Qualitative Conversations by AERA Qualitative Research SIG

February 23, 2023 Episode 38: Episode 38. Thinking With Theory: A Conversation with Alecia Y. Jackson and Lisa A. Mazzei

SPEAKERS

Alecia Jackson, Lisa Mazzei, Jessica Van Cleave

Jessica Van Cleave

Hello and welcome to qualitative conversations, a podcast hosted by the qualitative research SIG of AERA, the American Educational Research Association. I'm Jessica Van Cleave, Chair of the Qualitative Research SIG and Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Gardner Webb University. The Qualitative Conversations podcast doesn't have a regular host. Instead, each episode is organized by our podcast committee. Today I have the pleasure of hosting this episode, in which I interviewed Dr. Lisa Mazzei and Dr. Alecia Jackson about their recently published second edition of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research. Lisa Mazzei is Professor of Education Studies and Alumni Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, where she is also affiliated faculty in the department of philosophy. She is a methodological innovator in post human inquiry, and her work is widely read and cited across disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology, business and medicine. She is the author of Inhabited Silence in Qualitative Research from 2007. Alecia Jackson is Professor of Educational Research at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies program. Dr. Jackson's research interests bring feminist post structural and post human theories of power, knowledge, language, materiality and subjectivity to bear on a range of overlapping topics deconstructions of voice and method conceptual analyses of resistance freedom and agency in girls and women's lives and qualitative analysis and the posts. Her work seeks to animate philosophical frameworks in the production of the new and her current projects are focused on the ontological turn qualitative inquiry and thought. Together they are co-authors of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research, first and second editions, and coeditors of Voice in Qualitative Inquiry from 2009. Their forthcoming edited book, Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry, will be published in 2023. Lisa and Alecia, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Qualitative Conversations.

Lisa Mazzei

Delighted to be here. Thanks for inviting us.

Alecia Jackson

Thank you for the invitation.

Jessica Van Cleave

Absolutely. So some of our listeners may not be familiar with your work, or maybe new to your work. So would you be willing to tell us a little bit about yourselves, how you came to write together, and how you came to write Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research?

Lisa Mazzei

Well, Alecia and I say that we share an academic genealogy. We first met at AERA in 2005, I think I was presenting a paper on some of my voice work. Alecia came to attend the session. And she came and introduced herself at the end of the session. And I had just finished reading an article that she had written about subjectivity with new teachers. And so I was so excited to meet her and I had just been reading her work. And so we sat out in the hallway for about an hour. And we're talking about projects. And we said that we should propose a session for AERA the following year on voice because we were both looking at voice and challenging conventional understandings. And so that was right before I was moving to England, I moved to England in 2006, was attending the British Education Research Association Conference, started chatting with a book editor. And like a good editor, he always says, What's your current project? And so I told him about this idea that Alecia and I had for a session and he said, that sounds fabulous. Can you get a book proposal to me in a month? So I'm at this conference, emailing this woman that I've met in person once saying, can we put a book together, a book proposal, and that was the proposal we wrote for voice and qualitative inquiry. And the reviews were very positive for the book. But people who read the proposal didn't think that we could secure some of the authors that we had said we would put that would contribute. And they didn't know that I had studied with Patti Lather at Ohio State University, Alecia had studied with Bettie St. Pierre at the University of Georgia, and through these feminist networks, we had connections with some scholars who were doing some very interesting work. So that was the that was the beginning of our long and fruitful partnership.

