Encounters and Materiality in Intimate Scholarship: A Conversation with Maggie MacLure

Abstract

In this chapter, post-qualitative educational researcher Maggie MacLure discusses intimate scholarship and qualitative research within the new materialist turn, which has at its core a fundamental challenge to the humanist notion of the “self.” She suggests that, through new materialisms, we are much more intimately connected with human and non-human entities, which in turn requires us to continually push at the ways conventional research constructs researchers as sovereign subjects. At the same time, we must inquire into what these posthuman intimate connections might entail, reimagine the body outside the Cartesian mind/body dualism, and perhaps rethinking the notion of intimacy itself. She suggests that we might do so by explicitly attending to flesh and materiality in our research; focusing on affective intensities – the “hot spots” that continue to haunt us in our data; and aiming for difference, rather than sameness in our analyses, “dwelling with the data,” rather than trying to rise above it. Further, she contends that, rather than thinking of the data as something one dominates, we consider each instance with the data as alive, as an encounter.

Citation

MacLure, M. (2018), "Encounters and Materiality in Intimate Scholarship: A Conversation with Maggie MacLure", Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 31), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 197-204. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720180000031016