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9 Transmaterial Worlding as Inquiry
Gail Simon and Leah Salter
At the core of the chapter is this simple narrative: we live in language and in a material world. When we research human life, we cannot see it or investigate it as separate from all else around us, whether ‘man-made’ and/or naturally occurring. Social constructionist inquiry studies how we use language to construct stories of self and other, of material and apparently immaterial, of that which is animate and apparently inanimate. The idea that humans alone story the world is anthropocentric. The world also stories humans. We are all involved in a worlding process (Barad, 2007) where the stories we generate have consequences. Inquiry that draws on social constructionist principles is guided by an ethical imperative to address practices of power by asking how stories are generated, how some truths are propagated over others, by whom, to what end. We aim to understand the relational effect of stories and how some stories carry more weight than others in different contexts.
Transmaterial worlding describes researcher activity as storying a diverse material world. It is a way to attend to the human condition and the vitality of other matter, to the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, to life beyond species and life beyond what appears as death. ‘Worlding’ describes the constant process of intra-becoming within and between species and matter (Barad, 2007). As an approach to inquiry this includes not just observing, it includes challenging, perturbing, disrupting, transforming. There is no stasis, only movement. It involves a particular commitment to exploring incoherence between stories lived, stories told, stories ignored and stories re-written (Cronen and Pearce, 1999; McNamee, 2020). Deconstructing the relations in dominant discourses enables us to see how and why some voices (human or non-human) succeed in their stories being promoted and sold in some contexts over others. This has the potential to render visible the context and connection between everyday activities and their local and global contexts (Simon, 2012, 2013; Simon and Salter, 2019).
Research then becomes an opportunity to understand and disrupt power relations in order to challenge and reduce injustice. We offer examples of transmaterial worlding as a form of social constructionist inquiry and suggest signposts for how social constructionist research in a transmaterial world can honour societal, cultural, professional and other kinds of situated knowledge and know-how. These signposts propose coherent ways of validating and rendering transparent how we appraise what matters in social constructionist inquiry.
In this chapter, we extend social construction (i) to resituate the concept of social in the posthuman to broaden who/what counts as worthy of study and inclusion as a research participant; (ii) to recognise that social constructionist theory can be used for controlling self-interest in contrast with what we are calling co-construction which foregrounds collaboration and shared ethical meaning-making practices; and (iii) to introduce the concepts of transmaterial worlding and co-inhabitation as onto-epistemological understandings of relationships, movement, meaning-making practices, the influence of power between human and non-human parts of our worlds.
More Than Theory
Social construction is more than a theory of communication, it is a theory of theories. It invites us to explore how realities about people, places, intention and matter are constructed, by whom, to what purpose, and with what affect. Theory and research methods can be understood as products of their era, of their culture, of professional, social, political and economic agendas. If knowledge practices are inseparable from the contexts out of which they emerge, then we must accept that language is never innocent or neutral. Recognising the presence of power relations and which realities have more influence over others is critical to transmaterial worlding as a form of inquiry.
Social construction is a form of qualitative research, more specifically post-positivist inquiry. Given the post-positivist recognition that one always affects the context one is studying, it is important to direct that influence and deliberately set out to constructively and collaboratively change the site of inquiry through the doing of research. Social constructionist researchers not only declare their bias but put it to work and offer rich transparency as rationale, background and learning for the study. This is not simply a trend in research. It connects to concerns expressed by oppressed and colonised groups of people who have been researched and had all manner of falsehoods, intentional or otherwise, written about them, which have often led to the development of policies which have served to oppress these groups further and render invisible issues of concern facing those communities (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; McCarthy and Byrne, 2007; Reynolds, 2019; Simon, 1998; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999; Visweswaran, 1994). Narratives need understanding in the context of their production. We need to study historical contexts that gave rise to them and to explore how contemporary contexts continue to invest in fostering some stories over others. Stories don't just happen. Someone is promoting and fostering them. Structures such as political parties, newspapers, TV channels and ‘news’ stations are partisan vehicles for those people or institutions with often a hidden vested interest in social relations being maintained or challenged. Some people's cultures, values and local knowledges are reproduced and revitalised through language networks over others and become easily solidified into codes of normalcy which become policy and legislation.
Consequently, social construction