Abstract
This article attempts to reconceptualize qualitative research around young people, sexuality, and schooling. In a bid to contribute to what has been coined “post-qualitative” research, it grapples with questions of epistemology and ontology which some argue much humanist methodology negates. This discussion is situated within current debates about the utility of method and a context in which sexuality research and methodology appears to have stagnated. Taking two moments from sexuality research previously conceived within a humanist qualitative methodological paradigm, the article thinks them with feminist new materialist thought. The aim is to consider what new methodological, ethical, and ontological possibilities feminist new materialist ideas afford for research in the field of sexualities and beyond. The article argues that new materialist thought invites an open-ness and response-ability from researchers which reorients the ethics of sexuality research and the nature of sexuality itself.
This article attempts to contribute to what has been coined “post-qualitative research.” St. Pierre (2011) harnessed this term to encourage researchers to move beyond perceived inadequacies of humanist qualitative methodology typical of the 1980s. Her critique has been that much of this conventional research fails to shake-off its positivist legacy continuing to be driven by a need for “proper rules and procedures” as encompassed by concepts like “validity,” “bias,” “subjectivity,” “triangulation,” and “data coding” (St. Pierre, 2015). Traditional qualitative research also suffers from a lack of rigorous attention to questions of epistemology and ontology. This omission is evidenced in the teaching of social science research where St. Pierre describes methodology is predominately taught as separate from epistemology and ontology subsequently, “. . . reducing inquiry to method and research design” (St. Pierre, 2015, p. 85). Instead of concentrating on prescriptive rules around methods of data collection and analysis, St. Pierre (2015) suggests, “putting the concepts and theories of experimental ontology to work using the conceptual practices that are appropriate for a particular study” (p. 92). Her advice for those who want to attempt this “new empiricism” (Clough, 2009) is to relinquish all methods-driven research and read theory instead (St. Pierre, 2015).
I am drawn by St. Pierre’s (and others’) call (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; MacLure, 2013) to grapple with qualitative research’s ontological and epistemological concerns. As a researcher of education, young people, and sexuality, I have often been frustrated by what feels like a cul-de-sac (Rasmussen & Allen, 2014) of predictable questions, issues, and responses that render empirical research unable to say much new about these areas. My own sustained entanglement with methods-driven research means that while I would like too, I can’t quite fore-go it yet. With regard to the methods-based studies I have already undertaken, I worry that such abandonment is unethical in the face of effort and time contributed by those who have peopled this research. I also wonder if it is even ontologically possible? As Koro-Ljungberg (2016) writes, “Researchers are always constituted within a tradition, and they continue to be a part of tradition at-the-same-time that they might be capable of rupturing and changing traditions by not responding to its call for duty or not following rules” (p. 131). In this article then, I attempt to unsettle humanist qualitative research at the same time as I describe my enactment of it. My gesture to the field of post-qualitative research is to apply ethic-onto-epistem-ology, that is, an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being from feminist new materialism (Barad, 2007, p. 185) to a re-reading of qualitative methodology, steeped within a humanist tradition.
This “messing” with two ontologically distinct methodological foundations is likely to be untenable for some. Hein (2016), for instance, discusses the compatibility of the work of Deleuze and Barad which is often implied in the way it is presented together. He maintains that “beyond a surface resemblance, their ontologies and their understanding of matter differ fundamentally” (p. 132). For Hein, such theoretical incompatibility presents an issue of ontological incoherence that undermines the intellectual rigor of such work. He questions the “appropriateness” of employing the concepts of one ontology with another highlighting an ensuing “danger” of ontological confusion (p. 138). Onto-epistemological consistency has traditionally been a characteristic of “high-quality” qualitative research. Post-qualitative research however has begun to mobilize “multi-directionality, post-human bodies, networks, otherness and disparities” (Lather, 2013, p. 2). In fact, Koro-Ljungberg (2016) suggests that for post-qualitative research to avoid repetition of one-set-of-methodological-rules-to-fit-all, “scholars ought to get surprised, confused, disorientated, and uncomfortable” (p. 6). In this article, I take concepts from feminist new materialism and plug them into (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013) moments from a humanist qualitative methodology. Within the experimental spirit of post-qualitative research, such theorization of methodology is considered a “productive onto-epistemological and political move” (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016, p. 8). In breaking with the logic of ontological compatibility, I seek “newness” (Springgay & Zaliwska, 2014) in the form of an escape from the cul-de-sac of existing considerations of conducting research about young people and sexuality at school.
