The influence of posthumanist philosophies-broadly defined to include theories such as Baradian n... more The influence of posthumanist philosophies-broadly defined to include theories such as Baradian new materialism, Deleuzian assemblage theory, Wynterian counterhumanism, Afrofuturism studies, Indigenous studies theories of nonhuman agency, and others-on education research has been increasing at an exponential rate. This chapter provides a review of this literature organized around the theme of ethical and political responsibility. It compares four genres of posthumanist inquiry: assemblage studies, cartographic studies, diffractive studies, and place-based research. It locates these genres on a continuum from descriptive to enactive forms of inquiry. The review concludes with an examination of three different conceptions of futurity that inform posthumanist reconceptualizations of research responsibility, suggesting research is most powerful when all three are attended to in research designs.
Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing at a hectic pace, the idea of narra-tive has penetrate... more Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing at a hectic pace, the idea of narra-tive has penetrated almost every discipline and school. No longer the sole province of literary scholarship, narrative study is now cross-disciplinary, not fitting within the boundaries of any single scholarly field.
Empirical research informed by posthumanist philosophy is proliferating in the social sciences. T... more Empirical research informed by posthumanist philosophy is proliferating in the social sciences. This research takes many forms and is willfully pluralistic and creative in the analytic approaches it takes. The innovation, however, is not entirely free form. Posthumanist scholarship both employs familiar forms of inference and is also forwarding a distinctive array of inferential practices that until now have not been commonly present in mainstream/whitestream social sciences. Attending to the logic of emerging posthumanist empiricism can help clarify the affirmative ethics and politics of posthumanist inquiry. This essay offers that a modal, dialethic, paraconsistent logic of action is more suited to posthumanist inquiry than a classical logic of representation. This logic of action locates validity not with the accuracy of representations, but in the specific character of the futurities enabled and disabled by the ontologically generative action of inquiry. Implications for an axiology of posthumanist empiricism are explored.
The construct of moral injury is usually utilized to understand cases in which individuals perfor... more The construct of moral injury is usually utilized to understand cases in which individuals perform or witness actions they consider morally wrong. In this paper, we suggest the construct of moral trap, which entails circumstances in which teachers face pressure to act but are unable to simultaneously meet the demands of care, justice, and truthfulness because of systemic conditions. Using grounded theory, we present the analysis of ten semi-structured interviews with teachers from four U.S. states. We found three different types of entrapment: teachers attempting to enact and/ or advocate for social justice, attempting to care for their families, and attempting to care for their professional identities. Implications for teacher education include a need to prepare teachers for navigating multiple moral demands and for coordinating with other teachers to advocate for social change. Implications for policy include a need to provide greater wrap-around supports for educational equity.
In this “paper,” we share our process of exploring the possibilities for the emergence of new way... more In this “paper,” we share our process of exploring the possibilities for the emergence of new ways of knowing-thinking-doing response-able collaboration. In an effort to come “together-apart” as author-collaborators, working from our different positionings and locations in the world, we shared text and images of the various ways the ideas from individual papers (nodal points) and our diffractive processes were moving (with) us. Sharing these creative respondings, new relations co-emerged through the texts-images and the various diffractive patterns that traveled widely through screens, devices, bodies, from New Zealand and Australia, to Iran, London, Finland, Canada, and the West and East Coasts of the United States. Paying attention to the fine details, difference emerged, as did new forms of more-than-human connection. The visual and written respondings were then cut together-apart (literally, metaphorically and methodologically) to represent the multiplicities of the diffractive ...
Building on Karen Barad’s philosophy of science, this paper offers a diffractive reading of quant... more Building on Karen Barad’s philosophy of science, this paper offers a diffractive reading of quantum indeterminacy with/across the classic structure/agency dichotomy in social science scholarship. It highlights key parallels between the metaphysics of indeterminacy in both the physical and social sciences. In the course of this analysis, we draw upon relevant Indigenous studies literature. These citations are integrated into the diffractive analysis, both as a source of important and potentially transformative insight and as a performative illustration of enactment of political responsibility under conditions of ontological indeterminacy. The inclusion of the Indigenous studies citations raises questions about how to avoid problematic practices of appropriation and/or erasure. Instead of resolving this question, we will dwell within the indeterminacy it reveals and the responsibility for constructive action it brings into focus.
In this article, we share a curated version of a Zoom meeting in which we come together-apart to ... more In this article, we share a curated version of a Zoom meeting in which we come together-apart to articulate our experiences of the diffractive review process. In the later part of the dialogue, we turn toward imagining the possibilities for creatively exploring ways to represent how the ideas from this collaborative process travel with us, into our everyday lives. We discuss the ethical and political response-abilities in such diffractive collaboration and respondings, and in so doing, different author perspectives, positionalities, and productive tensions and knots, come to the fore. In so doing, this article connects the first part of the issue—the nodal points (author manuscripts)—with the final part of the issue (diffractive respondings), and provides insight into our collaborative and diffractive process.
I believe posthumanist philosophy promises the possibility of a more robustly ethical and politic... more I believe posthumanist philosophy promises the possibility of a more robustly ethical and political practice of social inquiry. I do not, however, believe analytic and rhetorical tools have been developed that deliver amply on that promise. This is less a reflection on the quality of efforts to do so, than it is on the scope of the challenge before us. Since this is an essay about what “postqualitative means to me,” I speak from within the desire to see that promise more fully realized and the belief that there is much work yet to be done. Simply stating that concern directly and describing the grounds for it, however, would involve a performative contradiction. It would presume the challenge is an epistemic one that yields to better information and clearer representation. The challenge, however, lies within the limitations of representation itself and the way convention compels us to address our scholarship to a humanist spectator subject, as opposed to seeking to transform the sub...
