Special Issue: Postqualitative inquiry: Theory and practice in environmental education

Abstract

This Special Issue of AJEE is an assemblage of creative starting points for postqualitative inquiry. Mazzei (2021), after St. Pierre (2011), has described postqualitative inquiry in terms of direct groundings in theoretical/philosophical literature. The purpose of theory is to help us better understand our world as well as to lead us to informed action (Brookfield, 2005). ‘ Postqualitative ’ can be distilled by the phrase ‘ thinking with theory ’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, 2018) to encounter different ways that theory-based concepts can produce thought that happens ‘ in the middle of things ’ . Inquiries are shaped in working concepts together within problems. Concepts help us to disentangle how we have come to think and see in certain ways, making it possible to see differently (Hart, 2014). Directly implicated are extant empirical and ethical applications of theory directly within philosophical positions, often associated with new materialist and posthumanist thinking. Such shiftings in theory/praxis are increasingly recognised within impending concerns about the value of a qualitative inquiry, complicated by bioethical and bio-political issues of the Anthropocene and beyond. The turn researchers Hargraves describes explore how we might reconceptualise inquiry where researchers and participants become entangled as living assemblages in ways that disrupt and deterritorialise and that move beyond linguistic poststructuralist discursive toward the material experience. ‘ not practice; practice. ,