So, what does this cul-de-sac of sexuality research at school look like? Within the existing literature (my own studies included) such research is considered a fraught enterprise (Allen, 2005; Kehily, 2002). The institutional framework of schooling produces a space in which sexuality is only sanctioned in specified forms; as heterosexual and cis-gendered, involving safer sex and preferably within loving/married relationships (Epstein, O’Flynn, & Telford, 2003). As the province of the mind (Paechter, 2004), schools are places in which expressions of sexuality are mostly unwelcome as evidenced in rules that prohibit sexual behavior. Sexuality research in this environment is difficult because it throws a spotlight on students as sexual and, in ways schools may not approve, that is, as sexually active outside specified boundaries of acceptability. In addition, schools are conceptualized as perpetuating prevailing discourses of sexuality including notions of childhood innocence (Robinson, 2013), youth as at risk (Powell, 2007), and fears around sexualization (Renold, Ringrose, & Egan, 2015). These discourses constitute sexuality and research which explores it, as controversial and potentially detrimental to young people (e.g., by increasing their sexual awareness and subsequently presumed likelihood of engaging in sexual activity).
This context has constrained the kinds of questions school-based sexuality research can pursue and the methodologies it has employed. Consequently, such research has tended to be intellectually cautious, confining itself to well traversed issues such as sexuality education pedagogy and content. There has also been an emphasis on determining the effectiveness of programs in achieving governmental aims (Poobalan et al., 2009) and identifying and redressing negative experiences of sexuality such as homophobia (DePalma & Jennett, 2012) and more recently transphobia (Jones et al., 2016). The sexual cultures of schooling (Allen, 2017) and schools’ proclivity for risk-aversity has also regulated understandings of young people, as “sexually vulnerable” and “at risk” to themselves and others (Robinson & Davies, 2014). What this has meant for sexuality researchers is that attaining ethics approval and gaining access to educational institutions have often been a protracted process (Sikes & Piper, 2012). Delayed ethics approval and school’s refusal to allow researcher access are often “justified” with concerns of protecting “vulnerable” students and assuaging parental anxiety over sexuality research’s “negative” effects.
The controversy and caution that often accompanies school-based sexuality research has stymied the use of methodologies that are new and experimental. Epistemological underpinnings of existing studies typically involve a representational understanding of the human researcher as separate from their objects of knowledge and in a relationship of hierarchical dominance to them (Davies, 2018). These epistemological foundations have stimulated a preponderance of research methods such as questionnaires, classroom observation, interviews, and focus groups to determine the effectiveness of sexuality education programs (Aggleton & Crewe, 2005). Despite valiant efforts by researchers to improve sexuality education’s effectiveness in terms of governmental objectives, unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmissible infections remain of perennial global concern. In a bid to exit the cul-de-sac of this representational research (MacLure, 2013), this article attempts to refuse “the seduction of representationalism” and abandon the illusion of the autonomous self-governing reflexively aware researcher (Davies, 2018, p. 13). My aim is to attempt to shift the terms of reference by which we evaluate the methodological success of school-based sexuality research via feminist new materialist thought. I endeavor to dislodge the notion of method as a recipe to follow, whereby this article becomes my example of the im/possibilities for such research which you readers collect or reject for your own empirical wanderings.
Why Do This Work?
In beginning to draft this article, I set out in the direction of exploring some of the im/possibilities of conducting school-based sexuality research with young people. In a conventional approach to this task (as undertaken in Allen, 2005), I imagined I would sketch how the institutional context of schooling creates both limitations and opportunities for eliciting rich data about young people’s sexuality at school. In the conclusion, I envisaged offering “tips and tricks” learned from experiences as a sexuality researcher to support others working in this methodological field. And then, I felt like a fraud. I realized that defining the possibilities and impossibilities of doing research on sexuality in schools isn’t in my power. It wasn’t when I was conducting my own research as the methodological moments I offer below reveal, and still isn’t now. So why write in a way that implies capture over these? How ethical is this? How useful would anything I write in this vein really be? Without knowing the specifics of the context in which other researchers are working, my so called “pearls of wisdom” can only ever offer decontextualized decision-making.
