Table Of ContentThinking with Theory in Qualitative Research
ThinkingwithTheoryinQualitativeResearch:SecondEditiondemonstrateshowtoenactvariousphiloso-
phicalconceptsinpracticesofinquiry,effectivelyopeninguptheprocessofthoughtinqualitativestudies.
Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research functions as a refusal of pregiven method, intensifying
creativity,experimentation,andnewness.Readersareinvitedintothethresholdoftheorytotraversephi-
losophers and their concepts, reorienting conventional approaches to inquiry. Each chapter presents a
thinkingwithprocessasawayofreadingintensivelythroughplugginginperformativeaccountsoftwo
first-generationacademicwomentophilosophicalconceptsfromDerrida,Spivak,Foucault,Butler,Barad,
andDeleuzeandGuattari.Thisbookisadeliberateattempttounsettlewhatisexpectedtoberepresented
orrecognizedintermsofbothmeaningandmethodintraditionalpracticesofqualitativeresearch,which
becomeunproductiveanduntenableinthisdifferentimageofthought.
Newtothisedition
(cid:1)
Fully revised and rewritten Chapter 1 that introduces the technique of plugging in as contingent,
strategicmovementsofthought.AlsonewtoChapter1isashiftinlanguageawayfromtraditional
practicesinqualitativeresearch(dataandanalysis)toperformativeaccountsandbecoming-questions
(cid:1) Fully revised “Thinking with intra-action” chapter, which focuses on Karen Barad’s ontoepiste-
mological framework of agential realism, and the concepts of posthumanist performativity and
entangledagencies
(cid:1)
FullyrevisedandrewrittenChapter8thatpresentsplugginginandthinkingwithasontological
(cid:1) Furtherdevelopmentofandnewmaterialonthe“pluggingin”technique
(cid:1)
SchematiccuesupdatedandextendedforalloftheInterludes
In the ten years since the first edition was published, Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research has
becomeavanguardtextinthefieldofpostfoundationalinquiryforitsaccessiblebutthoroughintroductions
to philosophically informed inquiry. This book is for experienced and novice researchers, and students in
introductory,general,andadvancedqualitativeinquirycourses,whomayalsobefirst-timereadersofphilo-
sophy.Thistextwillfunctionasanentryintotechniquesofthinkingwithanewtheoreticalvocabulary.
Alecia Y. Jackson is Professor of Social Theory and Research at Appalachian State University, USA,
where she isalso affiliated faculty in the Gender, Women’s,and Sexuality Studies program. Her work
seeks to animate philosophical frameworks in the production of the new, and her current projects are
focusedontheontologicalturn,qualitativeinquiry,andthought.
LisaA.MazzeiisAlumniFacultyProfessorofEducationattheUniversityofOregon,USA,whereshe
isalsoaffiliatedfaculty intheDepartment of Philosophy. Sheisinterested inphilosophically informed
inquirythatopensthoughttothenotyet.
Thinking with Theory in Qualitative
Research
Second edition
Alecia Y. Jackson and Lisa A. Mazzei
Coverimage:Coverartwork(Untitled)byPhillipPrince.PhotobyWilliamBarker.
Secondeditionpublished2023
byRoutledge
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©2023AleciaY.JacksonandLisaA.Mazzei
TherightofAleciaY.JacksonandLisaA.Mazzeitobeidentifiedasauthorsofthisworkhas
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FirsteditionpublishedbyRoutledge2012
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AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Title:Thinkingwiththeoryinqualitativeresearch/AleciaY.JacksonandLisaA.Mazzei.
Description:SecondEdition.|NewYork,NY:Routledge,2022.|Revisededitionoftheauthors’
Thinkingwiththeoryinqualitativeresearch,2012.|Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.|
Identifiers:LCCN2022006555(print)|LCCN2022006556(ebook)|ISBN9781138952133
(hardback)|ISBN9781138952140(paperback)|ISBN9781315667768(ebook)
Subjects:LCSH:Qualitativeresearch--Methodology.|Interviewing--Technique.|Womencollege
teachers--UnitedStates--Research.|Firstgenerationcollegestudents--UnitedStates--Research.|
Poststructuralism.
