Episode 25: 24. Egon Guba Lecture with Mirka Koro

Welcome. Tervetuloa. My name is Mirka Koro, I come from ASU, and I go by she and hers. I would like to acknowledge the land on which I am standing here in Phoenix and the original Hohokam caretakers of this land. I would also like to thank the Egon Guba awards committee and QRSIG chair Jessica VanCleave and her executive committee for this amazing honor and opportunity to share my thoughts with you all.

Despite my indefinitely youthful appearance and my love of Apocalyptica, I have a somewhat lengthy past with qualitative inquiry. Aaron, Juha, who are my stimulating discussants, Egon Guba, and I are entangled in our past and hopefully our experimental and philosophical qualitative inquiries will keep forming and shaping new relationalities among us and others in the future. I think it was 1998 when I attended my first AERA, heard amazing talks, and met Egon and Yvonna. At that time, I also attended my first QRSIG business meeting and thought to myself how excited I was about qualitative inquiry, stimulating scholarly exchanges, thinking, doing, theories, and paradigms. Egon’s Paradigm dialogue and Yvonna and Norman’s leadership with QI and ICQI were very inspiring for a beginning scholar. Since early 2000s Aaron’s work on methodology, Foucault, philosophy, ethics, and responsibility has been intellectually engaging and provocative for me. My entanglements with Juha, in turn, extends even further in linear time. I met Juha during my master’s studies and he introduced me to the world and practice of qualitative inquiry. I remember vividly attending Juha’s lectures and methodological seminars describing his exciting field work. His critical scholarship, philosophical knowledge, work with Freire’s legacy, and intersecting lines of methodology are truly inspiring. Mahtavaa etta olet taalla tanaan Juha videon valityksella! Entangled narratives, shared professional and personal histories, paradigm dialogues, multiple matter of and within factory and working-class town of Tampere Finland, meetings rooms of SQUICK in Athens GA, endless sunlight and scented orange blossoms of Phoenix AZ come together today.

I have multiple titles for this presentation yet all of them are quite inaccurate.

Title 1: Restless methodologies and speculative wonderings multiplied

Title 2: What does the light have to do with this?

Title 3: Lived scholarly possibilities of (methodological) multiplicity

Title 4: If we take speculation seriously…we need to multiply- also methodologically

Title 5: Lost in the words but still alive-- many methodological lives of qualitative matter

As you can tell, I deliver this talk with much speculation and hesitation. My methodological wonderings will not have core components or clear argumentative logic. The talk might not even offer anything new especially if one considers the relational nature of knowing and situatedness of being as simultaneously historical, already already here, and always multiple. Light encounters, in turn, have everything and nothing to do with my presentation today. This talk is designed to be light in its effects- dizzy, requesting little effort, having little weight, move away from inner light and truth, something that informs, to ignite and spark. I hope this talk may offer some provocations in the form of thoughts, wild ideas, images, light effects, and conceptual and theoretical movements and more. Maybe something I will say or do will enable you to enter the difference, feel affect, sense and live the methodological light/lightness and darkness differently, and access alternative spaces through unthought connections and different ways to work through and live realities of inquiry, methodologies, and qualitative relations. Still designs fail and continue with their hesitation.

Provocation 1: Close your eyes and see. What methodologies become possible?

I will wonder about the potential and possibility embedded in speculation and speculative practices in a method(continued)