Challenging the Mechanistic within Research Methodologies:
Using Butler to work both ‘within and against interpretivism’
Dr Rebecca Webb, Wed. 16 March, 11:00-12:
In this methodology session, Rebecca will address some of the key thinking
tools with which Judith Butler works. She will do this in order to conceptualise
methodology as that which is ‘beyond’ methods, working within and against
interpretivism. She will draw on twin concepts of vulnerability and resistance in
order to imagine an ontology of being an early career researcher within the
neoliberal academy. Her session will critique and assert a productive and
vulnerable researcher subjectivity which ‘speaks back’ to the neoliberal: to
claim and re-claim some agency. She will utilise examples, framed within a
‘lived’ epistemological and ontological space within which she has recently
worked with a group of PhD researchers at Sussex, to share questions and ideas
that this process produced.
Rebecca is primarily focussed upon the way in which theory is inherently
productive in the process of the being and doing of research methodology.
Key reading for this session:
Butler, J. (2014), Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance, Madrid
Dunne, Pryor & Yates (2005) Becoming a Researcher, Maidenhead, OUP, 162-174
Additional and optional reading:
Jackson, A. Y. and Mazzei, L.A. (2012) Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research:
Viewing data across multiple perspectives, London, Routledge