Open lecture 18 November 2014 at 10−12
University of Helsinki, Siltavuorenpenger 3A, room 302

Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre: Practices for the ‘New’ in the New Post Qualitative Inquiry

The lecture is part of the workshop Encountering Post-Qualitative Inquiry with Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre organized by the doctoral programme SEDUCE and the research centre AGORA for the study of Social Justice & Equality in education.

Abstract of the lecture

What St. Pierre calls conventional humanist qualitative methodology typically begins with methodology and methods of data collection (interviewing and observation) that privilege the humanist Cartesian cogito. However, this methodology is based on a humanist onto-epistemology that is unintelligible in post humanist, new empirical, new material, and post qualitative inquiry in which the human is not a unique, separate individual that exists ahead of the world but is entangled with everything else. St. Pierre argues that beginning with that methodology prevents us from making the ontological turn and doing anything “new”.  She recommends, instead, that we leave qualitative methodology behind and begin with theory(ies) and concept(s) and that enable different “conceptual practices” that may or may not include qualitative methods.  “Practices for the new” St. Pierre recommends for doing this new work are (1) leaving qualitative methodology behind, (2) studying theory, (3) beginning research with theories and concepts instead of methodology, and (4) trusting yourself and getting to work.  In this work, method comes not at the beginning of a study to shut it down before it begins, but at the end, too late, when we think back about what we did and why and what we might have done instead and will try next time.

Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre is Professor in the Educational Theory and Practice Department and Affiliated Professor of both the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Program and the Women’s Studies Institute at the University of Georgia, USA. Her work focuses on theories of language and the subject from critical theories and poststructural theories and what she has called post qualitative inquiry or post inquiry —what might come after conventional humanist qualitative research methodology.  She is especially interested in the new empiricisms/new materialisms enabled by the ontological turn.  She has recently edited several issues of journals on this topic:  International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (theme: post qualitative inquiry), Qualitative Inquiry (theme: qualitative data analysis after coding), and Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies (in process, theme: the new empiricisms/new materialisms).