Alecia Jackson

Yeah, when we were working on the voice book, I traveled to Manchester. And so we had some writing time together. So one thing I do want to say is that Lisa and I have, ever since the collaboration began, we've never we've never lived in the same time zone. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's something that, you know, is really unique to the way that we've made things work. But we went to Manchester, we worked on the voice book, and then you came here, and we were working on Thinking with Theory. So we've had a couple of times that we've worked together, but in you know, Lisa has explained kind of the origin story. And then how Thinking with Theory came about is that after the voice book, we got really interested in we both were doing separately, we both were working on philosophically informed inquiry. And it didn't have that name at the time. Nobody was calling it that. Nobody was you know, calling it thinking with theory. It didn't have a name. And but it's what we were doing. And we started because we're reading each other's work and through the voice book, we realized is that, you know, what, what would it be like to, you know, to write something together, that was an alternative to, quote, data analysis. We were both talking about how to teach this way of doing this kind of analytic work and conceptual work. And there were lots of journal articles that people doing this kind of analytic thinking. But there wasn't anything that was out there cohesive, that we could use me, really to us in our teaching, that was kind of the impetus. So we were at the Congress. And we were out to dinner with Philip Mudd, who was our editor for the voice book. And we pitched this idea of taking, you know, one data set, and we will talk about how we don't really use that language anymore in a moment. But we talked to him about how to maybe conceptualize a book where we had one set of data that we looked at, that we analyzed across different theories. And he really loved it. And at that dinner, you know, he said, Yeah, let's put this together and see, see what it's like.

Jessica Van Cleave

Thank you so much. It's really fantastic to sort of trace that process, obviously, briefly from that first meeting, until the beginnings of thinking with theory. So as you began the process of writing, thinking with theory and moving through to publication, what were your hopes for the book at the time?

Lisa Mazzei

I think I don't know, I don't know what our hopes were, I think our hopes were that it would be I mean, we've talked, we talked about our work when we started envisioning a new project as what kind of intervention do we want to make? And I remember extending what Alecia was saying, I remember being at the Congress, and we started talking about wanting something for our teaching and going to the book exhibit and looking at what was what was presented as analysis. And it was all about coding. And so our I think, you know, our initial hope was, well, this, this isn't what this is not representative of the kind of work that we do. This isn't how we teach our students. And so as Alecia said, We wanted something for our own teaching. And maybe I guess the hope was that it would be picked up by others and be useful to them. So

Alecia Jackson

yes, I think it was a matter of, of what Lisa said, the intervention, I think, is a really good word. We, as I mentioned, what we did there wasn't a name for what we were doing. And we said, we wanted that we you know, Bettie St. Pierre always says write something that people can cite. And so that was something that, you know, she's always said to, and you've probably heard it too, Jessica, write something that people can cite. And, and, and put something out in the world that people can, you know, can use, and I really have a big part of part of the impetus for both of us, I think was to give this alternative to the field and name it in some way and have it so that, you know, it was it would become something that was recognizable that people could use, and really to take the field into that direction. I think that we, you know, back in the early 2010 to 12 qualitative research was shifting. It was shifting away from, you know, interpretive work and even critical work. And it was just time, it was time to bring it all together and give it a name and give it a place. And there was just so much enthusiasm right away because I think people were really didn't feel like coding was really analysis. So, you know, we had already done some work on that talking, writing about pieces, we're writing about how coding is not analysis and, and I thought this was just a way to give it a place in in the in the in the field

Jessica Van Cleave

Well, I mean, it's fascinating because as you said, Yes and that advice from Bettie it's definitely something that that I think all of us who have ever worked with her have heard, and it's so true. since y'all have published the first edition of Thinking with Theory, there's been an explosion of all of the you know, the methodologies without methodology, and concept as method and anti-methodology. You know, this sort of thing that you said there was a hunger for at the time. I mean, I think there's no better evidence than how much has proliferated since then. So in the years since its initial publication, Thinking with Theory has become a staple in qualitative inquiry. People are citing it not only in dissertations, but in articles across the field, across publications. Instructors are using your text in their masters and doctoral level courses, Thinking with Theory has really become part of the canon of what qualitative analysis can be and can mean. And one thing also from Bettie, that comes up for me a lot when I think about what work does, especially aside from what your hopes might have initially been, is Alcoff's, quote, to paraphrase, you never know where your work goes and what it does there. So what do you think about where your work has gone? And what it's done there? How it's been taken up and received, since you published?

