Post-Qualitative Inquiry in Educational Contexts
Summary
Post-qualitative inquiry has emerged as a transformative stance in educational research that moves beyond the conventions of traditional qualitative methods. Drawing on posthumanist, feminist new materialist and non-representational theories, it foregrounds the entanglements of human, nonhuman and material agencies in learning environments. Rather than treating data as fixed representations, this approach embraces the fluid, emergent and performative nature of pedagogical events. Research becomes an experimental choreography of bodies, objects, affects and discourses where meaning is enacted rather than merely interpreted. In educational settings, post-qualitative designs have been applied to explore how classroom technologies, classroom architecture, bodily movements and aesthetic practices co-produce learning trajectories. This perspective highlights the relational and material conditions that shape teaching and learning, offers novel ways of rethinking curriculum and assessment, and provokes educators to consider more inclusive, dynamic and ethically responsive pedagogies. Globally, such work has informed policy debates on digital literacies, community-engaged practice and creative activism, while offering practical tools for practitioners to cultivate more responsive, adaptive classroom assemblages.
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Post-Qualitative Inquiry in Educational Contexts publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in post-qualitative inquiry in educational contexts across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Post-qualitative inquiry: A research stance that moves beyond representational data to focus on emergent, entangled relations among human, nonhuman and material agencies in educational contexts.
Performativity: The notion that knowledge and identities are enacted through embodied practices, language and material arrangements rather than merely described.
Diffractive thinking: An approach that reads methods and theories through one another to generate new insights, emphasising patterns of interference and entanglement over linear interpretation.
Assemblage: A conceptual framework for understanding how heterogeneous elements—people, materials, discourses—come together to produce dynamic phenomena in classroom and learning environments.
New materialism: A theoretical orientation that attends to the agency and vitality of matter, acknowledging that nonhuman elements actively participate in the co-production of educational processes.
References
- Pedagogies of mattering: re-conceptualising relational pedagogies in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education (2021).
- Speculative method in digital education research. Learning Media and Technology (2016).
- A performative paradigm for post-qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Research (2021).
- “How many sums can I do”? Performative strategies and diffractive thinking as methodological tools for rethinking mathematical subjectivity. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (2011).
- Improvising Bags Choreographies: Disturbing Normative Ways of Doing Research. Qualitative Inquiry (2018).
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