By Sara Mezei, Junior Researcher
When starting the JR program, my goal was to carry out a project led by my design education toolkit. With my research topic, I aimed to explore how the current right-wing government of Hungary (my birth country) fragments civil initiatives and limits collective action. Originally, I outlined my aim to foster a mutual understanding that helps collective organizing for social justice initiatives. Surely, even rereading it now, as I am writing, this statement seems straightforward. On the surface level, there might not even be too much to disagree with, as I assume many of us want to contribute to (what we believe is) positive change, include others, and do a good job at it. Yet, in the past year, I became interested in ideas that structure how “the job should be done to be considered a good job.” In other words, how we (we = engaged in a given discourse) define what is possible to think and how to put such definitions into play. This play, of course, is not simple playing around but the very process of justice (but more about this later). With it I grew interested in ways to fiddle with the grid-like nature of discourse (by pointing out it is in fact not a grid), so we may think the impossible (the perception of a transcendental truth determines the grid we base our inquiry on; thinking the impossible means becoming suspect of these regulating frameworks). I spent time exploring and later on, showing how “the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us” (Jameson, 2008, p. 39). That is to say, I started to spend time with poststructuralist literature that questions the ontological, based on the statement “ontology is politics that has forgotten itself” (Oksala, 2014, p. 10).
My goal with this blog post is to share some results. In my case, the results involve asking different kinds of questions that can consequently inform practice. In sharing these results, I hope to demonstrate that the line of questioning we use when entering a context is inherently political, influencing certain outcomes while excluding others. While this is nothing new, I hope it sparks some reflection about your practice, as it did for mine, shaking the very grounds of understanding (and I hope it causes a manageable vertigo). What is more, I hope this blog post also presents a post qualitative approach in an accessible way so that you get something to hold onto if you venture into this realm (stay suspicious of the support I offer, as I am also learning and misunderstanding a lot of things).
On post qualitative inquiry
To start, I introduce post qualitative inquiry, which became what led my approach throughout the year. For Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre (2023), a post qualitative approach entails a break from qualitative research and methodology of any kind (methodology refers here to inquiry understood as something systematizable). In St. Pierre’s words:
[P]ost qualitative inquiry is not a methodology nor is it a variety of qualitative methodology. It has nothing to do with qualitative research methodology. And you can’t do a qualitative study and then make it post qualitative after the fact. Post qualitative inquiry begins with poststructuralism and its ontology of immanence. So you have to read and study poststructuralism before you do post qualitative inquiry; you have to let it guide your inquiry. (p. 24)
This statement meant rethinking everything I learned about research. It meant to start reading poststructuralist theory and understand the kinds of perspective it can give. It also meant an entirely different practice than I am used to, albeit one that I found extremely enjoyable (and challenging). For me, post qualitative inquiry entails sitting with theory and learning to pay attention to how the lens through which we read a given context is transformed by a poststructuralist theory (this transformation is situated, yet points to how our understanding and ways of looking at things can change so easily). Reading through theory is transformation, and this is important to understand here, as this change is not of an evolving nature, nor is it a teleological progression. Reading with poststructuralism does not get you closer to truth, as it rejects access to truth. In other words, there is “no there there” (Derrida, 2012). That is to say, it rejects a transcendental understanding that claims an essence of things, so through post qualitative research, one does not arrive at a predetermined endpoint, as there is no singular, universal truth to unearth through researching the social. Rather it is best understood as a practice, where we “compose with” theory (Dillet, 2017). I found poststructuralism hard to work with; after all, as Foucault puts it, this way of thinking is “in opposition to the history of thought” (Foucault, 1972, p. 27). Presumably, here he refers to a dominant Western history of thought.
To work post qualitatively, then, is to look at a context as singular and understand that the methodology would assume a reproducibility that is incompatible with the singularity of a given context (Derrida, 2012). Furthermore, it is a theory-led practice, it entails reading theory until one grows an eye to see with it. With post qualitative inquiry, I was led to look at a context differently and see what, in a given setting, makes an argument possible.