Lisa Mazzei

Do you want to start Alecia or? No? Um, you know, I think, what do I think? This isn't about I remember the first time I was at AERA decades ago, and I had a piece that had come out in ED Researcher, and I was walking, like, from building to building and there was someone sitting on a bench. And I happened to glance and they were reading my article. And I thought, oh, my gosh, what, what? What a, what a validation, I guess, of one's work to know that someone would take the time to actually pick it up and read it. And so I think that the fact that people are talking about thinking with theory as a methodology is not something that I ever imagined would happen. I think one of the things that I'm most proud of in terms of the work that Alecia and I've done together is that people will say to us at conferences, or students will say to us how pedagogical the work is how, how much it helps them understand. And that was really a primary goal of ours was to, to extend the reach of this way of thinking, so that people would consider a new analytic, if you will. I'm not I don't feel like I'm really answering your question. I don't go ahead, Alecia.

Alecia Jackson

No, I think it's, I think that Lisa and I are both very, I don't know, humble people, and we just didn't really write this book in order to, you know, do anything other than, I don't know, I think we kind of wrote it for ourselves, at first, you know, and then because we wanted to do something together. And then I think, I've been most surprised, I guess, at how it's not just in educational research, like when I've had to go through and do my, you know, annual reviews, and, you know, going up for promotion, and all that. And you pull up the, you know, the Google Scholar citations, and it's just surprising to me that all sorts of social science disciplines have picked up this work. It's not just educational research, but it's, you know, people in, in all sorts of disciplines that I never would have imagined. I think there was even some citations from a business journal. And I just thought, wow, you know, so I guess what's been most delightful is that it's crossed all kinds of boundaries, which I believe that's one of our missions in, you know, is reaching into other found, you know, do some do some deterritorialized thing through the book, in terms of qualitative research, but it moving across all these other fields, you know, anthropology, sociology, business, I mean, just, there's just a whole, a whole lot of other disciplines that have taken it up. And just the expansion of that has been really surprising. I would have never thought that the work would go there. But it's really, I think, it's exciting. It's humbling. It's very endearing for people, you know, on social media to, you know, make comments about that. They have it, they've read it. It's, you know, I had a colleague who did a Fulbright in Australia. And she got there and was working with a faculty member. And the first thing they said is, oh, you work with Alecia Jackson, look, I have the book, you know, do you know. And it's just so it's just wonderful that it's just connected us, to so many people. And it's been so useful and so helpful. So.

Jessica Van Cleave

So then you get asked to write a second edition of this incredibly impactful book that has gone all of these places and done all of these things. When you were first asked to write that second edition, how do you approach that as a project, especially given how big Thinking with Theory is?

Alecia Jackson

It was very difficult. And we've been working on the second edition for a while the pandemic hit us, and it slowed everything down as it did for a lot of people. We changed editors, in in the at somewhere in the middle of all this, but we, we wanted to do something because it will talk a little bit about how the book is different. But in the intervening years after this was published, we began to critique some of the things that we had done in the first edition. And we wanted to update some of the things that we had written in chapter one in particular, the way we were conceptualizing some different aspects of it. And we'll get into that, but the main thing we struggled with was, do we add more theoretical chapters? Do we keep them really, you know, they work? Why change them? Do we want to add? So it took us a while, a couple of years to really think about how we wanted it to look and what we wanted to say that would be different enough, so that people would, you know, find the second edition, you know, an actual extension of what we had done. Something different. So it, it took a while. It was a process, but once we really figured out what we were doing, it flowed pretty well, you know, we were able to really work with it. Quickly. So.