The influence of posthumanist philosophies-broadly defined to include theories such as Baradian n... more The influence of posthumanist philosophies-broadly defined to include theories such as Baradian new materialism, Deleuzian assemblage theory, Wynterian counterhumanism, Afrofuturism studies, Indigenous studies theories of nonhuman agency, and others-on education research has been increasing at an exponential rate. This chapter provides a review of this literature organized around the theme of ethical and political responsibility. It compares four genres of posthumanist inquiry: assemblage studies, cartographic studies, diffractive studies, and place-based research. It locates these genres on a continuum from descriptive to enactive forms of inquiry. The review concludes with an examination of three different conceptions of futurity that inform posthumanist reconceptualizations of research responsibility, suggesting research is most powerful when all three are attended to in research designs.
Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing at a hectic pace, the idea of narra-tive has penetrate... more Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing at a hectic pace, the idea of narra-tive has penetrated almost every discipline and school. No longer the sole province of literary scholarship, narrative study is now cross-disciplinary, not fitting within the boundaries of any single scholarly field.
Empirical research informed by posthumanist philosophy is proliferating in the social sciences. T... more Empirical research informed by posthumanist philosophy is proliferating in the social sciences. This research takes many forms and is willfully pluralistic and creative in the analytic approaches it takes. The innovation, however, is not entirely free form. Posthumanist scholarship both employs familiar forms of inference and is also forwarding a distinctive array of inferential practices that until now have not been commonly present in mainstream/whitestream social sciences. Attending to the logic of emerging posthumanist empiricism can help clarify the affirmative ethics and politics of posthumanist inquiry. This essay offers that a modal, dialethic, paraconsistent logic of action is more suited to posthumanist inquiry than a classical logic of representation. This logic of action locates validity not with the accuracy of representations, but in the specific character of the futurities enabled and disabled by the ontologically generative action of inquiry. Implications for an axiology of posthumanist empiricism are explored.
The construct of moral injury is usually utilized to understand cases in which individuals perfor... more The construct of moral injury is usually utilized to understand cases in which individuals perform or witness actions they consider morally wrong. In this paper, we suggest the construct of moral trap, which entails circumstances in which teachers face pressure to act but are unable to simultaneously meet the demands of care, justice, and truthfulness because of systemic conditions. Using grounded theory, we present the analysis of ten semi-structured interviews with teachers from four U.S. states. We found three different types of entrapment: teachers attempting to enact and/ or advocate for social justice, attempting to care for their families, and attempting to care for their professional identities. Implications for teacher education include a need to prepare teachers for navigating multiple moral demands and for coordinating with other teachers to advocate for social change. Implications for policy include a need to provide greater wrap-around supports for educational equity.
In this “paper,” we share our process of exploring the possibilities for the emergence of new way... more In this “paper,” we share our process of exploring the possibilities for the emergence of new ways of knowing-thinking-doing response-able collaboration. In an effort to come “together-apart” as author-collaborators, working from our different positionings and locations in the world, we shared text and images of the various ways the ideas from individual papers (nodal points) and our diffractive processes were moving (with) us. Sharing these creative respondings, new relations co-emerged through the texts-images and the various diffractive patterns that traveled widely through screens, devices, bodies, from New Zealand and Australia, to Iran, London, Finland, Canada, and the West and East Coasts of the United States. Paying attention to the fine details, difference emerged, as did new forms of more-than-human connection. The visual and written respondings were then cut together-apart (literally, metaphorically and methodologically) to represent the multiplicities of the diffractive ...
Building on Karen Barad’s philosophy of science, this paper offers a diffractive reading of quant... more Building on Karen Barad’s philosophy of science, this paper offers a diffractive reading of quantum indeterminacy with/across the classic structure/agency dichotomy in social science scholarship. It highlights key parallels between the metaphysics of indeterminacy in both the physical and social sciences. In the course of this analysis, we draw upon relevant Indigenous studies literature. These citations are integrated into the diffractive analysis, both as a source of important and potentially transformative insight and as a performative illustration of enactment of political responsibility under conditions of ontological indeterminacy. The inclusion of the Indigenous studies citations raises questions about how to avoid problematic practices of appropriation and/or erasure. Instead of resolving this question, we will dwell within the indeterminacy it reveals and the responsibility for constructive action it brings into focus.
In this article, we share a curated version of a Zoom meeting in which we come together-apart to ... more In this article, we share a curated version of a Zoom meeting in which we come together-apart to articulate our experiences of the diffractive review process. In the later part of the dialogue, we turn toward imagining the possibilities for creatively exploring ways to represent how the ideas from this collaborative process travel with us, into our everyday lives. We discuss the ethical and political response-abilities in such diffractive collaboration and respondings, and in so doing, different author perspectives, positionalities, and productive tensions and knots, come to the fore. In so doing, this article connects the first part of the issue—the nodal points (author manuscripts)—with the final part of the issue (diffractive respondings), and provides insight into our collaborative and diffractive process.
I believe posthumanist philosophy promises the possibility of a more robustly ethical and politic... more I believe posthumanist philosophy promises the possibility of a more robustly ethical and political practice of social inquiry. I do not, however, believe analytic and rhetorical tools have been developed that deliver amply on that promise. This is less a reflection on the quality of efforts to do so, than it is on the scope of the challenge before us. Since this is an essay about what “postqualitative means to me,” I speak from within the desire to see that promise more fully realized and the belief that there is much work yet to be done. Simply stating that concern directly and describing the grounds for it, however, would involve a performative contradiction. It would presume the challenge is an epistemic one that yields to better information and clearer representation. The challenge, however, lies within the limitations of representation itself and the way convention compels us to address our scholarship to a humanist spectator subject, as opposed to seeking to transform the sub...
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