Classification:LCCH62.J2952022(print)|LCCH62(ebook)|DDC001.4/2--dc23/eng/
20220406
LCrecordavailableathttps://lccn.loc.gov/2022006555
LCebookrecordavailableathttps://lccn.loc.gov/2022006556
ISBN:978-1-138-95213-3(hbk)
ISBN:978-1-138-95214-0(pbk)
ISBN:978-1-315-66776-8(ebk)
DOI:10.4324/9781315667768
TypesetinGalliard
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Preface vii
1 Plugging one text into another 1
Interlude I: Why Derrida? 17
2 Derrida: Thinking with deconstruction 23
Interlude II: Why Spivak? 37
3 Spivak: Thinking with marginality 40
Interlude III: Why Foucault? 50
4 Foucault: Thinking with power/knowledge 55
Interlude IV: Why Butler? 68
5 Butler: Thinking with performativity 73
Interlude V: Why Barad? 86
6 Barad: Thinking with intra-action 93
Interlude VI: Why Deleuze and Guattari? 109
7 Deleuze and Guattari: Thinking with desire 115
8 Ontological writing: Unleashing becomings and worldings 133
Appendix 143
Bibliography 149
Index 155
Acknowledgments
Lonescholarswearenot.Wewouldliketoexpressoursincerethankstocolleaguesnearandfar
whohelpedusasweconceptualizedandwroteThinkingwithTheoryinQualitativeResearch,
bothfirstandsecondeditions.Weareespeciallygratefultothosewhoweregenerousenoughto
readchaptersindraftformforthefirstedition:SaraChilders,Stephanie(Daza)Curley,Alexa
Dare, Ken Gale, Susanne Gannon, Fran Huckaby, Maggie MacLure, Kate McCoy, Nancy
McEachran, Chaz Preston, Phillip Prince, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, and Cate Watson. Bettie St.
Pierre, Sarah Bridges-Rhodes, Jessica Van Cleave Williams, and Jonathan Wyatt provided
insightstoearlydraftsofrevisedandnewchaptersforthesecondedition.
The first edition would not have been possible without the immediate enthusiasm of our
first editor at Routledge, Philip Mudd. Hannah Shakespeare’s unwavering support and
earnestencouragementspurredusonaswecompletedthissecond,tenth-anniversaryedition
in themidst of a global pandemic.We are delightedoverthe positive receptionof Thinking
with Theory in Qualitative Research by colleagues from around the world, and we thank
everyone who has attended our workshops, campus talks, and conference presentations to
engagewithus.Wearegratefulforthegroupoffirst-generationacademicwomenwhowere
interested in our project and willingly offered accounts of their lives. We owe a special debt
to Cassandra and Sera. We also appreciate the various agencies at Appalachian State Uni-
versity for funding for our project at different times over the years: the University Research
Council, the Office of Academic Affairs, the Reich College of Education Dean’s Office, and
the Department of Leadership and Educational Studies. We would also like to thank Gon-
zaga University for funding to support our week of intensive work together in Boone, NC
forcraftingthefirsteditionandtheUniversityofOregonforreleasetimeduringthewriting
ofthissecondedition.Weexpressgratitudetothemanystudentswehaveencounteredover
these years who are thinking with theory and who continue to challenge us. And lastly, we
are in deep appreciation to our mentors who introduced us to the joys of theory, especially
Patti Lather, Maggie MacLure, and Bettie St. Pierre.
Lisa thanks Alecia for thinking with her, laughing with her, and challenging her. Lisa
cannot think of anyone (besides Phillip) whom she would rather be partnered with! She is
especially grateful to Phillip for sharing her love of philosophy and for sharing life.
Alecia is immensely grateful for Lisa and her gifts of positive energy, a creative mind, and
thewillingnesstostay“inthethreshold”withher.AleciaowesKristian,Silas,andJudeabig
thank you for their unconditional support and cheering her on while she took time and
space to think with theory.
Preface
Much has changed in the field of qualitative inquiry since we first conceptualized what
became Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research. One year before the publication of
the first edition in 2012, Elizabeth St. Pierre published a chapter in which she first named
“post qualitative inquiry.”1 The following year, Patti Lather and Elizabeth St. Pierre co-
editedaspecialissuefocusedonthepostqualitativeinwhichtheyemphasizeda“rethinking
ofhumanistontologyaskeyinwhatcomesafterhumanistqualitativemethodology.”2Inthe
interveningperiod,manyscholarsinthefieldofqualitativestudieshaverefusedinterpretivism
and taken up philosophically informed inquiry, thinking with a range of postfoundational
theories: poststructuralism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, feminist new materialism,
indigenous methodologies, speculative pragmatism, radical empiricism, new empiricism,
agential realism, immanent ontologies, affect theory, process philosophy, and others
deemed postfoundational.