Lisa Mazzei

I mean, yeah, I think, I think initially, when we first started talking about the project, we thought that it would not, it would not involve as much new writing as it did. And when we started even, even the chapters that we that we said, Okay, well, you know, we're pretty solid with the with Derrida, there's not a lot we need to change. But then when we started really getting into it, it's like, oh, everything has to change, because all of our thinking and languaging is different. And as both of you have talked about, you know, I think when the first edition was published, that was about the time when, when Bettie published her first piece on post qualitative inquiry, and then we had special issues on data analysis after coding and so forth. And so everything that was informing our thinking, in addition to the way we were doing our own work had shifted, and, and then what we learned from working with students and the places that, that we were able to be more that we were able to show more well, what we were doing, or what we thought we were doing, because we had been doing it, you know, in the intervening time, we've been teaching it, we've been working with students around these texts in the intervening time. So I think it was it's, it's a completely different text in many ways.

Jessica Van Cleave

So that kind of leads in you, you have spoken to this, I think a little bit already with that, that your thinking and your languaging and your processes and your experiences and your inter and intra actions had all shifted since the initial publication, but how did you end up deciding then what to include, what to change ,and what not to include in that second edition?

Alecia Jackson

That was a process. I think that emerged from what Lisa was saying about the teaching, you know, using the book and teaching what really kind of confused students, you know, what, what was what were some things that they just couldn't, you know, make the turn into, because it was some languaging. Also related to where the book has gone. What it's done is we have done lots of workshops, using this text at the Congress in particular, but also individually, we've gone to institutions and have done workshops together and individually. And we just started to notice there were some some languaging, that that didn't really quite represent what we really wanted to do. And part of that was if we wanted to really make a break, we really wanted to escape conventional qualitative inquiry and go on this line of flight, we would need to really, really change how we talked about it. So the second edition, we dropped data altogether, it's not even in the title anymore. We don't use that word anywhere in in the book, and we call it instead, we came up with a concept, you know, so we were very much into this work is about concept creation, and, and so we came up with performative accounts. And that's how we talk about the so called stories that are that are part of the part of the plugging in. So performative accounts helps us to say something differently about, about memory, about language about subjectivity, what words do, what stories do and rather than representing reality or experience that they're, that these are actually ontological stories and the process of plugging in is a performative and so we use that language in Butler's chapter. And we just decided to pick it up and use it in the intro to make well actually, in the preface, we, we describe that shift from data to performative accounts, and then we had to rewrite the whole, you know, all of the middle chapters because data was everywhere. And really reconceptualize not just replace the word throughout, but really rewrite what was going on in plugging in if we call this entire process performative. So that was that was one. Lisa, if you want to talk about a couple of the others.

Lisa Mazzei

Yeah, I think we do a much better job in this edition talking about the questions and the emergence of the questions. That was also a thing that I think, through workshops and teachings that students were, how do I, you know, how do I do this? And so so an example when I sit on dissertation committees and students would, you know, in their proposal say, well, this is my analytic question. Well, now we call them becoming questions, but I would, but then it's like, no, you're you're missing the point. Because you can't identify that question up front, because you don't know what's going to emerge until you are actually immersed in the texts, both the conceptual philosophical texts and the research texts. So I think we did, we spent a lot of time talking about how to explain the process and the way that we sort of came to the process, or the process came to us. I think, another thing and Alecia picked up on the, the nature, the ontological nature of this work that, particularly in the last chapter, we we talk about the ontological nature of writing, and we talk about the way in which the very act of doing is producing these new ontological formations. And so that, that that language, I think, is also present throughout and it's, it's showing how we're shifting in our, in our present work both individually and together.

