A Posthumanist Ethics of Mattering: New Materialisms and the Ethical Practice of Inquiry N a t a s h a S . M a u t h n e r (original) (raw)

2018, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics

Against a background of renewed interest in materiality in the social sciences, this chapter considers what this ‘material turn’ might entail for qualitative research and its ethical practice. The chapter is organized in the following way. I begin by discussing some of the ways in which the material turn is inspiring new ways of conceptualizing and conducting research in the social sciences by highlighting two bodies of work in particular: ‘post-qualitative inquiry’ (Lather, 2015; St Pierre, 2011) and ‘the social life of methods’ (Law, 2004; Savage, 2013). While these studies draw on diverse notions of materiality, they share an interest in the ways in which attention to the material dimensions of research gives rise to new methods and objects of inquiry. This materiality may take the form of the embodied experiences of researchers and research participants, the material artifacts used by participants, the physical settings of investigations, and the tools and devices used in social inquiries. In the second section of the chapter, I discuss in more detail different theoretical conceptualizations of materiality. To Reckwitz’s (2002) three notions – materi- ality as ‘social structures’, ‘symbolic objects’ and ‘material artifacts’ – I add a fourth new materialist understanding of materiality as ‘materialization’. I discuss Barad’s specific conceptualization of materiality as ontologi- cal processes of materialization, and the non- essentialist ontology that this entails. In the third section, I explore Barad’s agential realist metaphysical framework that she elaborates on the basis of her concept of materiality and non-essentialist ontology. I consider how it opens up new and distinctive possibilities for social inquiry and its ethical practice, includ- ing how it makes way for what Barad calls a ‘posthumanist ethics of mattering’. In the fourth section of the chapter, I explore how Barad’s posthumanist ethics can be put into practice through what she calls diffractive practices, and I propose two such practices: ‘diffractive genealogies’ and ‘metaphysi- cal practices’. In the fifth section, I illustrate a posthumanist ethical practice of qualitative research using the Listening Guide feminist method of narrative analysis, a method I have been engaged with for twenty-five years.