Principles for data analysis using critical post humanism and affective turn

Engaging with the complex theories from critical post humanism and affective turn theories the project team set out to develop a set of principles, as a basis for an analytical framework. In this process Google Docs were used in the conference venue - One for critical posthumanist perspective and one for affective turn perspective; team members were requested to work on these two documents, outline principles and questions for further exploration. This process took about an hour and the outcome was subsequently discussed. 

Based on critical posthumanist theories team members outlined these principles for the foundation for an analytical framework:

1. Descriptions/interpretations never to be located with a particular object but within the relation/intra-action in between (cf. e.g. Davies, 2014 p.5)
2. The material and the discursive are both important and mutually constitutive of each other in data analysis
3. The entanglement of the human and the non-human - entanglement of relations
4. Attention on how discourses materialise, how they work, not what they mean
5. Data are not neutral, objective, speak for itself, but framed technically, economically, ethically, temporally, spatially and philosophically ‘situated’/framed (Kitchin, 2014)
6. We are transformed through the intellectual energy and both made and unmade by data analysis, which is an embedded and embodied (Braidotti, 2012) process. There are no divisions between theory, thinking, writing, participants and data - they work together and make one another to create ‘new analytical questions’ and constitute us to produce different ‘researcher selves’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012: 118).
7. Data illustrates theory and vice versa - you need to stay with both in analysis
8. Collaborative data analysis helps in this process
9. The process is unpredictable and intense ‘As readers in an intensive mode, we are transformers of intellectual energy, processors of the ‘insights’ we are exchanging’ (Braidotti, )
10. As humans we don’t have a unidirectional relationship with materiality we affect and are affected by it - this impacts on conventional notions of agency, choice and acting on the world. Agency is an enactment and is distributed over human and non-human forms (including data and writing) - it is not something that is possessed by an individual, something someone has and is not exclusive to humans. Matter is vital.
11. Understanding the linkages and connections between subjectivity and other things and bodies
12. Using diffraction (patterns of difference) to ‘move away from habitual normative readings’ grounded in the discursive to reading ‘insights through one another’ (Barad, 2007) rather than critical self-reflection (mirroring/sameness).
13. knowing, being and ethics are not separate but are mutually implicated

From the affective turn perspective the following principles were outlined:

1. Emotions as socially / historically/culturally constructed
2. Emotions as moving between/in bodies
3. Emotions as practices/praxis
4. Emotions as public and political
5. Affects and emotions as intersections of language, power, bodies, social structures, subjectivity, materiality
6. Focus on relationality / the in-between
7. Acknowledging the (im)possibility of language to translate/map emotions?

References:

Post-humanism:

Barad, K. (2007)

Blagaard, B. and van der Tuin, I. (eds.) (2014).  The subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts. London: Bloomsbury.

Braidotti, R. (2002). Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Malden: Polity Press.

Braidotti, R. (2012). The Posthuman.

Butler, J. (2014). Reflections on ethics, destructiveness, and life: Rosi Braidotti and the Posthuman. In B.Blagaard and I. van der Tuin (eds.) The subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts. London: Bloomsbury.

Davies, B. (2014). Reading Anger in Early Childhood Intra-Actions: A Diffractive Analysis, Qualitative Inquiry, 

Hemmings, C. (2014). Reading Rosi Braidotti: Returning to Transpostions. In B.Blagaard and I. van der Tuin (eds.) The subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts. London: Bloomsbury.

Lenz Taguchi, H. (2013). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data, Feminist Theory,13(3) 265–281. 

Affective turn:

Childers (2014) Promiscuous Analysis in Qualitative Research, Qualitative Inquiry, 

Lenz Taguchi, H. (2013). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data, Feminist Theory,13(3) 265–281. 

Ivits, S. (2009). Disturbing the comfortable: an ethical inquiry into pedagogies of discomfort and crisis. Unpublished Masterthesis from The University of British Columbia (Vancouver).