Alecia Jackson

Yes, a couple of other new changes and additions, I think, we do a better job in the second edition addressing thought and thinking. In the first edition, we were really focused on theory and I think in that first chapter, really justifying the use of theory and the importance and also in the handbook chapter four. We, we really focused on that and and in, in this second edition, we do a lot with thought and the movement of thought we rely a lot on Erin Manning's work. And in her collaboration with Massumi, and in writing about thinking and thought and in the ontology of that so that's some something that's, that's new. The Barad chapter is brand new, practically, of in the first edition, when it came out in 2000. When we were writing in 2010 and 11 new you know, Barad's book was very that's what everyone was reading. And everyone was there a lot of conference presentations on you know, using Barad, and we had to do it in the first edition, what we thought was some background work on new materialism some historical kind of description and tracing of how the emergence of this particular theory into the qualitative profession, but when we read it, when we read, we read it in terms of the revisions were like, we don't really need this background anymore ever. It's it's been around now for 10 years. People are very familiar with them. And it's new materialism and Barad and, and intra-action. And so we felt like we could do, you know, take a lot of that conversation out around some of the other feminists who were working on new materialism. So the Barad chapter is very much more focused on just Barad and intra-action, and we bring in power and we move the Barad chapter to follow Butler and Foucault that made it a little bit more sense to us, since we also added a section on post human performativity, it flows better, and we added a section on power in Barad. So both of those, the post human performativity, and the materialization of power are nice sections in Barad that flow from Foucault and Butler. So we felt like those three chapters just work together better. And then we moved Deleuze and added Guattari to the end.

Lisa Mazzei

So and just a note on the the flow. I'm I'm teaching a course this term and the students one of our texts is thinking with theory. And so last night, we started looking at we introduced her concepts last week. And so we actually took one of the performative accounts in class last night, and looked at the way it was talked about differently with Butler's concept of performativity. And then looking at the same account with post humanist performativity. And it really, it was a fantastic discussion, and the connection was much more clear for students.

Alecia Jackson

So I think it's, we've just really worked to connect, you know, really pull through the coming questions, you know, game, we don't call them analytic questions. And we really make as obvious as we can the process of the emergence of those questions, how plugging in works, and just trying to be a lot more pedagogical, with with the process.

Jessica Van Cleave

So I feel like you've already discussed this, and in your response to the last question, but I didn't know if there was anything else that you wanted to add in terms of thinking with theory as a as a concept or as a text. How, how would you say it has shifted for you both over the last decade?

Lisa Mazzei

Well, I think maybe I think we did talk about this, but but the emphasis on thought, the emphasis on newness. One of the things we talked about, I think in the preface of the second edition is how in the first edition, and we've talked about this in other ways that we were, we were still in the mode of of writing against or, or deconstructing some of the, the interpretivist hooks, if you will. And we started from that place still with this addition. And then at one point, we both said, we don't need to do this anymore, we need to push into this different territory. And so I think that's one of the that was a very important but also very freeing moment, because it's like we can, we can let go of some of this language. And we had fabulous support with our editors, partly because I think of the success of the first edition. And so then we were able to say, this is what we're going to do and you know, dropping things like the starting with method, which we did in the first book. We don't we don't do that anymore. So that we I think we felt a lot more confident in our in the acceptance of us saying this is this is how the work is now and we're not going to pretend that it we're not going to try to fit it into another way of making itself intelligible.

Jessica Van Cleave

So one of the one of the other things that has changed a lot in the last 10 years is the material discursive conditions of the world. So in what way does do those shifts mean that we should or need to, or might, think with theory differently or think with different theory or what? How do y'all think about those kinds of things?

Lisa Mazzei

I'll start and then Alecia. I mean, one of the things that we do in this edition is we, we deal with the idea of the collective. Deleuze and Guattari, this idea of collective enunciation, we talk about memory in a very different way. I think even the way that we mobilize Barad's concepts is an attention to the the formation of subjectivity and and the way things are, the way not talking about agency as some even though we worked against humanist agency in the first book, it's not even attributing agency to individuals and things and talking about agentic capacities. And so I think it's a it's a reconceptualization, and I've had some students in recent years really do some very interesting work, I think that, you know, moving and thinking very differently. So that's a that's a beginning answer to that question.

