(Re)imagining What Counts as Writing in a Writers' Studio

• In Event: 32.081 - Decentering Commonly Held Assumptions in Writing Research and Teaching: Thinking With Posthumanist Perspectives

Abstract

Panelist 1 shares data from a second grade Writers’ Studio (photographs, videos, artifacts) from a researcher/teacher collaboration since 2010. Thinking with the posthumanist concepts of intra-activity, enacted agency, and ethico-onto-epistemology (Barad, 2007, 2008; Lenz Taguchi, 2010), the presenter illuminates how a posthumanist view of knowing/being/doing intra-actively produce new ways of thinking/defining/(re)imagining what writing is. What writing is/can be produced when we define writing from a posthumanist paradigm?

All three panelists draw upon post-qualitative ways of inquiring. Post-qualitative scholars question the taken for granted, normative assumptions (and ways of doing) qualitative inquiry. These scholars push forward with innovative, rigorous methodologies and methods of qualitative research that embrace theory and methods as entangled (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; St. Pierre, 2011). Distinct from applied theory approaches, examining material intra-actions and performances in texts requires analytic lenses that recognize data as actors themselves (Barad, 2007). Analysis can therefore be described as “thinking with data, theory, and research questions”, not acting upon data to interpret or determine findings (Hultman & Lenz-Taguchi, 2010; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Leander & Rowe, 2006). This approach to analysis engages panelists’ own encounter with the data (what it provokes and what each understands) and can be characterized as a dialogue among data sources such as previous research analyses, their understanding and experiences of writing research and teaching, the research questions related to material processes and products, relevant research history, theory, and the data produced.

Author

• Candace Ross Kuby, University of Missouri - Columbia