where ‘participants’ can express themselves in a wider range of non-normative modalities, in this case through embodied languages. Through rap and the creation of short films pupils were able to engage in an affirmative and vital approach to ‘research participation’ which shifted power, positionality and called in to question what counts as research.

The Editors

Jayne Osgood, Camilla Eline Andersen, Mona Lisa Angell, Lotta Johannson and Ann Merete Otterstad

Becoming Artography

2023-07-27T13:40:09+02:00

This study focuses on mapping Theatre-In-Education (TIE) practices through the research methodology artography. The study is inspired by agential realism, using diffraction as a way of reading different insights and discoveries with an artographic lens and how these multiple dimensions intra-act as an entanglement. The article provides an example of TIE artists co-labouring their practice as research by exploring the entangled intra-action between the positions ‘artist, researcher, teacher’. This study aims to explore how the multiple perspectives offered by an artographer’s lens contribute to significant knowledge in the art-making process of the TIE programme The Clearing. Learning for the TIE artists involves moving in and through spaces of possibilities folding and unfolding new understandings, a becoming intensity of an entangled artist, researcher, teacher. The process of becoming artography in TIE produced movements of possibility in four evolving spaces: Lingering in-between, Transformation and affect, Knowing and being, and Encouraging diffractions. The study also produced artistic and pedagogical principles regarding dramaturgical thinking concerning how to structure an aesthetic learning process and how it is facilitated.

Diffracting early childhood teachers’ culture stories

2023-07-27T13:17:20+02:00

Teachers’ cultures impact on their orientations to diversity and pedagogical practices. However, limited attention is given to early childhood teachers’ cultures in research and practice. Informed by Barad’s notions of diffraction and intra-action, we reimagine research methodologies as critical in shaping research on what culture does or how it works for teachers and their culture stories. Turning and re-turning to diffractively engage with teachers’ culture stories in an exploratory Australian project, this paper pushes the boundaries of conceptualisations of research. It elevates the ways in which research methodologies, like culture, are always re-iterative, contingent and responsive to their relational context.

Hanging-out-knowing

2022-11-16T12:10:32+01:00

In this paper, I approach knowing as a spatial practice of dwelling with one’s affective landscapes of inquiry to think with Erin Manning’s idea of research-creation as immanent critique. ‘Landscape’ is re-defined in a nonrepresentational frame to include the various materialities with which we sense and see. To approach research-creation as a joint-action with the landscape, I turn to my native language, Finnish, in which being is referred to as pre-individual with the passive form of ‘to be’: ollaan. I build the argument by discussing my research with young people on their hanging out practices. Movement without destination, attuning to the landscape, can be taken as an energizing technique of relation: an encouragement to follow the call of the unfolding world. In this experimental way of being together, new worlds and selves emerge in encounters. ‘Hanging-out-knowing’ arises from moments of hesitation that challenge what is known.

A Pedagogy of Suspensions

2022-11-16T11:54:44+01:00

This paper takes as its catalyst a series of live art events that took place between London and Manchester in 2019. Thinking in conversation with Erin Manning’s propositions for “minor movements” and the Duchampian “infrathin”, we explore the potential for live art to temporarily suspend the thresholds of perceptibility and permissibility in the public realm. We argue that artful techniques of improvisation carry the potential to suspend capitalistic orderings of time by temporarily confounding the perceived barriers between art and life. Drawing together anarchival traces of improvised movement, sound, image, and thought, the paper is composed of vignettes that sketch the infrathin variations of a “pedagogy of suspensions” as elaborated through live art events in a public park, a moving train, a university gymnasium, and an anechoic sound chamber.

Shifting Focus

2022-11-16T11:27:32+01:00

Erin Manning's concept of the minor gesture invites a changed approach to education and encourages a radical reconceptualisation of studying within educational institutions. Using examples from her teaching with students in teacher training as well as from her artistic practice, Elke Mark studies the intertwinement of her varied collective, practice-theoretical research approaches with Erin Manning's philosophical concepts in order to apply them to qualitative inquiry and educational research.