Alecia Jackson

Um, I'm very excited about the way in which we talk about or write about power in in the new Barad chapter in terms of the materiality of power, I think it's a very different way of conceptualizing it. So that that's something that I think, that we've, that we paid really close attention to. I think that that's a concept that, that once you plug it into materiality, you know, because it's history is really connected to knowledge. You know, Foucault's famous couplet or doublet, the power knowledge workings, and, you know, when we get into the materialization of power in the Barad chapter, I think it just really opens up, you know, a whole conversation and I think it's got, we have a lot to say about about that, in terms of, like Lisa was mentioning the collective. And how that that is working, were much more, I think, smarter about assemblage in the second edition, I think that has some some implications for materiality, language, subjectivity, all of that. So we've got some real, I think, shifts in, in how we're bringing those, those theories in, not only in the Barad chapter, but also when in chapters one and eight. When we're talking about thinking, we talk, we, you know, we are using some of the material discursive theories around how thought is, is material, how thinking is, is material and that that's Barad, you know, we, we quote her on that, and then, and write about what that what that looks like. So I think those theories also allowed us to make the shift away from epistemology to ontology. You know, this book is not a knowledge project. It's not representation. So we, you know, we really relied on those theories to make arguments for how research is creation, it is creation. So when we're in this, this ontology, these theories that you've mentioned, Jessica, we, we can't talk about research as knowledge production. Really, we're in a, you know, an ontology where research is helping us to imagine the worlds that we want to live in. So that's what we talk about a lot in my classes is, so what's the what's the use? You know, why are we doing this? If we're not, you know, we know so much already. Like, why do we want to keep asking the same questions. I was somewhere one time, I don't remember maybe getting my hair cut, I don't know. And I was talking to someone about what I do. And I was in that that semester, in particular, I was teaching a women's studies course and feminist theory was a graduate feminist theory course. And she said, Oh, that sounds so, so cool. And so awesome. And I'll say, Well, it's kind of depressing, because for 10 years, we've been talking about the same things, you know, in this feminist theories class, and, and nothing is really different. So I've started thinking about that and talking with doctoral students in my research courses saying, Well, what if research was became something completely different, you know, its use its purpose. And I think what we're doing in this book, is we're saying that we're making worlds, when we think with theory, we're creating something new, we're creating openings for possibilities that have been unthought. So and I see students doing this in their dissertations now. So they're picking up, you know, their theories, you know, we just went to a defense last week of a student, I was chairing a dissertation for and she's, she has a son who has autism. And so she basically did a power knowledge reading of all the, the materials of autism, all the the documentation, the special ed, you know, just everything that the path to diagnosis is what she called it and, and just recreated an entirely different world. Through that work, you know, the outcome of what she did the she got to the end and, and she said, this is this is what we need to do to the DSM to make this entire framework less deficit oriented, and less damage centered. So she recreates she did her critique, you know, her thinking her thinking with, but what came from that was her own creation, you know, a creation of a different concept, you know, how do we redefine this? How do we, you know, how do we talk about it differently? Y'all know, Heather Cox Richardson, that the historian on Facebook has been doing her letters, and posting a lot. And as a historian, she said something recently that that I've been using in my class, and she said, the way that we make change is that we have to change the way that we that people think about something. And the only way we can change the way people think about something is to change the way that we talk about it. That's it from a historian's perspective, that's, that's how change happens. And so it is about language, but it's also about worlding. And I think that, with this, these new theories and the material discursive turn and attending to ontology, in qualitative work, we can begin to create the worlds through the words that we use, changing the way that we talk about it, changing the way that people think about it, and then the doing. So I think that this book, in particular makes those connections between thinking and doing creation, experimentation, and really pushes that, again, what we talked about this in the chapter eight, what we do in research is unleash becomings. And that still is so I can read chapter eight and see what we have to say about unleashing becomings. But, but that's what I I envision, I would like to see research moving in that direction. I think that that's what those these theories, these post foundational theories enable us to do. And students are doing it like, I see them taking risks in ways that are very exciting.