While one is learning to grow a new eye, it is best practiced on materials that are familiar and readily available. Therefore, in the final month as a JR, I applied what I learned to the text that led me to become a JR: my application project proposal. In the next section, I will try and demonstrate the shift in understanding the past year led me to; with it, I present a tweaked research question that informs my next steps in inquiry. This, of course, is only one way to grow a new eye, meaning that there is not one way to see when someone takes on a post qualitative approach.
A snippet from my JR proposal and a lot to reflect on
Originally, when applying for the JR program, my aim was to engage with Hungarian feminist initiatives and communities. At its core, my idea was based on the following statement, which I derived from the available literature on the state of Hungarian social initiatives and interview materials with local feminist NGOs that I worked with in 2024:
In Hungary, one of the Soviet satellite states of the 20th century, civil initiatives and movements are to date fragmented and challenged by taboos and the traumas lived by many of the Hungarian manifestations of the Soviet regime (Gregor & Kováts, 2018; Timár, 2019). Such experiences often foster binary thinking, making it hard to build communities of care, have a sense of purpose and orient these values into an organized, social justice-focused work. The lack of resources and the internal tensions greatly hinder the birth of a cohesive force, something necessary to struggle against the totalitarian notions emerging in the country, which pushes marginalized groups and women (with their intersections) against one another, while also limiting their democratic rights.
Looking back at this statement, there is an implicit framing (construction) of reality. The quote implies that the fragmentation of Hungarian social justice initiatives stems from its history as a Soviet satellite state. Furthermore, it suggests that Hungarian initiatives are in a state of binary either/or thinking. What is more, it assumes that these initiatives are not building communities of care, do not have a sense of purpose, and are not organized. Finally, social justice is framed as something reachable; that happens through organized effort.
Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with this understanding, what it does is build a reality that leads to certain kinds of action. For me, this would have meant entering the Hungarian context with the agenda of bringing people on the “same page” for collective action. Today, I grew suspicious of such a colonizing notion that implies the decision on “the right way” to do something. Instead, I became increasingly interested in identifying the underlying assumptions that lead to specific types of action. As for me, looking at and analyzing what structures the types of action possible seemed to have tremendous responsibility attached to it. Indeed, what kind of practice is one that helps to point out the grids of discourse that allow and limit certain kinds of action? With a post qualitative approach, I could start treating theory as different lenses that unveil different understandings of reality, like a flash showcasing a different reading while one stays always already entangled in a given context (Benjamin, 1940).
Learning to see differently
In the process of engaging with poststructuralist theory, I was guided to turn critically toward my, what I still believe, was a well-intentioned proposal. With Jacques Derrida’s (1995) deconstruction, I was led to pay attention to the binaries of my argument, like how I privilege an “organized” and “cohesive force” over the so called “messiness” of the status quo. As if the way to justice has to happen through sanitized action. Derrida lets me wonder, “What kind of understanding of social justice am I advocating for, if it has to happen through total unity? Whose reality would a homogeneous initiative erase? What does it do if I privilege ‘organized cohesion’ over the so-called ‘chaos’?”
Joining in here, with Lee Edelman (2004), I was able to learn to distinguish between social justice and Social Justice with capital letters. The latter is the uniting myth placed on the future, for which one is ready to erase and sacrifice the present social justice initiatives, schematizing plurality on the altar of a better future. With Edelman, I ask, “What violence are we allowing when we insist on a better future by articulating The Socially Just future? What social justice initiatives are sacrificed if we name what The Just End is?”
Reading some more Derrida (2012), hauntology leads me to think with the spectral (with ghosts), which collapses linear time and “makes the present waver” (Jameson, 2008, p. 38). In other words, the specter of Soviet times is not the past but, like a ghost, is very much present today, creeping on and guiding decisions in the Hungarian context. Similarly, Walter Benjamin from the Frankfurt School reminds us that interpreting historical time as linear and teleological is, put simply, getting how history operates all wrong. Benjamin here ultimately messes up the idea of time as progress—what vertigo indeed! After all, what does it mean for justice if the past and history do not represent progress?