From Technique to Technicity: Non-Methodological Explorations of Chairs, Neurodiversity, and Schooling

2022-11-16T11:13:00+01:00

In response to the call for this special issue, we draw upon Erin Manning’s (2013, 2016) theorizing of technique and technicity to reconsider schooling and inquiry practices through the chair. The chair is often taken for granted and narrowly conceived through the lens of neurotypicality. By beginning with technique and technicity, this work foregrounds affect, relation and process, rather than object, form and method, so as to dislodge the chair from the sedimented practices of schooling and inquiry. In the emergent fashion of research-creation, this article makes use of genealogy, narrative and theory to explore how the interplay of technique and technicity might engender different modes of chair-ing, and how these modes might speak to concerns of neurodiverse schooling and research methods.

Standing in the Midst

2022-11-16T10:59:30+01:00

This paper is an entry point into a different way of doing research: speculative pragmatism. Its roots are to be found in A. N. Whitehead, W. James, H. Bergson, among others. The main concept it fosters for a speculative pragmatism practice is intuition (Bergson, 2007; Deleuze, 1988, 2002; Manning, 2016). Around a discussion on knowledge, the concept of intuition is a pivotal milieu that anchors the basis for thinking-with-research-in-the-making. In the outlining of this background, the classical structure of experience is challenged. It introduces the subjective nature of the event, and shifts the role of objects, as they are normally understood.

The Value of the Useless: Erin Manning, Impact, Higher Education Research, Progress

2022-11-16T10:59:18+01:00

This article brings the work of Erin Manning to bear on common sense practices and conversations of the value of a college education. Manning’s work provides a productive alternative to the neoliberal discourse of college impact that has dominated higher education research for the past half century. Neoliberalism produces the common sense of the value of education as privatized, datafied (or dividuated), and measurable outcomes. This common sense reduces American higher education to the sum of its parts. To produce worlds to which campus marketing departments on occasion gesture, worlds where college produces spaces of community transformation, we must come to re/value progress in excess of measurable outcomes. In a rotating series of revaluations, this paper puts Manning’s concepts to work in both substance and form in four refrains: redefining value in higher education, revaluing the infrathin and the imperceptible, reconceptualizing liberal education, and valuing the useless.

The Interview-Event-Agencement as Creative Movement and Methodological Disruption

2022-11-16T10:50:03+01:00

In her article “Towards a Politics of Immediation,” Erin Manning (2019a) writes about the process of “immediation, the withness of time, of body in the making” (p. 1) that bodies subjectivity through the interstitial experience of/in the event. Drawing from Manning’s movement-oriented philosophy, and thinking-with her concepts of immediation, agencement, interval, and memory of the future, I invite alternate visualizations of interviewing as a research method through my study with international graduate students in a TESOL program at a Canadian university. By shifting focus from human-centred researcher intentionality and pre-determined research tools of the interviewing method, to the entangled human and non-human affective agencies of the interview-participant-voice-recorder-assemblage, I offer possibilities for experiencing the interview-event as an affective ecological attunement. Manning’s concepts also create interferences with existing institutional and TESOL representations and discourses, where multilingual students are often interpellated into rigid identity constructions and difference is seen as deficiency.

Disequilibrium, Disorder, Discord at a Video Game Design Camp: Welling the Chaos in Qualitative Inquiry

2022-11-16T10:42:48+01:00

Whereas the colloquial notion of chaos as disorder, chance, and anarchy is laden with negative connotations in educational contexts—that is, chaos inhibits rather than promotes—the author attempts to rehabilitate chaos by drawing on a process philosophical view that emphasizes chaos’s generative potential. To develop this line of inquiry, the author offers a genealogical account of chaos across the work of Erin Manning before discussing its implications for qualitative inquiry in education. The text then picks up speed through an anarchival experiment with the Giga-Games Camp (pseudonym), a video game design camp for adolescents. Through this work, the author suggests that worlds cohere and are expressed through chaos, not in spite of it, and that qualitative researchers might therefore seek the virtue in chaos, especially in such chaotic times as our own.