Lisa Mazzei

They recognize that the descriptive project is not is not moving us. I mean, we talked about that in class last night. Okay, we know we know what's happening. So how do we what are the mechanisms for, for creating these new worlds that Alecia is talking about?

Jessica Van Cleave

So that was really exciting, because I was hoping you all would have something fabulous and, and generative and opening up to say, in relation to that, and I wildly underestimated what might happen. So I really appreciate that. That was, that was really helpful. I'm sure the, the audience is going to get a lot out of that. And I think, as I go back to the second edition of Thinking with Theory, I will now be reading it differently because of hearing the ways that you all frame it and how it's now being taken up and seeing where it goes with your students and in relation to the current projects that you have going on. So thank you for that. Um, so I'm gonna shift a little bit, if you don't mind to talk about the writing process. And you said that you have shifted and talked about writing as an ontological project as well. So what does that look like in terms of your writing partnership or your coauthorship? Either for this book, obviously, you've published a lot together and separately, so what does coauthorship look like and how has that shifted for you over the years?

Lisa Mazzei

I'm not sure it has shifted. I think that we're I think we're very appreciative of the generative nature of our collaborations together. And we often when we have not worked together on a project before, and we're working on something separately, it's like, oh, we miss we miss this. Because it does, there is a, there is an energy. And a, I don't even know how to talk about it the way in which I think we've established a great deal of trust in one another. And so it's not. So there's not maybe a hesitation that there might have been at the beginning. But it's, I can't imagine not having projects to work on together. And we keep coming, we keep dreaming up new ones.

Alecia Jackson

It feels often like it just a zigzag, you know, we're just kind of in it, we're in the middle of something. Sparks fly, and Lisa will write a word. And it'll remind me, I can you know, she'll she'll write a word that will just spark an idea. And then I can develop a paragraph from that, vice versa. We're not sensitive to, we don't hang on to our we're not, you know, if I write something, I'm not hanging on to it. And I think how many times have I said in the margin? I'm not wedded to this, or this is terrible. Just rewrite it? Or, you know, I think that we just have a real? I don't know, we see it, we look at it as as equals we don't, you know, we take turns on lead. You know, who's first? Who's second, but don't really track that. I mean, I couldn't even tell you, like, who's first, who's second on however many. It's very 50 50, I think, you know, on both of our leaders, we have that written very clearly that, that it's it's 50 50. And that way, it's in these collaborations we've done in the last decade with me on the East Coast, and Lisa on the West Coast, you know, we've had, we've joked a little while I'll get up and maybe work first, you know, and then and then, you know, Lisa will sometimes say, Oh, I can't wait to go in and see, you know, like what you've done and, and then I'll come back in the afternoon to kind of see, so it always feels like a gift. You know, when I go into the document, I there's never a time where I'm not a little bit excited to see what's developed and what's what's being made. Because it isn't an act of creation. And you know, we're not, but we're just you know, we're reading the same things. You know, it's just, it's, it's a collaboration in every sense of the word, you know, from reading the writing to, you know, the publishing, it's just yeah, it's, you know, we're respectful of when there's other things going on, you know, travel or family stuff. And, you know, it's just, yeah, it's just easy.

Jessica Van Cleave

Would that we all could have such lovely, collaborative relationships that are just easy. That's wonderful and of course, we all get to be the beneficiaries of that easy work for you. Not that it's easy, but um, so is there anything else that you want to share with the qualitative conversations audience either about thinking with theories, specifically, or qualitative research broadly or anything else that comes to mind?