How then might I write an article that is more ethical for sexuality researchers engaged in methodological decision-making? Within the paradigm of humanist qualitative research, researcher ethics is often conceived in terms of morality, duty, or compliance with institutional ethics requirements. However, from a new materialist perspective ethics is not a duty, but a response (Barad, 2007). As Davies (2018) explains, Ethics . . . demands that we examine the onto-epistemologies through which any events are constituted and constitutive. We must continually ask; how are we mutually implicated in particular unethical practices; what practices of knowing and being are we mobilizing when we choose to engage in them, or to ignore them; how are we dis/continuous with the world’s injustices. (p. 13)
By examining the onto-epistemology of my previous research and exploring the limitations of its representational account, I attempt to engage in a form of post-qualitative research ethics. Data collection tools in my previous studies, which included questionnaire and visual methods, mobilized a form of research which privileges the human subject/researcher as someone who can know the world and is ontologically separate from it. In dis/continuity with this previous practice, my response (Barad, 2007) is an openness (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016) to other theories and methods (in this case feminist new materialist) which might apprehend these research relationships differently. In this article, I make a commitment to thinking about researching sexuality at school with feminist new materialist theory, in ways that attempt to exceed existing methodological parameters.
I make no claims that such work will result in more just outcomes, for these effects are not mine to orchestrate. This is not an abdication of my ethical responsibility as a researcher, but an acknowledgment of my inseparability from the rest of the world in its intra-active becoming (see below). A post-qualitative account of research mobilizes an ethic-onto-epistemology in which presence demands openness and response—as a form of response-ability (Barad, 2007). Referring more broadly to issues of justice, but in a way that holds resonance for research methodology, Barad (2007) writes, Justice, which entails acknowledgement, recognition, and loving attention, is not a state that can be achieved once and for all. There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly. (p. X)
A representational research methodology promises more certainty about my ability to secure justice for research participants, young people, and researchers of youth and sexuality. It does this by endowing me a place of central authority in the research landscape from which I control what happens in the empirical field. As the moments below attest however, such authority is indeed false and promises of justice illusory.
How else might I produce a more ethical discussion of methodology utilizing a post-qualitative research approach? Koro-Ljungberg (2016) discusses how researchers’ responsibility can extend beyond participant protection and procedural compliance “towards ways in which scholars approach uncertainty and not-knowing” (p. 117). For Koro-Ljungberg, researchers who embrace the plethora of unknowns as an inevitability of conducting research, rather than refusing or ignoring them, are practicing a post-qualitative research ethics. She writes, In the context of research, responding to the call from the Other can imply theoretically and methodologically unlimited and ongoing movement toward the unknown and beyond established knowledge, questioning and dislocating the knowledge one desires to produce. Engagement with the edge, or with the Other, and advance of the future or the borderline, are preconditions for responsibility. (Wang, 2005, cited in Koro-Ljungberg, 2016, p. 126)
This embracing open-ness of not-knowing is deemed ethical in the way it attempts to decenter the researcher as all-knowing master of the empirical process. In representational research logic, the accomplished researcher has considered, planned, and prepared for almost all empirical probabilities. Via these acts, the researcher exhibits control over the research process and their work is equated with responsible and ethical practice. Relinquishing this control, by acknowledging you don’t know what is going to happen, you can’t control what participants will do, and you have no guarantee that the results will lead to “just” outcomes, risks being seen as methodologically incompetent. Failure to show careful planning and sufficient mastery over method implies methodological carelessness and subsequently unethical researcher practice. Under such conditions, to admit not knowing what will happen and actively embracing this to be open to other sorts of ways of being-doing constitute a step into the empirical unknown.
Embracing openness is not the only risk I take in endeavoring a more ethical consideration of my previous work’s methodology. As indicated above, engagement with the borderlines of methodology can banish some discussions to obscurity for being irrelevant to methodological consideration. In this article, I pay attention to “methodological borderlands” in the form of two moments that within the realms of humanist qualitative research—sit on the methodological edge. They constitute borders because they didn’t occur while I was engaged in data collection. Rather, they are situated before, and after, this work. The first occurred while I was in the early stages of recruiting schools for my doctoral research. The second holds an even more tenuous relationship to methodology, as it happened while presenting findings more recently at a conference. With all data collected, analyzed, and written-up, the project was complete, stranding this moment outside the limits of what is conventionally understood as “methodology.” New empiricisms, however, understand methodology as a journey without a specific temporal beginning and end point (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). This means that methodology is unending and not conceptualized as confined to certain stages of a research project or finished when the study has ended. Including this moment marks a disruption to methodological traditions and is another attempt at a post-qualitative ethics of responsibility.
