Exploring Data Production in Motion

“The overarching value of this book is the author’s presentation of the ways in which the movement and fluidity of the data, ‘the life in the lines’, is articulated through feminist poststructuralist analysis. The data highlight the molar and molecular movements and changes in the women’s subjectivity. These changes show how women who are part of religious conservative movements can live and think beyond dominant and patriarchal assumptions of their roles. The women’s writings and expressions are treated with sensitivity, and it is clear that the author was committed to an ethical and collaborative retelling of the women’s experiences and aspirations. The blend of images, narratives, and theory provide a twofold contribution: the first is to highlight new and innovative methodologies with which to enact qualitative inquiry. The second is the elucidation of the women’s multiple molecular subjectivities, which provide an alternative counterpoint to some of the dominant religious and societal narratives that surround contemporary women. This book is aimed for both established scholars, as well as master’s and doctoral students. The book is a valuable resource for those interested in both feminist poststructuralist methodology and postqualitative inquiry and analysis. It skilfully opens up the possibilities of feminist fluid and open-ended inquiry to readers who may not be familiar with the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari and poststructuralist methodology.” (Read the full review at Education Review, Vol 27, 2020).

"This is a gorgeous book. It is a pleasure to read—scholarly, accessible and beautifully written. Every neophyte researcher should read this book as well as every experienced qualitative researcher, for the clarity with which the multiple, intersecting and entangled concepts and practices that affect qualitative research today are laid out, and then put to work. This book takes research methods beyond prescriptive, pre-conceived ideas about how data should be collected and analysed, embracing method as open-ended experimentation. Data, concepts and method are fluid, and in motion, concepts and life coincide, and ethics is emergent in the relationality of the research encounters. Here, researcher and participants encounter each other, affecting each other and being affected, working together on the task of making sense of the machinic assemblages, and the complex and surprising lines of force, through which lives are generated."

Bronwyn Davies, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University, Australia

"Exploring Data Production in Motion is a deftly written, deeply theorized exemplar of feminist poststructuralist inquiry. For qualitative researchers with even a little curiosity about inquiry in and with post-perspectives, Teija Rantala’s book is a must read. It is the ‘mother’ of all mentor texts, first brilliantly and accessibly laying the (fluid) theoretical foundation for an inquiry in motion and then demonstrating it with her remarkable dissertation study of conservative religious women in Finland. It is a powerful teaching tool on how to think through and embrace fluid methodology inspired by poststructural theory while remaining committed to the anti-oppressive aims of critical social inquiry."

Dr. Jennifer R. Wolgemuth, University of South Florida

"Exploring Data Production in Motion makes a significant and timely contribution to the field of qualitative research. As a bold and innovative book, it is an energizing delight to read. This book eloquently argues for fluid feminist poststructuralist methodologies in qualitative research by creating experimental and innovative approaches to collecting and analyzing data. Fluid methodologies enable examining shifting processes, movements, intensities and affects by acknowledging the multiplicity of changing elements of inquiry. Rantala’s book fabricates fresh and novel ways of doing qualitative research where disturbances and irruptions are welcomed as possibilities in order to pave the way for transformation in the affirmative ethics of inquiry. This fascinating book is warmly recommended to anyone interested in ethics and politics of qualitative research methodologies."

Dr. Taru Leppänen, Senior Lecturer of Gender Studies, University of Turku, Finland

"Exploring Data Production in Motion: Fluidity and Feminist Poststructuralism is a very special book. Fluidity in methodology beautifully weaves together critical social inquiry with poststructuralist feminist thinking. The result is a stunning piece of work which is carefully and ethically teasing out the fluidity of methodology in social research and working with the notion of multiple in qualitative inquiry. This is a highly original piece, and an important publication, that merges current research thinking with the flow and performances of becoming. The section ‘future possibilities and challenges of fluid methodologies in critical social research’ demonstrates how this book acts as a tour-de-force of cutting edge critical qualitative thinking, that creates new possibilities and the potential for re-conceptualising the limits and boundaries of critical social research methodology."