Lisa Mazzei

This is not my this is not my original thought. This is something that you know, Bettie St. Pierre says all the time, but that I say to students, if you if you want, I mean, two things, I guess, you get into the middle of a project and you think that you want to think with this particular concept? Well start thinking with it. But if it's not doing the work that you want it to do, then try something else. But you have to be willing to spend the time to immerse yourself in the reading and the study in order to be able to, to do the work. I mean, Alecia, and I talked about with the first edition, people say, Well, how did you choose these theories? Well, some of them were ones that we had, because we had worked with them in pre, you know, with some of our other work. But then we as we started thinking, for example, with Barad, it was okay if we're going to do this, we need to really spend some time with it to see if it if it is doing something for us. And if it's not, then we need to find something else. So that's, I mean, we we talked about that a little bit in the book, but I think it's just really emphasizing that it's, it's it's not easy work, but it's such exciting and generative work. And I think once the students start, start encountering it then it's hard for them to imagine not doing their work in this way.

Alecia Jackson

Yeah, I think that what, what Lisa just said reminds me of how I talk about theory is that it just finds you, you know, that's something I say, in every class, we're, you know, we're, we have two theory classes that we offer in our doctoral program. We just call it theory one, theory two, and it's just, it's pretty linear. You know, it starts with positivism. And then just, by the time we get to the end of theory two, we're in post humanism. So it's, you know, just going through those frameworks, and and there were some times students just nothing really speaks to them. And so we just say, you know, just keep reading, and something, you know, that language. You know, I tell the story of how, when I first read Foucault, it was like, wow, this is language that I've always sensed, and felt that I couldn't articulate, I didn't know what I needed to say. And then here's somebody who's saying it for me. And then all I had to do is plug it into, you know, what I was encountering in the world. And, and that helped me to think differently about it and opened up to the end thought so, you know, a lot of what I like to say to students is, you know, this, this work is the pursuit of the unthought it is the pursuit of what we, you know, can't imagine yet, the not yet. We were back to the movement between the first and second edition. And, and, you know, Jessica, you read a chapter for us on Manning, because we thought we need to add a new theorist, you know, and we'd both been reading a lot of affect and gone with the affect conference. And, and we thought that that was something that was missing from the book. And so we thought, well, let's just add a Manning chapter. And it didn't, it didn't fit well. It didn't, it didn't, it didn't, it wasn't working the way that we wanted it to work. But Manning was working on us, but we couldn't figure out what was going on. So we just kept wrestling with it. And and, you know, you read it, and we got great feedback from you. And it made us really ask some questions about what what is, what are we doing? And how are we putting this to work? And what happened is, I remember we were going back and forth on it. And, and I think I texted you, Lisa, or sent you an email, and I said, I think we're using Manning, Manning methodologically like as a technique. And so we're like, whoa, that's exactly what's going on. It's not that we need to plug Manning into the performative accounts, we need to plug it into writing and thinking and doing. And so chapter eight is where Manning shows up and affect because we do a lot with pre individual sensing, and how that is part of of a thought. That thought is not just cognitive, but it's this pre individual syncing of something coming into being of the coming that's emerging. So we just stayed with Manning, but it it shifted and helped us to say something about writing and thinking and ontology that we could never have planned for. So the last thing, yeah, I'll just say is that you just don't know where you'll end up. And all of this is emergent, contingent, relational, all of those things. So just stay, as Donna Haraway says, just stay with the trouble and you know, something will will come, Donna Haraway says something, something always happens, and it always will. So I think that that's part of what the message is in in the the second edition.

Jessica Van Cleave

Well, I want to thank you both so much for your time today. This has been a delightful conversation for me, and I know our QR SIG listeners are really going to appreciate your, your descriptions of the text, as well as the connections that that you are making and thinking about, both in their roles with students and in their roles as instructors as well as methodologists. So thank you both so much for your time this afternoon.

Lisa Mazzei

Thank you, Jessica. And thanks for prompting us to think more about our own process.

Alecia Jackson

Yeah, it's very nice to, to articulate it and, and be able to really appreciate, you know, what, what we've done, I don't think I really sat and thought about the, you know, I mean, I know what the differences are between first and second edition, that really going back on this journey in time and space has been a real treat. So thank you.

Jessica Van Cleave

Thank you. Thank you. It's been a gift this afternoon.

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