ABSTRACT
When I teach qualitative research methods, I spend a lot of time decentering and discussing alternatives to Western modernist traditions of knowledge production and try to avoid replacing them with white Western successor “regimes of truth” (Lather, 2007). I can, and sometimes will, refer to Leibniz’s suggestion that everything is connected, or Spinoza’s belief in the unknowable order of the universe. I will discuss Levinas’ appeal for relational accountability, John Law’s interest in allegorical methods, Karen Barad’s explanation of non-linear timespaces, and Annemarie Mol’s appeal for practice-based knowledge. I will situate the practice of locating yourself in your work in feminist standpoint theory, and the idea that non-human things and places are active actors in non-representational theory. I will trace performative methods that value non-mastery back to Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, attribute the narrative turn to ethnographers like Ruth Behar, and find embodied subjectivities in Judith Butler or Julia Kristeva. 1 But I also can, and often will, locate all of these ideas and more within Indigenous knowledge traditions.
