Data Engagement: A Critical Materialist Framework for Making Data in Qualitative Research

Abstract

The language of “data collection” is perpetuated by disciplinary practices, as well as a pedagogical motivation to make data collection practices teachable to new generations of qualitative researchers. Interpretive and critical qualitative researchers generally bracket meta-theoretical discussion of what we do when we “collect” data, side-stepping epistemological complexities when reporting results. At the same time, we remain keenly aware that researchers bring data into being—we make it. We want to explore rather than skirt the epistemological and ontological issues involved in doing (and teaching) data collection. Yet, we differ from those postqualitative scholars who would abandon the concept of data. As a generative alternative, we promote data engagement. Drawing on intersectional feminist and other critical, materialist theorizing, we articulate a methodological practice that incorporates making, assembling, and becoming data, along with ethical commitments to pragmatism, compassion, and joy.

Farming Resilience: From Maintaining States towards Shaping Transformative Change Processes

“…To implement a process-relational approach, it seems judicious to engage with postqualitative inquiry and its possibility to produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently [39]. Postqualitative inquiry, like many 'posts', invites deconstruction, i.e., the displacement of overdetermined existing concepts, so that something different can be thought and done [120,[123][124][125]. Rooted in postmodernism, postqualitative inquiry challenges the notion of validity as correspondence to 'truth', since 'truth' is understood as made by humans, spaces of visibility constructed by power/knowledge so as to frame our seeing [126].…”

Doing Democratic Theory Democratically

“…I encourage theorists to embrace the material diversity of data and dive into the data assemblage. Understanding data as agentic and their meaning as context-dependent, theorists can take joy in the “mess[y] reality of piles of field notes, transcripts, photos and maps, memos and reflections, computer files, paper files, sticky notes with questions jotted on them, journal article PDFs, books, and all the other vital information and ideas that form cascading piles on our desks and computer desktop folders” (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2020, p. 820). It may make sense to lay out categories on papers on the floor, attach them on sticky notes to the wall or visualize them through software graphs, all of which can be done alone or with participants.…”

Troubling the Troublemakers: Three Challenges to Post-Qualitative Inquiry

“…This popular idea of data as pre-existing building blocks, that is, the tendency to treat data as objectively given, continues to be written off by PQI as naïve realism. Curiously, however, spun into such naïve realism, we often find the idea that data only exists as data because human researchers have created it from the "unintelligible stew" of daily living (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2020). This notion that data owes its existence to human researchers transforms data to a lifeless product of our creation.…”