Fielding Fractured Masculinities: Implications for Nonrepresentational Educational Research Methodology in the Philosophy of Erin Manning

2022-11-16T10:33:50+01:00

In this paper, I put Erin Manning’s philosophical project into conversation with gender theory and consider possibilities regarding what it means to theorize masculinities in educational research methodology. To do this, I first speak to the urgency for reconceptualizing masculinities in education, outline how educational researchers have previously theorized the field, and problematize previous work that theorized masculinity as a relatively stable and monolithic identity marker. Following this, I consider what Manning’s process philosophy might offer educational researchers in the field of masculinities. In thinking with masculinities, the ongoing and lived experiences of gender, and Manning, I offer “fractured masculinities,” which theorizes masculinities as multiple, mobile, relational, contextual, intersectional, and fractured.

Editorial: Thought in Motion

2022-11-16T10:26:40+01:00

Edit from within! Become world! Value, don't evaluate! Lure the feeling! Know not what a body can do! Create with concepts! Make multiple sense! Affirm all that appears! Play the differential! Speculate! Engage relations of tension! Make the relations felt! Create degrees of intimacy! Propose! Transduce! Create affinities of purpose! Forget what you feel! Return the return! Transvaluate! Pay attention! Go to the limit! (Manning, 2008).

What does a philosophy produce? How might philosophy and methodology entangle, blur, respond, engage, interact, contradict, argue, provoke? Erin Manning’s process philosophy attunes researchers to the potential of difference. Manning grounds her philosophy in the notion that doing is thinking, that there is thought in the act, and that philosophy is an experimental practice that coexists with art; it is “pathfinding in the making” (Manning & Massumi, 2013, n.p.). Further, Manning posits that research and creation come together in their product, and the product is always ongoing, always becoming, always in process. Thought with qualitative inquiry, “the conjunction between research and creation […] make[s] apparent how modes of knowledge are always at cross-currents with one another” (Manning, 2016, p. 41).

Not-knowing-in-advance: Trying to think and see as if not doing a PhD.

2022-11-16T10:21:59+01:00

In this piece, the writer offers up a tentative exemplification of how reframing a thesis in terms of what it can do rather than what it is has the potential to generate a joyful-artful engagement with the PhD process and to engender a more response-able relationship with the world. By refusing to engage in the dis-abling processes prescribed by institutional expectations of doctoral study, the act of writing emerges as a powerful antidote to the constraints of the neoliberal, neurotypical, university. Exploring a mode of expression that intertwines text and image, the writer enacts Erin Manning’s philosophical projects of research-creation, artfulness and thought-in-motion.

Writing as PARTicipation: working towards in:tuition and intimating

2022-11-16T10:00:52+01:00

This paper is a thought-experiment into the question, “How might we participate in the writing of this paper together?” Having been both inspired and moved by Erin Manning´s beautiful chapter “Me Lo Dijo un Pajarito: Neurodiversity, Black Life and the University as we Know It’ (2020) we pick up the baton of moving thinking into how we can begin to work together to contribute to the reconceptualization of educational and research practices and specifically through practices of inclusion and participation within them. We do this with the starting point of our own participation in the writing of this paper. We follow the faint line of two emerging techniques. The first technique, in:tuition, emerges to help make operational a practice of participation that engages participants, students, us, on the register of the preindividual. The second technique, intimating, works towards a notion of transindividual participation.

We offer an immanent and processual approach to practice, involving a ‘(r)eaching toward one another, (in which) our individuations qualitatively alter our “individuality.” With Manning, we work with ‘thinking-feeling (as) the transversality of all planes of experience in the immanent twist’ with the desire of twisting into new and socially just practices.

