Re-turningfeelings that matter using reflexivity and diffraction to think with and through a moment of rupture in activist work (original) (raw)

2016, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

AI-generated Abstract

Over the past three decades calls for alternative forms of qualitative research that require of the researcher to think deeply, differently, disruptively and diffractively have been gathering momentum. This article adds to a growing bank of possibilities for this type of work by re-turning feelings that emerged while doing insider activist work related to issues of gender in an isolated rural Australian community. The process of re-turning feelings assists in understanding how I, and others, were being re-inscribed in this community with and through its material and discursive forces. The original five-year study (conducted three years earlier) drew on emancipatory, poststructural feminist and critical research paradigms, however, this paper takes a paradigmatic leap to fold in posthumanist and new materialist thinking as it re-turns feelings that mattered and were produced as part of the mangle of doing activist research. The paper foregrounds a different way of knowing by embracing a researcher identity that is an assemblage of feelings, thoughts, physical realities, identities, temporalities, speech acts and practices. This postmodern paradox is a superposition of knowings and unknowings; certainties and uncertainties; power and powerlessness; an entanglement of relations and productions that are troubled and troubling, determined and indeterminate, comfortable and uncomfortable. The example on offer enmeshes and flattens the personal and political, the material and discursive and the epistemological and ontological as it cuts together-apart past and present feelings using reflexivities of 'confounding disruptions' and diffraction. In this way I am able to know differently the effects and affects of my entanglement in the research act and world.

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