Dr. Marek Tesar, University of Auckland, New Zealand

"This book sensitively weaves together feminist post-structuralist theory, methods and analysis employing Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic cartographies to reveal the situated but also fluid nature of social qualitative inquiry. Experimenting with fluid approaches to methodology including collective open-ended methods of memory work and collaborative writing, Teija traces processes of the Conservative Laestadian women in Finland as they explore identities as women and mothers. Her experimentation draws on concepts such as lines, desiring machines and difference to make explicit the constant variation in the women’s lines while they traverse conservative and religious politics of female identity, womanhood and motherhood and to show how subjectivities are produced within and through these wider social and material constellations. Through motion in inquiry sometimes seemingly contradictory identities become possible and complementary. A thought-provoking feminist contribution reconfiguring how discourse matters, becomes materialised, in women’s lives while raising questions on the ethics and boundaries of differences."

Dr. Nikki Fairchild, University of Chichester, U.K.

"In this book, Rantala skillfully draws on a range of feminist poststructural, feminist post-colonial, new materialist, and posthuman thinkers and concepts to both map a theoretically-driven methodology and, through a detailed exploration of a study on processes of subjectivity formation, illustrate how this methodology might work. Rantala’s methodology is an affirmative experiment of movement and flux, multiplicity, relationality, and creative difference that produces situated knowledges simultaneously part of, and accountable to, the researcher. This methodology is an enactment of a process ontology, both in terms of its espousal of a logic of becoming, in the Deleuzian sense, as well as its shift in focus from subjects to processes of inquiry. Theoretically creative with accessible explanations, Rantala’s work offers a methodology well-suited to multifaceted analyses that can help us produce new ways of thinking in our increasingly complex historical moment."

Dr. Kathryn Strom, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership, California State University, East Bay

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

References

SECTION 1: FLUID CRITICAL QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGIES

Chapter 1: Motion and Fluidity in Feminist Critical Social Inquiry

1.1. Movement in methodology

1.2. Fluidity

1.3. ’Subjects’ of situated knowledges

References

Chapter 2: Feminist Poststructuralist Methodologies as Escape

2.1. What is feminist poststructuralism?

2.2. Feminist writing practices

2.3. Memory work and collective biography

2.4. Collaborative data production

References

SECTION 2: FLUID METHODOLOGIES IN SPECIFIC CONTEXTS

Chapter 3: Overview of the Method

3.1. A brief contextualization of the study

3.2. The data production

3.3. Fluidity and movement in the feminist data production

References

Chapter 4: Composing Processual Analysis

4.1. Reading the data with concepts and theories

4.2. Schizoanalysis

References

Chapter 5: The Movements of Lines

5.1. Flowing lines

5.2. Breaks in the flow: Relational and sexual configurations

5.3. Temporary formations

5.4. Brief summary on the lines

References

SECTION 3: FINAL THOUGHTS ON CRITICAL RESEARCH IN MOTION

Chapter 6: The Possibilities and Challenges of the Methodologies in Motion

6.1 The aftermaths of fluid feminist critical social inquiry

6.2 Some future possibilities and challenges of fluid methodologies in critical social research

References

Glossary

Teija Rantala

Teija Rantala earned her Master’s in Education and Ph.D. in Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki. In her doctoral study she explored the aspirations of religious women belonging to a minority movement in Finland and used feminist methods and poststructuralist theory to be able to examine the women’s controversial aspirations.//She has published her work mostly in feminist educational journals. The publications reflect her feminist, creative but critical approach to methodology and knowledge formation. She has a special interest in examining processes of gender, identity, aspirations and experience by experimenting with feminist poststructuralist and posthuman theory. She has given invited lectures at the University of Aberystwyth and University of Reading and reviewed for SAGE and Routledge.