Practice is Persuasion (PQI)

Post-Qualitative Inquiry (PQI) represents a scholarly reorientation and experiment with ways of knowing and being rather than a specific method or research practice – terminology suitable to describe interventions that resist disciplinary boundaries and navigate the mucky terrain when embodied and creative methods mix with discourse and cultural analysis. PQI starts with an ‘event’—an action, provocation, or creation that dispenses with fixed agendas to facilitate innovative thought and generate new possibilities. PQI is a model to address the epistemological challenges arising when embodied and creative methods produce inevitable tautologies by embracing the process of navigation as the point of research rather than its procedure. In the scope of Routes and P(l)aces each element of the research is considered as its own knowledge producing entity constitutes it own event of moving towards understanding: the acts of reading on screen or from the zine; mindfully walking or mindfully sitting; listening to recordings or viewing a photograph.

According to Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, one of its most vocal proponents, PQI is neither method, design, practice, nor a demonstrable process neatly fitting into a framework labelled “methodology”.²Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, ‘Why Post Qualitative Inquiry?’, Qualitative Inquiry: QI 27, no. 2 (February 2021): 163. Post-Qualitative Inquiry is not many things.³Amana Le Blanc and Jodi Kaufmann, ‘Meaning: A Postqualitative Inquiry That Is Not’, Qualitative Inquiry: QI 27, no. 2 (1 February 2021): 251–54. When an event or moment during an inquiry appears as a process, method, or design, it is treated as a snapshot, a demonstration from an ongoing experiment. In most cases, the “outcomes” involve a hybrid of reflective close readings mixed with descriptions of lived experience – a narrative composed of thick description, both auto-ethnographic and philosophical in character, autotheoretical, constituted of multimedia components.⁴PQI is one of many practices which seek to “better represent” their subjects. For more of these debates on this see C. Jason Throop, ‘Articulating Experience’, Anthropological Theory 3, no. 2 (1 June 2003): 219–41; Clifford Geertz, ‘Afterword: The Politics of Meaning’, Culture and Politics in Indonesia, 2019; Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 3rd ed. (Basic Books, 2017); Sandra L. Pensoneau-Conway, Tony E. Adams, and Derek M. Bolen, eds, Doing Autoethnography (Rotterdam: Brill Sense, 2017). Her prompt is to “read widely” across philosophy, humanities, arts, and social science, and to do so without an agenda, keeping rigour through critical engagement with peer-reviewed scholarship, critical practices and accountability to socially engaged scholarship.

To engage a PQI approach starts with a prompt or thesis question such as “what happens to attention when a process is recorded on video, audio, or by pencil”.  By fixating on the function of the researcher’s attention the assumptions about what the devices and their media is unsettled – it is no longer a matter of what each media teaches us about the subject, it is about the dynamic between the researcher-media-device-subject; what is sustained and transformed beyond the subject through creative practice-led inquiry. As such, to inquire post-qualitatively is both an ontological and a practical project. For St. Pierre, the recommendation is to create the “not yet instead of the repetition of what is”,⁵Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, ‘Post Qualitative Inquiry in an Ontology of Immanence’, Qualitative Inquiry: QI 25, no. 1 (1 January 2019): 3. via reading and experimentation. To start and maintain the process is constantly anchoring and departing from a “concrete encounter with the real”⁶St. Pierre, 13.[5] to cultivate creativity and experimentation.