Orientating to Assembling: Qualitative Inquiry for More-Than-Human Worlds

Abstract

A key concern for qualitative inquiry is finding ways to account for nonhuman and emergent forms of life. Toward this, researchers are experimenting with research practices that decenter the human subject. Deleuze's (1977) assemblage concept has proved a useful resource for these methodological experiments. Most often, the assemblage concept has informed analysis and writing processes. This article puts the assemblage concept to work during each stage of an empirical research project exploring how people experience antidepressant use. It details seven ways that assemblages are used during concrete research processes across the span of the project. This strategy generates a sensibility toward qualitative inquiry described as orientating to assembling. The sensibility decenters the human as the focus of qualitative research. It enables the presence of nonhuman objects, not as acted-upon, but agents in the research processes. The article contributes to the challenges posed to human-centered qualitative research by reframing the focus entirely. It shows how using a sensibility that consistently decenters the human across all stages of empirical research projects, is a way that qualitative inquiry can account for more-than-human worlds.

Medical travel facilitators, private hospitals and international medical travel in assemblage

“…There are other aspects of international medical travel that can be examined using the assemblage approach, but it has not been possible to fully explore them in this paper. We can, howeer, mention two aspects here: first, the assemblage approach does not privilege the human (McLeod, ); as such, focusing on relations of components may yield insights on the range of disparate entities that play similar roles and functions; for example, see Kaspar and Reddy (this issue) for an analysis of human and non‐human ‘connectors’. Second, and following from this, assemblage wholes and components have independent agentic capacities that result from and act on their relations and interactions with one another.…”

“…Because specific components across an assemblage have different capacities to act, we can understand components as having their own agencies, and overall assemblages also having agentic capacity (McLeod, : 380). In this framework, MTFs, private hospitals, doctors, and other entities in the assemblage each have their own agentic capacities, and can plug into and out of international medical travel as assembled in specific sites.…”

“…Nevertheless, this nascent literature has so far not teased out the specific ways in which assemblage theory applies to medical travel, especially in understanding the relations between a collective formation and its various component elements. For this purpose, we look to DeLanda () whose systematic interpretation of Deleuze has been applied in writings that focus on collective formations and their relationalities, processes of assembling and disassembling, spatiality and time (Anderson et al, ; Dittmer, ; McLeod, ; Price‐Robertson and Duff, ).…”

Using the pluriverse concept to critique Eurocentrism in education

“…This enabled us to challenge assumptions and current thinking in "diversity" teaching and maintain a broad vision of our work as it relates to issues of social justice, in particular decolonising pedagogies and educational goals and values. The methodology was emergent, in the sense that we were open to the connections made and directions taken through the conversations (McLeod, 2014). Additional connections were also derived through the iterative movement between our reflections on previous and ongoing teaching experiences, reading, thinking, talking and curriculum review.…”

Towards a critical psychology of human–animal relations

“…Many different logics are drawn upon to interpret and frame these encounters, including Latour's network theory (2005; e.g., Nimmo, 2011Nimmo, , 2010, Deleuze and Guatarri's (1987) rhizome (e.g. McLeod, 2014), and Haraway's (2003Haraway's ( , 2008 conceptualisation of companion species (e.g., Lorimer, 2010). 7…”