Two Research Moments
I deliberately present the two research moments here before an explanation of why they were chosen, to privilege them first as event. In representational methodological accounts, researchers often begin by explaining how examples were collected and then justifying their selection as indicative of something they want to highlight. As the discussion of their appearance unfolds below, I propose their inclusion is more than my doing. Through this discussion, and in outlining these moments first, I attempt to fore-go, some researcher authority. This move is destined to be largely unsuccessful, because in true representational style I, as human researcher, re-present these events for you. As a consequence, the ontological divide between knower and known is reinstated. What is ethical in post-qualitative research, however, is to try to respond to the challenge of feminist new materialist theory, knowing there will be inevitable failure and being open to the vulnerability such failure exposes me as a researcher.
Moment 1
It’s early days in my preparations for entering the field during my doctoral research. I’ve sent out 6 letters endeavoring to recruit schools to participate in 3 methods—a questionnaire, interviews and focus groups. These form part of my investigation of a “gap” identified in the existing literature between what young people know about safer sex and what they actually do in practice. Sitting at my desk, the phone rings. I answer, and hear the authoritative voice of what can only be a teacher. Hope rushes over me that it is a school willing to participate. Instead, I hear the words “We have received your research invitation and copy of the proposed questionnaire. Is it possible for you to come to my office as I would like to talk to you about some of the questions?” A week later I am sitting in the health teacher’s office, feeling like a naughty student who is about to be reprimanded. The teacher explains that members of her health teaching team are concerned by the nature of some of the questions. For instance, why I am asking about young people’s sexual desire and how is this relevant to improving the effectiveness of sexuality education? Well prepared by my doctoral supervisors, I explain how Michelle Fine’s (1988) research identifies a missing discourse of desire in sexuality education which may be useful in thinking through the knowledge/practice gap. After another hour of questioning I am given permission to come back next week and distribute the questionnaire. As I leave the office the teacher says “Thank you for coming in, part of the reason we asked you to was to make sure you were normal . . . ”
Moment 2
I’m 30 minutes into a conference presentation where I am showing photographs collected during visual research from a project around the sexual cultures of schooling. The images have been taken by students in the last 2 years of secondary school (aged 16-18 years) as part of a photo-diary method. Participants were asked to capture images over a week that revealed how they learned about sexuality at school. Currently on the data-projection screen is an image of “Hannah,” taken by her friend Madison to demonstrate how student clothing offers meanings about sexuality. The picture shows Hannah wearing a spaghetti string tank top. In accordance with ethics regulations to protect Hannah’s identity, Madison has cropped her friend’s head out of the picture. The effect (although not intentional) is one of objectification as Hannah’s headless torso dominates the image. I am discussing how Madison’s adherence to ethical regulations designed to protect participants, has resulted in an image that identifies a need to rethink ethics stipulations around participant anonymity. As I’m about to answer a question from the front of the room, another audience member’s voice interjects with “You are abusing children.” This voice says other things I cannot remember, but that suggest deep displeasure with the research and its ethics. Tension in the room swells as other audience members enter the dialogue, some like me defending the work, others less certain about it. The room begins to agitate to the point where people are talking over each and the dregs of my presentation dissolve in the air. A loud voice, the conference convener’s, ends the cacophony with a call to order. Later, I am told, this moment became the talk of the post-conference discussion.
These two moments are explored here because they offer what Koro-Ljungberg (2016) calls, “methodological sticky points” (p. xvii). Methodological sticky points are those research moments that have the potential to expose methodological grand narratives. The first grand narrative they reveal is that what counts as research methodology has a clear beginning and end point. “Moment 2” is dis/continuous with conventional boundaries of research methodology because it falls outside these in discussing a moment after project completion. The second methodological grand narrative disrupted is that meticulous planning provides sufficient preparation for researchers to deal with challenging research moments. The doctoral project from which “Moment 1” is drawn was supervised by two international authorities in the field of gender, sexuality, and education. “Moment 2” is derived from a project that received a “Research Excellence” award and underwent ethical review from an institutional committee. In both studies, project preparation was extensive with comprehensive external support and review. Thorough preparation did not prevent these moments from occurring, nor necessarily make them easier to manage. The last grand narrative exposed is that being an experienced researcher mitigates the likelihood of difficult moments occurring. The first moment is taken from the beginning of my career as a novice researcher and doctoral student, while the second occurred more recently when I was an associate professor. As a temporal juxtaposition, they reveal, what Robinson and Davies (2014) astutely note about researching young people and sexuality, that “ . . . even experienced senior researchers in the field can be caught up in moral panics” (p. 259).
