Teaching, Troubling, Transgressing: Thinking With Theory in a Post-Qualitative Inquiry Course

The authors (teacher and doctoral students) seek to illuminate the transgressive experiences of teaching ↔ learning in a poststructural (PS) theory and research methods course. They aim to (a) illustrate teaching practices that open spaces for students (and faculty) to rethink, critique, unlearn, and ultimately un-inhabit dominant concepts and principles of qualitative research (QR) and the theory/method divide across research disciplines more broadly and (b) convey how thinking with PS theories become methodologies of post-qualitative inquiry (PQI). They used PS theoretical concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s scholarship to work with co-produced data (e.g., memories, artifacts from class, notes from meetings, and written responses after the semester) to demonstrate our learning in terms of assemblages of desire, becoming, lines of flight, and smooth and striated spaces. The examples shared demonstrate how they tackled essential, assumptive attributes of QR and attempted to embody discourses and practices against (post)positivist, interpretive, and constructivist sciences.