The path through the library: Reading for post-qualitative research

“The library is lifeless until we begin to trace a path through it … The path carved by reading establishes a territory. It animates thought through the connections that it affords: with other texts, with inchoate ideas, with matter, with memories”
(MacLure, 2024).

These words are taken from the opening of a recent article about reading for research. This presentation takes off from that article, exploring some of the characteristics of “intensive reading” as described by Deleuze (1995). Intensive reading is more akin to irruption than interpretation: something opens up or opens out onto new connections - textual, material, virtual, sensual.

As Deleuze puts it, “Something comes through” from the book’s inexpressible Outside. I discuss some examples of intensive reading in my own research, tracing the ways in which unanticipated paths have opened and ramified, and the implications for the thinking and doing of the research. I think too about paths not taken, and how some influential texts, beloved by others, might not “work” for an individual reader. I also consider the obligation to read “intentionally” as well as intensively - that is, to read outside the canon and the romance of chance. I explore some of the limitations for posthuman and decolonising research of being constrained to read (and write and think) within the grammar and logic of English and the other European languages at the heart of colonialism, thereby being closed off from the diverse ontologies, realities and temporalities of indigenous, creole and other languages.

• Deleuze, G. (1995) Negotiations 1972-1990 (M. Joughin, Trans). Columbia University Press.
• MacLure, M. (2024). “Something comes through or it doesn’t”: intensive reading in post-qualitative inquiry. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 37(6), 1647–1654.

Speaker

Maggie MacLure

Maggie MacLure is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Health and Education, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, and a former member of the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI), where she led the Theory and Methodology Research Group. Her interests include theory and methodology in qualitative inquiry, and early childhood research. She is Founder-Director of the international Summer Institute in Qualitative Research.

ORCID

Maggie MacLure https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7679-9240