In accordance with a post-qualitative approach, I want to attribute the selection of these moments to more than my determination of their utility. That is, the idea that researchers are “autonomous agents, choosing and disposing” of methodologically salient issues (MacLure, 2013, pp. 660-661). To leave their appearance in this article as exclusively a consequence of my (presumed) human agency does little to unsettle traditional qualitative research. What post-qualitative enquiry enables is a recognition of how these research moments appear also of “their own volition.”
In this vein, MacLure (2013) offers one way of accounting for the capacity of these moments to attract my attention which endeavors to decenter researcher authority. Within feminist new materialist thinking (explained next), matter, in this case in the form of methodological moments, can be seen as animated and agential (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Coole & Frost, 2010). In this account, methodological moments are not the passive events produced by researcher action and thought, but rather, lively intra-active materiality with the capacity to provoke a reaction from me. With reference to the vitality of research “data,” MacLure (2013) explains that . . . we are obliged to acknowledge that data have their ways of making themselves intelligible to us. This can be seen, or rather felt, on occasions when one becomes especially “interested” in a piece of data, such as a sarcastic comment in an interview, or a perplexing incident, or an observed event that makes you feel kind of peculiar . . . on those occasions, agency feels distributed and undecidable, as if we have chosen something that has chosen us. (pp. 660-661)
MacLure (2013) elaborates that some data exhibits a kind of “glow” and attraction that is not under our conscious or intentional control as researchers. For me, the methodological moments here exhibit a kind of “glow” out of many research moments I have experienced. The glow generated by “Moment 1” might be attributable to the way it “left me feeling kind of peculiar” (MacLure, 2013). Although I had diligently prepared for the eventuality of needing to defend my project’s methods, this did not alleviate the feeling of having done something wrong. This sense was communicated by the teacher’s parting words which positioned me as initially “suspect” and “untrustworthy” until I had convinced her of my intentions. Part of the reason I mention these moments is also to highlight the scrutiny to which sexuality researchers can be subject (see also Star Johnson, 2008). Perhaps it was because this was my first experience of such discomfort that the presence of this moment “glows.” To be clear, this is not because my feelings make it glow but that the glow derives from being a moment of methodology with the capacity to demand my attention.
The lively pull of the second methodological moment is evidenced in the fact that when I was originally asked to write about this incident, I refused. A special issue editor who was at this conference, later emailed me to ask if I would contribute an article about what had happened. My written response (archived on my computer) was, Thank you for the invitation to write about what happened . . . it is an honour to be asked. My view at this time is that this audience member has already had their “air time” and I would not want to warrant their actions with further attention. They expressed what are dominant understandings about young people, sexuality, images and camera-use and the power of these ideas . . . is not sufficiently disrupted by analytical reiteration. My energies are focused on new ways of ethically exceeding the conceptual and practical boundaries of what we can know and do in the field of critical sexualities studies.
Elsewhere in this response, I comment that such incidents are ‘unremarkable, having worked in the area for many years.’ And this is true, I have experienced and forgotten many similar occurrences. To my mind, this event was all but forgotten, apart from the fact that here I am writing about it, despite my best intentions not too. This moment refuses my refusal to engage with it. It has worked its way into this article by offering a poignant example of what I want to say despite my being uncertain and uncomfortable about its presence. I could have chosen another example but can’t recall one that serves my purposes better than this one, which keeps coming back to me above all others—demanding I engage with it. I find it interesting in my email response that I claim (representational) analysis does not provide sufficient justice to the cause of disrupting dominant understandings of young people and sexuality. Did this moment know that I would meet it again with feminist new materialist concepts to attempt to ethically exceed the conceptual and practical boundaries of critical sexualities research?
Reconceptualizing These Moments Via Feminist New Materialism
Before I undertake a feminist new materialist reading of these moments next, I analyze them here in a conventional representational frame to better illuminate their feminist new materialist reconfiguration. Representational logic means I could assign meaning to these moments to discern possibilities and impossibilities for conducting sexuality research at school. From a representational stance, these moments highlight the challenges of such research due to the ways in which sexuality, young people, and schooling are socially understood. Sexuality researchers must navigate a series of dominant discourses that constitute young people’s sexuality as in need of protection, leaving them vulnerable to others (Monk, 2001). Schools are attuned to these discourses as they are held legally accountable for protecting students from harm, making sexuality research especially difficult within them. In both moments, these discourses position the sexuality researcher as someone who is “a risk” to students. This risk occurs because the researcher employs a methodology that addresses young people as sexual subjects by asking them to express their thoughts in relation to sexuality and desire via questionnaire or photo-methods. In Moment 2, the researcher is constituted more strongly as “abusing children,” for presenting photos generated by 16- to 18-year-olds that participants’ perceived expressed sexuality. Here the structural power differences between adult researcher and young people, as well as the power of the image which focuses on Hannah’s body in an objectifying way, produce a sense of risk.
