Toward “Post Inquiry”

Practice. Writing that conference paper was helpful not only in thinking about the past but also in thinking about the possibilities of our work going forward in what some in the humanities and social sciences are calling the “ontological turn, ” as were comments and questions from the audience, several of which I address here. In this paper, I highlight three key periods in my history as a social science researcher. The first was an early encounter (St.Pierre, 1995), followed by ongoing difficulty, with the incommensurability between postmodernism, poststructuralism, posthumanism and other approaches that I refer to together here as the “posts ” and “conventional humanist qualitative methodology ” (St.Pierre, 2011, 2013) or “1980’s qualitative methodology ” (e.g., Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Erickson, 1986). That period included an attempt to use post theories to critique, to deconstruct, to “work the ruins ” (St.Pierre & Pillow, 2000) of that methodology in order to make it unintelligible and “produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently” (St.Pierre, 1997, p.175). I think, however, we were more comfortable with the posts’ epistemological critiques than we were with their possibilities for rethinking ontology. For me, that period ended when I shifted from a critique of that methodology to its defense in response to the neo-positivism in the debates about what counted as rigorous, high-quality, “scientifically based research ” (SBR) as described in the 2002 No Child Left Behind Ac