The materiality of fieldwork: an ontology of feminist becoming

Abstract

Through the materiality of fieldwork at a high-achieving high-poverty high school, I discuss how the collision between practices of feminist methodology and the materiality of fieldwork forced me to rethink the “feminist” in feminist research. Using the work of Karen Barad, this material–discursive account of methodology as ontology looks at feminist research as a constitutive intra-action between the materiality of the field and discursive representations of “what count” as feminist research. I discuss “the matter” of feminist research, or how representations of it in the literature rubbed up against its practice. I illustrate how “the matter” of inquiry – bodies, buildings, books, desks, policies, theories, and discourses – was agential and affective. “Doing” of feminist research is an ontological engagement where the force of the material was simultaneously (re)constitutive of feminist methodology, theory, and practice. By engaging with these entangled intra-actions, I hope to narrate an ontological event of feminist becoming.

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