Notes on:
Lather, P. (2012) 'Methodology - 21: What Do
We Do in the Afterward?' OISE
lecture.u.osu.edu/lather.1/video/2012-oise-lecture/
Dave Harris
There had been a lot of different turns in social
sciences and a lot of posts as well, and deaths
and returns. There are now lots of hybrids
especially in qualitative methods, away from the
standpoint approaches building on humanist
subjects and qualitative descriptions. Now
there are multiple voices, messy texts, a lot of
reflexivity, although initially this was still
humanist. Methods were codified by being
incorporated into textbooks. In the final
stage ['qualitative 3.0'] post criticisms have led
to serious doubts about validity, voice and
data. Feminist theories have also been
attacked. Mixed methods have
dominated. In qualitative 4.0 in the future,
the theme will be becoming, as in Deleuze and
Guattari, and actually getting on with work as a
form of incremental practice. Different methods
will be characteristic, not even chosen according
to different projects. In Deleuze's terms,
there will be '1000 tiny paradigms': we're moving
far from the simple split between qualitative and
quantitative.
Political science is a good example. It was
once wholly positivist but then endured paradigm
wars. Qualitative work was acceptable but it
still had to be positivist. In order to
regulate the problem, there was a move to develop
standards for research, appearing initially in
journals, then inevitably becoming used in
dissertations [some of them seem to have been
sponsored by the AERA]. Then separate
strands were developed for humanities based
qualitative work, and these included a tolerance
of dissonance and discomfort, the imaginary, the
use of narrative and so on. This was aimed
explicitly to help qualitative research to defend
against absorption into the audit culture.
It was important to keep addressing issues of
ontology and epistemology and to insist on the
difficulties.
Then followed a period of 'escapes'. An
example here was the regulation attempted by the
Spencer Foundation Report, to guide applications
for funding. The lessons had apparently been
learned from receiving a number of bids, and the
Foundation was ready to offer advice. Again
the idea was to resist simply applying
'scientific' methods, which had been heavily
sponsored by the turn towards evidence based
research. Instead, disputes over rigour,
neutrality and objectivity were permitted.
It was seen that all ideas [about how to do
research] have epistemological
underpinnings. The context of knowledge was
important, and researchers were even encouraged to
address social justice. Everything was to be
open to be discussed, and it was even possible to
let the question determine the method.
Questions were allowed to emerge from
research. It was acceptable to offer
incommensurable accounts. Power was seen as
important. It was acceptable to acknowledge
difference and to be reflexive. There were
still debates about whether research should be
theory based or skills based. Positivism was
now seen as something that had been replaced by
post positivism. There were still some
qualitative research traditions that were omitted,
however: qualitative research was OK 'as long as
it behaves itself'.
A book by George Marcus [?] describes research as
'messy conceptual labour', and urged researchers
to develop 'metamethodological habits'. His
emphasis was on networks of agents involved in the
research process [possibly a bit like ANT].
Advocacy became suspect, and had been since
Foucault's questions about who was being liberated
and who claimed the right to liberate them.
So there seem to be two regimes of truth, neo
positivist and other neo stuff, which was
experimental and pluralistic. There is still
a struggle to be had with demands for evidence
based research, and the struggle came to define
itself as to question what was meant by science -
for example science is not scientism.
Some post qualitative approaches can be seen by
looking at three examples. Lather's method
has always been to focus on actual studies and
then 'narrate' their methodology.
In the first study, a Swedish one on relational
data analysis, Deleuze and Guattari are the
inspiration, with their emphasis on
becoming. The project was to investigate the
possibility of the 'molecular girl'. The
authors were able to criticize their own thinking
in research in order to resist their own habitual
ways of understanding data. They offered a
Deleuzian violence towards their own
thinking. They developed lines of flight
rather than coding. They rendered the data
in terms of both dominant and resistant
discourses. They developed multiplicities
rather than binaries. They used data and
read it from a number of different subject
positions, emphasizing difference rather than
hierarchy. It was collaborative
research. It's about an idea of becoming
woman, as requiring other people to correct
understanding and convention [sounds a bit like Ettinger?].
This sort of research stresses pleasure and
surprise, including pleasure in encountering
theory, to overcome the 'terror' that it normally
brings, especially to feminists. The stress
is on companionship. The researchers saw
themselves as used by thought, seeing research as
the production of desire. [Someone else] has
talked about the topography of research, where we
examined densities within texts in order to
uncover particular configurations [different
readings]. This raises implications for the
knower, rejecting conventional subjectivity.
There is also the turn to affect and affect
theory. Berlant [?] Is cited here in
deploying Williams's 'structures of
feeling'. The result is to produce an
'objective queerness'. Berlant and others
oppose the normal definitions of affects as a kind
of interior emotional process asserting its
authority in 'the demand for feeling
effects'. Opposing the validity of tears
connects with this project. What we need is
emotional deflation after the emotional inflation
which has proved to be so 'bruising'. We
should stress the insecurity of knowledge, and
need to work in stuck places instead.
Research should be unheroic, a mere 'brush with
solidarity'.
We need another theory of change, based on
Nietzsche. This would see change as a matter
of 'immanent accretions', which attracted little
resistance. This sort would change through
networks, unobtrusively. An example might be
the way in which the cellphone was just diffused
through a number of user networks. Foucault
reminds us that practice drives change, because it
reveals the workings of power, especially power
which is expressed in the body.
Somerville[?] has pursued a project on the
importance of water in Australian indigenous
societies, which sees language itself as
water. The piece is an autoethnographic work
which weaves together indigenous stories of
ecology, and develop some arts based methodology
designed to show links across different
worlds. Images and text and other art works
are displayed in exhibitions. The links are
non hierarchical and messy. Difference is
emphasized, incompleteness.
This is what Rancière sees as a redistribution of
the sensible, a move towards indeterminacy, and it
links with Butler on inadequacy, seeing the self as
a mess rather than as something heroic.
We are working in the ruins of the old
empire. The final example concerns some
research on the women's mosque movement in Egypt,
which came to the fore in the recent public
demonstrations. This piece offers a
criticism of liberal feminism and its assumptions,
through an autoethnography of desire. The
piece criticises the usual views about the modesty
and quietism of women. Its findings are
uncertain. It is prepared to take risks
rather than to codify. This raises questions
about whether self reflexivity is an adequate
solution to a methodological problems. This
sort of new material goes beyond that [and
presumably is relational again?].
We now need to be inventing new methodological
practices. Fragmentation now defines just
about every field. There are no shared
standards. Nothing has foundations any
more. Arts and politics are probably leading
this particular development. Evidence based
research is now a busted flush, it didn't
work. Some of the sponsoring bodies can find
anything that actually was rigorous enough to
serve as an example of something that could be
scaled up. But at the same time, positivism
is not ended, and we are still in the era of Big
Data and quantification, although there is a
crisis. Its ontology is now troubled and
doubts are being raised about objectivity, the
ability to control chance, and the predictability
of quantifiable empirical knowledge. No
policies can now be based on such data. Reflexive
knowledge is emerging as crucial. No one
wants to go back to a new form of narrowness.
[Bit theoretically naive about Deleuze and
Rancière -- other feminist have found them not at
all helpful]
back to Lather page
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