In a representational account however, despite these challenges, sexuality research can still proceed if researchers plan their projects meticulously and prepare for “tricky” situations. In “Moment 1,” for instance, initial resistance to distributing the questionnaire was overcome by grounding it within the authority of existing literature. Similarly, although it generated significant tension, “Moment 2” sparked productive conversations and action regarding research ethics that extended beyond the conference. Clearly then, the institutional context of schooling and prevailing discourses of young people and sexuality create both limitations and opportunities for undertaking this kind of research. What readers might glean from this article is the need for careful methodological planning, strong academic justification for projects, and appreciation of the likelihood of difficult moments arising. Such representational narratives offer researchers comfort in the apparent certainty they provide, that anything is possible despite the methodological hiccups and uncertainties presented here. From a feminist new materialist perspective, however, it is in these methodological uncertainties that school-based sexuality research be-comes.
A Feminist New Materialist Account
Feminist new materialist thought is associated with the work of scholars like Barad (2007), Bennett (2010), Braidotti (2002), Harraway (2008), Kirby (2011), and Coole and Frost (2010). Although its expressions are diverse, it heralds an ontological reorientation that involves a “new metaphysics” of materiality (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 13). As Davies (2018) explains, “New materialist thought makes a fresh challenge to the taken-for-granted ascendance of all things human in qualitative research, and it argues for the co-implication of humans with non-human matter, where the subject is ‘already part of the substances, systems, and becomings of the world’” (Davies, 2018, p. 2 drawing on Alaimo, 2014, p. 14). For Barad (2007), the mechanism of this co-implication is intra-action a concept derived from the body of thought known as “agential realism.” Drawing on quantum physics, intra-action involves the idea that all things lack an independent and self-contained existence. That is, things or “phenomena” in an agential realist sense do no pre-exist each other and are instead brought into being via their intra-action. Such intra-action is not a conventional relationship of discrete, ontologically prior entities intertwining. Instead, it is an entanglement of ontologically inseparable phenomena that come into being (be-come) via their iterative intra-activity agency. Materiality in this framework is “not mere stuff, an inanimate given-ness. Rather, matter is . . . not a thing . . . but a doing, a congealing of agency” (Kleinman, 2012, p. 80).
This ontological reorientation has profound implications for the practice of qualitative research. “If humans have no separate existence, if we are completely entangled with the world, if we are no longer masters of the universe . . . ” (St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016, p. 101) then empirical research is no longer possible in its current form. With feminist new materialism’s collapse of the ontological divide between researcher and researched, what we currently understand as methodology comes into being at the same moment as the researcher. The researcher does not precede the methodology they implement, instead researcher and methodology intra-actively be-come simultaneously. This means researchers can no longer be understood as the curators of their projects, designing and controlling research and its outcomes. As they are not situated in a position of pre-existing privilege, it is also not possible for them to extract meaning from the objects under their investigation. Previous markers of robust methodology, such as planning, rigor, and systematicity (St. Pierre, 2015, p. 80), are obsolete in this new form of empiricism. The role of the researcher might instead be imagined “loosely” and “imperfectly” as engaging in “a kind of ‘surfing’ of the intensity of the event that has caught us up, in order to arrive somewhere else” (MacLure, 2013, p. 662). Within this feminist new materialist framing I might view “Moment 2” as being caught up in a conference event, which despite my protestations that I did not want to engage with, I am now writing about as a quasi-intentional act. I surf the intensity of this event as an inextricable part of its congealing agency, navigating its flow, but unable to prevent its be-coming.
Feminist new materialist thought reconceptualizes these moments of researching young people as unknowable unfoldings. This is a very different perception from them as generating a methodological recipe to follow. The flattened ontology of the research landscape means the researcher is not a privileged component of it, and subsequently not more knowledgeable about what will happen. Methodology from this perspective cannot be seen to produce possibilities or impossibilities for “good” data collection. In this paradigm, methodology occurs at the same moment as the becoming of the researcher and event under investigation. As such, being more/better/differently prepared is an unintelligible response to preventing the moments above from happening, because within the ontological reorientation of feminist new materialist thought, it makes no sense to think of research as in the researcher’s exclusive control. This ontological reorientation raises questions like, “What might this thinking do to research if we recognize researchers are no longer in control?” “What might it mean, for instance, for the practice of ethics committee review?”