In a reimagining of the limit of traditional qualitative research, methodologists have con-
tinuedtostretchtheperimetersofwhatconstitutesinquirygiventhecontoursofthistheoretical
orientation.Regardlessofthenaming,aconsistentrefrainisthepersistentcritiqueofWestern
metaphysicsbyunderscoringtheontologicalformationsimplicatedinadoingofinquiry.Sucha
shift necessitates an emphasis from what we can know about an object (method and episte-
mology) to what a particular object does when we enact inquiry (ontology). Special journal
issues,editedbooks,conferencepapers,seminars,andworkshopshaveproliferatedinresponse
tothepracticesandquestionsthatsuchcritiqueaffords.Asaresult,theboundariesthatwewere
pushingthenhavepropelledustothelimitofdifferentthinking,tenyearslater.
InthisPreface,wepresentanoverviewofwhathasemergedinthewritingofthissecond
edition in response to the deterritorialized landscape of qualitative inquiry. Since 2011, we
have readmore, thoughtmore, andengaged withcolleaguesfrom aroundtheworld as well
as hundreds of students in our own teaching. These connectives have engendered reconfi-
gurations that are responsive to the collective in which we find ourselves. In the next sec-
tions, we explain how our own approaches to plugging in have taken flight, and that these
changes to the text were sparked by encounters with other concepts that animated experi-
mentation and creation.
1 Elizabeth A.St.Pierre,“PostQualitative Research:TheCritique andtheComingAfter.”InThe
SAGEHandbookofQualitativeResearch,4thed.,ed.NormanK.DenzinandYvonnaK.Lincoln
(ThousandOaks,SAGE,2011).
2 Patti Lather and Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, “Post-qualitative Research,” International Journal of
QualitativeStudiesinEducation26(2013),629.Emphasisadded.
viii Preface
Concepts new to the second edition
As completely rewritten, Chapter 1 introduces the technique of plugging in as con-
tingent, strategic movements of thought. Readers of the first edition will notice a turn in
our language away from interview data to performative accounts. While we troubled
“data” in the first edition by interrogating voice, language, and meaning, we can no
longer even think the accounts as data, for to do so implies a static capture of text,
devoid of life. Instead, we position these generated texts as performative because, instead
of eliciting and presenting these accounts as narrations of experience by a discrete sub-
ject, the accounts themselves bring forth the life which they name. In sum, we made this
change to avoid the phenomenological in favor of the immanent. Our use of Butler’s
theory of performativity in Chapter 5 incited this change and enables us to carry the
concept throughout the book.
Toward the end of Chapter 1, we take up “accounts and memory” in a discussion of the
way in which each of these is always already a collective, presupposing a disavowal of an
individual speaking subject who offers isolated accounts of her experience. As such, we
cannot situate the accounts as detached, but as utterances from what Deleuze and Guattari
name the collective assemblage. While we name and use the performative accounts, we do
not treat them as fixed accounts of experience from which we can derive meaning, as if we
ever could. We name the accounts as performative because we refuse a stance that views the
women as consciously narrating and representing the fullness of their individual experience.
Their accounts are not stable stories that reflect experience to be “understood” phenomen-
ologically;rather,theiraccountsproducenewwaysofbeing.Eachpluggingin,eachemergence
bringsforththeunthought–notapinningdownbutanopeningup.
In the new Chapter 1, we turn to the emergence of becoming-questions in the middle of
our encounters of thinking with and thinking together. In the first edition, we referred to
these as “analytic questions.” However, given our distance from using the term “analysis,”
our concern is not with what we can know but what things do. Also, we wanted to stress
that the questions we use to frame the plugging in chapters are not predetermined in the
same way that traditional “research questions” are. We created them, conceptually, as
becoming-questions due to our thinking ontologically while writing this second edition. Our
technique is one of emergence and encounter, so the questions do not precede our thinking
with: they emerge in the middle of plugging in. An ontology of becoming allowed us to
show not only how these becoming-questions arrive on the scene when the accounts and
concepts are thought together but also how they provide an incitement to the previously
unthought.