Portal-time and wanderlines: What does virusing-with make possible in childhood research?

2022-11-16T09:49:24+01:00

This paper emerged from the forces of a pandemic that invited us to wrestle with what ‘virusing-with’ might potentiate in educational research-creation (Manning, 2016a). We sense the Coronavirus perform its agency on childhood in the Capitalocene in new, troubling, and sometimes hopeful ways. Research-creation has compelled us to dwell upon how virusing-with makes attuning differently to the world possible. We contemplate how virusing-with as concept and method holds the potential to disrupt and reformulate ways to undertake research and ways to conceptualise the child. Inspired by Manning’s (2020) recent work in relation to the child of the wanderline, we explore how multiple wanderlines take shape and interweave through research processes. Through the curation of three threshold events we think-do qualitative research in ways that push ideas and practices about childhood in directions that attend to agentic relationalities between the human, non-human and more-than-human. We argue that practices of virusing-with in portal time provides space for coming-into-relations of differences (Manning, 2016a, p.11) as an ecology of practice that shapes how educational research might be conceptualised and practiced.

Backs and Fronts: Stitching Thread and Thought Through Manning, Methodology, and Art

2022-11-16T09:27:13+01:00

This paper started with a messy embroidery back and a question: What happens when we play with/in mess, attending to how front/back, process/product, art/research, are counterparts in the event? To answer, we passed embroidery and writing techniques through each other, exploring what becomes possible when you think and make relationally, that is, between. Here, we stitch together Erin Manning’s theorization of the event with our experience. As we attuned ourselves to how thinking back-and-front together mattered, we found that our artful inquiry required us to rethink both what we thought and how we thought. Thus, we found that a methodology of front and back was made in this event, as a result of passing between. Finally, we invite readers to experiment with crafting their own methodologies of the between by flipping over their research as the embroidery hoop, and thereby opening the inquiry to its more-than.

A Response to Thought in Motion

2022-11-16T09:16:31+01:00

Right in the middle: chaos. Or better put: chaoz. “A radically empirical, chaozmatic qualitative inquiry, then, is one that reckons with the quasi chaotic threshold of the middle—the middle of the method, the middle of the field, the middle of the muddle” (Bradley Robinson).

Wondering into the Subjunctive: A Commentary on Thought in Motion

2022-11-16T08:54:59+01:00

November 16, 2021

Thinking with the papers in this special issue has been an intense spiritual experience. It is true that for me reading and writing are transmorphic events. The words move into my body, get into my veins, move about, lodge themselves into my stomach and vibrate and mix with memories, molecules, muscles, and thoughts in a sort of flurry that seems rather uncontrollable. I dream about words, lines, and ideas written in this special issue. Language itself is not isolated material; I do not hide out to write or read or cut myself off from the rest of the world to interact with words; they instead become part of me, part of my limited world, the things I eat and drink and shower with. Still, I grapple for words and language to come back when I need to harness them because I stutter and murmur; I'm klutzy, drop things inadvertently and leave the kitchen counter dirty after eating lunch. It is as if I still need to beg for permission to use them when I write, to promise to treat words and sentences with care; and still I need to prove myself with language; it demands my trust; holding onto words and placing them in proper order can seem like trying to carry a plastic bag full of eggs home from a crowded market.

“Trembling Moments”

2023-10-09T14:00:42+02:00

In this article, the authors investigate making data with pupils in the kulturskole through the exploration of a performative paradigm. There seems to be a lack of knowledge concerning how the pupils see their place in and engagement with the kulturskole. When we started working with the pupils, a request emerged to not only observe and interview them, but also to hear their stories and understandings of being with the kulturskole. These processes are, throughout the article, described and understood as methodologically developmental when working with pupils. We attempt to bridge a qualitative approach into a post-qualitative performative thinking about making data. The article contributes explorations into what data can be and how to make data with pupils.