‘The past was never simply there to begin with and the future is not simply what will unfold’: a posthumanist performative approach to qualitative longitudinal research |
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Authors: | Natasha Mauthner |
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Institution: | 1. Business School, University of Aberdeen, Edward Wright Building, Dunbar Street, Aberdeen AB24 3QY, Scotland, UKn.mauthner@abdn.ac.uk |
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Abstract: | In this article I argue that in their current genealogical and philosophical configuration, qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) practices – and a wider regime of knowledge, ethical, moral, legal, technological, political and economic practices with which they are entangled – embed and enact representational assumptions in which the realities being investigated – time, change and continuity; the past, present and future – are taken as ontologically given and independent of these QLR (and wider) practices. My approach is to conceptualize QLR practices along nonrepresentational lines, through a philosophical framework that is able to materialize the constitutive effects of QLR (and wider) practices on the objects of study and knowledges produced. For this, I turn to Karen Barad’s posthumanist performative metaphysics – ‘agential realism’ – a framework that embodies and enacts a non-classical ontology in which entities are seen as constituted through material-discursive practices. On this account, QLR (and wider) practices are understood as an ineliminable and constitutive part of the realities they help bring into being. |
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Keywords: | ontology representationalism Barad posthumanism performativity agential realism diffraction qualitative longitudinal research practices revisiting practices |
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