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This article, which introduces this special issue on new empiricisms and new materialisms, focuses on two of the many conditions that enable this new work: first, an ethical imperative to rethink the nature of being to refuse the devastating dividing practices of the dogmatic Cartesian image of thought and, second, a heightened curiosity and accompanying experimentation in the becoming of existence. The article includes a brief description of how matter matters differently in this new work, of Deleuze and Guattari's description of philosophy as the laying out of a plane that enables new concepts, a discussion of the "new," and how/if methodology can be thought in the "new.

Our article is a response to the editors' call to challenge simplistic and mechanistic approaches to qualitative research that preclude dense and multilayered treatment of data. The editors assert that such practices can lead to (over)simplified knowledge claims, something especially risky when participant "voice" is presented as an expression of "experience" devoid of context. In this article, we specifically challenge simplistic treatments of voice in qualitative research that beckon voices to "speak for themselves" or that reduce complicated and conflicting voices to analytical "chunks" that can be interpreted free of context and circumstance.It is our view that such resistance of methodological simplicity is a practice that qualitative researchers should be concerned with. We are not referring to a use of theory and/or jargon for the purpose of obfuscation and erudition. We are advocating such as a move to create a way of thinking methodologically and philosophically that gets us out of the trap of fixing meaning and instead opens up previously unthought questions. In other words, we are advocating that qualitative researchers think with theory 1 as a guard against being seduced by the desire to create a coherent and interesting narrative that does little to challenge hegemonic discourses and (over)simplified knowledge claims. We use theory in our effort to refuse the romance of voice as we attempt to open up, rather than foreclose, meaning.Conventional, interpretive, and critical approaches to qualitative inquiry frequently privilege voice because it has been assumed that voice can speak the truth of consciousness and experience. In these paradigms, voice lingers close to the true and the real, and because of this proximity, has become seen almost as a mirror of the soul, the essence of the self. Qualitative researchers have been trained to privilege this voice, to "free" the authentic voice from whatever restrains it from coming into being, from relating the truth about the self. This drive to make voices heard and understood, bringing meaning and self to consciousness and creating transcendental, universal truths, gestures toward the primacy of voice in conventional qualitative research.To solve the problem of voice in conventional, interpretive, and critical qualitative research, methodologists have taken up various practices in attempts to "let voices speak for themselves," to "give voice," or to "make voices heard" (see Jackson, 2003, for an epistemological perspective and critique). As Guba and Lincoln (2005) explain, "As researchers became more conscious of the abstracted realities their AbstractIn this article, the authors respond to the editors' call to challenge simplistic and mechanistic approaches to qualitative research that preclude dense and multilayered treatment of data. The editors assert that such practices can lead to (over)simplified knowledge claims, something especially risky when participant "voice" is presented as an expression of "experience" devoid of context. The authors approach ...

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