Importantly, zooming out, the poststructuralist reading of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory helped me to understand the hollow character of things and the reality-making power of framing a statement (how I formed my JR proposal). This theory illustrates that such a reality is always deferred, constantly in the process of becoming, and never fully realized. It ties in with Derrida’s declaration on justice: “‘Perhaps’, one must always say perhaps for justice” (Derrida, 1990, p. 971).
With the glimpse of theories presented here and the readings that helped me see things differently, when writing this, I understand justice as a process rather than a single goal. I now see justice as something that must remain in motion (it is in motion), embracing its ever-changing character. It is with this understanding that policing other dissenting advocacy stops (and I am left with a lot of reflection to do on implicit policing). Put simply, the above seems to me to be a just way to approach justice. In other words, as soon as we are to define the figure of justice (in a totalizing manner) by solidifying it into a fixed meaning (naming what justice looks like or how it should operate), it turns into violence, as at the moment of defining it, it already erases other ways of becoming. Lest we forget, after all, justice is not a thing in itself, as “there is no there there,” no set destination to arrive at (Stein, 1985, p. 251). Justice, like everything we articulate, is always negotiated, always on the move.
The (non)closure this approach brings
Closing the year as a JR, I became less interested in what to do to reach a given goal (or at least, I acknowledge that a goal cannot ever be fully reached). Instead, I ended my one year with a reframed research question (very broad, but pointing towards—in my view—a more just way to inquire), which is as follows:
What kinds of action do the discursive constructs like “social justice,” “a better future,” and “democracy” (you name it) in a given context (feel free to name yours here) limit us (us = engaged in discourse) to take?
This question reframes the type of action one might take and helps us to pay attention to the hidden assumptions that define what is possible to think as the “right way” to act. With it also implying, that the “right way” is not stable. I decided to write this post as a back-and-forth on my work, for this; my reasoning is twofold. First, it shows how if we are to engage with post qualitative inquiry, we should understand ourselves as something unstable (hence writing about my own writing, disagreeing with myself). As Derrida puts it:
“[T]he people who fight for their identity must pay attention to the fact that identity … implies a difference within identity . . . Once you take into account this inner and other difference, then you pay attention to the other and you understand that fighting for your own identity is not exclusive of another identity, is open to another identity” (Caputo & Derrida, 1997, pp. 13–14)
And second, I decided to disagree with myself in this post because I see it necessary to start this way of questioning with one’s own practice before applying it elsewhere; engaging with our materials helps to gain the empathy that is necessary for this practice to remain a “pointing out” exercise, rather than a “judgement.” By pointing out limitations of a (con)text, new ways can be explored, only to, as soon as we sense that we start to solidify this new way of looking at things into an identity, repeat the research question above, delimiting practice once again. To submit to the practice of deferral is to embody the place in between start and end, in between totalizing binaries. It is to formulate a research question at the supposed end of a JR program; this way, staying in the messy middle of things.
References
Benjamin, W. (1940). Theses on the Philosophy of History (H. Zohn, Trans.). In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations. Schocken Books.
Derrida, J. (1990). Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority.” Cardozo L. Rev. 920, 11(5–6), 920–1045.
Derrida, J. (1995). Of grammatology (16th pr). Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr.
Derrida, J. (2012). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Taylor and Francis.
Dillet, B. (2017). What is Poststructuralism? Political Studies Review, 15(4), 516-527. https://doi-org.libproxy.aalto.fi/10.1177/1478929917712931
Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive (M. Aina Barale, J. Goldberg, M. Moon, & E. Kosofsky Sedwick, Eds.). Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/no-future
Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archeology of knowledge (A. M. S. Smith, Ed.). Pantheon Books.
Jameson, F. (2008). Marx’s Purloined Letter. In M. Sprinker (Ed.), Ghostly demarcations: A symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx” (pp. 26–67). Verso.
Oksala, J. (2014). Foucault, Politics, and Violence. In Philosophy Today, 58, p. 307). https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday201422120
St. Pierre, E. A. (2023). Poststructuralism and Post Qualitative Inquiry: What Can and Must Be Thought. Qualitative Inquiry, 29(1), 20–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004221122282
Stein, G. (1985). Everybody’s autobiography. Virago.