The middle chapters of the book, 2–7, incorporate these shifts in language of performa-
tive accounts, becoming-questions, and thought. We claim that this is not merely a new
naming but a different image of thought in which the old categories and questions are no
longer productive. It is a reorientation that opens inquiry to what has previously been
foreclosed.
The Barad chapter, “Thinking with intra-action,” is wholly revised. In re-crafting this
chapter,wedecidedtoeliminatemuchofthebackgroundcontextforwhatwasanemerging
theory at the time of writing the first edition. Thus, we focus only on Barad’s ontoepiste-
mological framework of agential realism, and the concepts of posthumanist performativity
and entangled agencies. In place of the diffraction discussion, we supplemented with a
section on “materializations of power.”
Preface ix
Our plugging in technique is further developed in Chapter 8, also entirely rewritten with
new material for this second edition; we present plugging in and thinking with as ontologi-
cal:“not athingbut adoing.”3Afocusonontologyinthisfinalchapterisnotpresentedas
a concept to be understood, but as a becoming or doing that involves an attunement to
happenings and formations in and of the world. We also bring in Erin Manning’s recent
work on affect theory to update the conclusion.
Changes to the structure
Whenwefirstbeganthisprojectoveradecadeago,oneofouraimswastopresentareadingof
so-called “research texts” with theoretical concepts as a way to provoke the unthought. We
envisioned the audience as both experienced and novice researchers who desired to resist
sameness,representationalism,andtheall-knowing“I”thattraditionalmethodprivileges.Fur-
ther, as faculty who teach introductory, general, and advanced qualitative inquiry courses, we
foundourselveswantingatextthatwecouldusewithstudentswhomaybefirst-timereadersof
philosophy – a text that would function as an entry into techniques of thinking with a new
vocabulary.Assuch,wekepttheoverallstructureofthebook,witheachchapterprecededbyan
interludethatindicateswhateachphilosopherhelpsusthinkanddo,thattheothersdonot.We
also kept the schematic cues (hooks or gestures, if you will) that readers can hang onto as a
brace as they enter what might be unfamiliar theoretical terrain. However, we expanded and
revisedmanyofthesecuesbasedonourusingthebookincourses,workshops,andseminars.
We have omitted the research exemplars that were included in the first edition. Since the
publication ofThinkingwithTheory in QualitativeResearcha decadeago, the archive ofphi-
losophically informed inquiry has grown exponentially and traversed disciplinary fields. Thus,
curatingalistofexemplarsorspecialissuesofjournalswouldundoubtedlyresultinexclusions.
Wehavemaintainedrecommendedreadingsthathavehelpedus,andwehopethesetextswillin
turnhelpreaderstakeupconceptsinwaysthatstretchtheirownthinkingwithandpluggingin.
Readersfamiliarwiththefirsteditionwillalsonotetheabsenceofwhatwaspreviouslythe
introductory chapter, in which we had discussed the impetus for the project that frames the
accounts: our conversations with first-generation academic women. We have moved this
material to the Appendix because we wanted to deemphasize method and procedure yet
acknowledge the importance of orienting readers to our broader conceptualization of the
project. Therefore, in the Appendix, we present the questions we asked that provoked con-
versation, and we offer the curated histories of two of the first-generation women with
whom we spoke: Cassandra and Sera, whom readers will encounter in Chapters 2–7.
WealsoreversedtheBaradandDeleuzechaptersinthisedition.WedidsobecauseBarad
developsatheoryofposthumanistperformativitybydrawingheavilyonFoucault’stheoryof
discourse and Butler’s theory of performativity. Thus, rearranging the Barad chapter to
follow Butler in this edition extends the discussion from those two preceding chapters. In
movingDeleuzetoChapter7,weaddedGuattaritothetitleinordertoreflectthefactthat
much of our thinking throughout the book is a substantive engagement with their joint
work,namelytheirbookAThousandPlateausandourenactmentoftheirconceptbecoming.
We end this second edition with a new Chapter 8 in which the ontological implications of
our thinking with and plugging in are realized in writing.
3 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning
(Durham:DukeUniversityPress,2007).