If we decenter the authority of the researcher, how do we think about their role as surfing the intensity of the event? Koro-Ljungberg (2016) offers that we might practice methodologies without methodology. This conceptualization involves “ . . . methodology without strict boundaries or normative structures—methodologies that may begin anywhere, anytime, but by doing so can create a sense of uncertainty and loss (or mourning of stable, fixed, preconceptualised, or historical knowledge)” (p. 1). In this article, employing methodologies without methodology has meant disrupting the conventional composition and structure of methodological discussions. Including moments which conventionally sit outside the data collection process is an attempt to instigate a sense of uncertainity about where methodology begins and ends. Typically, there is a linear format when recounting methodology which involves first justifying and describing the use of methods, then reflecting on what worked to propose changes for future application. The current discussion dis-orders this pattern, starting instead at the end by mapping two moments/events inaugurated by methodology’s implementation. Rather than critically reflecting on what methodology enables, I theorize its onto-epistemological underpinnings, by asking how feminist new materialist concepts might engender thinking differently about the methodology of researching sexuality and young people at school.
One of the ways in which feminist new materialist thought enables a different mode of thinking about methodology is in its reconceptualization of methodology’s relationship to its object under investigation. Within agential realism’s understanding of “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies,” (Barad, 2007, p. 33) the object of investigation does not pre-exist a project’s research methodology. So, for instance, sexuality as an object of investigation is not a separate entity out there in the world that method uncovers. Rather, sexuality materializes in intra-action with the method. Barad explains this inseparability of the object of investigation and the method with reference to the notion of “apparatus” used in physics experiments. In an interview with Kleinman (2012), she explains, For example, a particular “apparatus”—that is, a particular set of material-discursive practices that materializes, say, particles, in this case—has the dual function of giving meaning to the notion of “particle” as well as participating in materializing “particles,” that is, determinately bounded things with determinate sets of particle properties (within the phenomenon). (p. 80)
Research methodology then is a particular set of material-discursive practices that materializes sexuality in the current research. As a specific apparatus, methodology gives meaning to the notion of sexuality as well as participating in its ontological becoming. Because apparatuses enact agential cuts that produce determinate boundaries and properties of “entities,” they are boundary-making practices (Barad, 2007, p. 148). Methodology as apparatus shapes how we understand what sexuality is. It does this, though, not from a position of exteriority, that is, externally configuring the nature of sexuality and influencing how we understand what it means, but in the way that methodology is ontologically inseparable from what sexuality is, or more accurately, what sexuality intra-actively be-comes.
In re-reading the moments above within feminist new materialist thought, they cannot be understood as a consequence of insufficient methodological preparation or the way sexuality is socially understood. From a traditional qualitative research account it is the object of investigation (i.e., the research topic), in this case sexuality, and people’s reaction to it, which causes these methodological moments to occur. Taking Moment 1 as an example, the health teacher is cautious of the questionnaire and me as researcher, because of the way in which sexuality is socially conceived as dangerous for young people. In this rendition, both sexuality (as socially constituted) and the researcher/methods are viewed as ontologically separate entities that cause this event. However, feminist new materialist ontology inaugurates another set of questions because of the way in which research, methodology, and sexuality are intra-actively entangled. This theory enables me to ask, “How do these methodological moments provide insights about the ontology of sexuality at school?” This question is not asking, as it would in qualitative research mode; what do these moments tell us about the subject under study? But, how do the methodological moments make the topic under study?
This is a very different conceptualization of methodology as a tool the human researcher wields to understand young people’s sexuality at school. It enables an ontological understanding whereby what student sexuality is, be-comes via the methodological moments above. The methodology doesn’t shape the object under investigation; it is ontologically derived in the same moment as it. Method then, is concept. 1 When the conference venue erupts in “Moment 2” with the audiences’ reaction to the words “you are abusing children,” the nature of sexuality itself, sexuality research methodology, and sexuality researchers are ontologically made. They are ontologically materialized in this event as something dangerous and which renders young people vulnerable. This is no longer a discussion of “how does methodology help us to understand the nature of sexuality at school?” A feminist new materialist reconceptualization goes much further. Instead, it enables us to ask “how the methodological issues in these moments are productive of the nature of sexuality itself?” (for more, see Allen, 2015). Far from being obstacles or dilemmas to conducting research, these methodological moments contain a rich source of knowledge about how the nature of sexuality and young people as ontological entities come into being. These methodological moments intra-actively determine the boundaries and properties of sexuality and sexuality research with young people at school as “risky, dangerous, problematic, sexualizing” and “abusive.”
A Reconceptualization of Ethics in Sexuality Education Research
This final section considers the implications of a feminist new materialist conceptualization of ethics for researching sexuality, young people, and schooling. With the concept of ethico-onto-epistemology, Barad (2007) posits that how we understand the relation of knowledge and being is a profoundly ethical issue. In her agential realist account of mattering, she indicates that “responsibility is not a calculation to be performed” (Kleinman, 2012, p. 82). I take this to mean that responsibility is not action an individual chooses to undertake or a right way to respond to something/someone to be seen to act justly. Responsibility is instead . . . a relation always already integral to the world’s ongoing intra-active be-coming and not-becoming. That is, responsibility is an iterative (re)opening up to, an enabling of responsiveness. Not through the realization of some existing possibility, but through the iterative reworking of im/possibility. (Kleinman, 2012, p. 82)
Response-ability is already a condition of our intra-active entanglement with the world which we cannot ignore because we are inseparable from it (St. Pierre, Jackson & Mazzei, 2016). Within an agential realist account, it is not intelligible to say, “that issue/person/crisis/natural disaster does not matter to me,” because all of these things are inseparable from us. They form part of our own intra-active “mattering.” Put another way, there is no “me” that is ontologically separate from a particular person, issue, natural disaster, and so forth, as our intra-active entanglement ensures our indistinguishability from them. This mode of presence in the world subsequently incurs “irreducible relations of responsibility” (Barad, 2010, p. 264). As St. Pierre, Jackson and Mazzei (2016) write, “We cannot ignore matter (e.g., our planet) as if it is inert, passive and dead. It is completely alive, becoming with us, whether we destroy or protect it” (p. 101). What response-ability entails then according to Barad is “inviting, welcoming and enabling the response of the Other” (Kleinman, 2012, p. 81).
How then can we invite the response of the Other in a methodological discussion of researching sexuality at school? An open-ness to the Other is evident in this article via the appearance of moments which include the voices of (human) others whose ideas about young people and sexuality are the reason why I continue to undertake research in this area. Situating me as “suspect” in “Moment 1” and the “abuse” comment in “Moment 2” is talk constituted by the sorts of dominant discourses which the original research projects sought to challenge. Including these comments, even though I don’t agree with them and I am still reluctant to engage with them, is an example of the “irreducible relations of responsibility” to which Barad (2010) refers. A conventional qualitative research approach would critically analyze such moments for the possibilities and impossibilities they constitute for sexuality research. In the current article, a different form of “justice” is in practice, one which recognizes there is no right answer to handling these moments. Doing or not doing something such as seeking help from more experienced researchers or preparing better responses to difficult questions would not have altered the materialization of these events. When methodology is conceptualized as an unknowable unfolding and the researcher intra-actively part of this research landscape, such things are not in their control. What is ethical in a feminist new materialist approach, however, is an embracing open-endedness to not-knowing and the “iterative reworking of im/possibility” (Kleinman, 2012, p. 82).
Koro-Ljungberg (2016) suggests it is methodologically ethical to put these feminist new materialist ideas to work “without hesitation, reservation, qualification, or judgement, and to set in motion new thinking regarding theoretical and methodological possibilities” (p. 120). And this is not an easy task in the way it risks appearing anti-intellectual, methodologically irresponsible, and inciting discomfort with the unknown. Perhaps most of all, it appears to disappoint academic audiences in its dismantling of researcher authority which is one of the pillars upon which academic endeavor and integrity are built. It is also an ethics which requires deviating from the known rewards of empirical enquiry and certainty about positive research outcomes. In addition, the term post-qualitative research marks a space for something that is, as yet, not easily recognized because it exists outside our (human) grid of intelligibility. Putting feminist new materialist ideas to work in this environment is an act of intellectual vulnerability, for it is impossible to get such discussion “right” when post-qualitative research and its possibilities for becoming are constantly being remade. With reference to the work of Cixous, Davies (2018, p. 7) writes, “To dare to go where one is blind, where thought has not yet happened, where the unknown is yet to emerge and multiply, is for Cixous, ethical writing” (citing Williams, 2012). The acknowledgment of the impossibility of “getting methodologies right” exposes researchers to responsibility toward the Other—other ways of knowing, other methodologies, and other research approaches. This article has attempted to embrace this open-endedness in a form of ethic-onto-epistemological surfing.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by University of Auckland Grant 3606314/9215.
