The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Группа авторов
with an attendant method of analysis, it asks why some narratives are in play more powerfully than others and in whose interest. It invites researchers to consider how social groups can participate in language games to challenge destructive practices of power, and what other methods of communication and power are available to those wanting equality and justice, and at what cost to all those with interests. Victims of injustice, their advocates, professionals, academics the world over struggle for their truths to be taken seriously in a world which uses 21st-century technologies to amplify dominant discourses and fan preferred truths to generate simplistic dismissals of what, in another era, would have counted as fact. Theories have been influenced by the unacknowledged ideological assumptions about the superiority of white people, particularly men and their ‘normal’ ways of living in the world. First person and co-constructionist research act as a counter-movement to decolonise research practice (Dillard, 2000; Lather, 1994, 2007; Madison, 2012; Pillow, 2019; Simon and Salter, 2019; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999; Wade, 1997).
Social construction has offered a long-standing critique of ‘truths’ (Foucault, 1979; Gergen and Gergen, 2002; McCarthy and Byrne, 2007; McNamee, 1994; McNamee and Gergen, 1992) as a product of the most powerful people, institutions and cultures. The theory of social construction has been appropriated by the latter resulting in language games with no relational ethics and no reliable ‘truths’ (McNamee, 2004, 2020). ‘Truth’ is not simply subjective but has the potential to be systematically subject to intentional manipulation.
While social construction falls into a post-positivist paradigm, it can be utilised in positivist or post-positivist ways. We make a distinction between aboutness research (Shotter, 1999, 2011) and co-constructionist research (Simon and Salter, 2019). Aboutness research is when a researcher uses the theory of social construction to study or deconstruct what meaning others are making with each other, positions them as an observer outside of a system and creates distance between researcher and that which is being studied. Research participants are not included in the meaning-making processes. It subscribes to an idea that knowledge can be extracted or manipulated for others. In co-construction, the researcher uses the theory and ethical imperative implicit in social constructions that meaning is made with others. The researcher makes their inquiry alongside and with other research participants, exploring discursive practices from within the doing of them. Co-construction involves studying mutual and reflexive meaning-making processes while engaged in the doing of them.
Social Construction as Co-Construction
We propose co-construction as offering a clear ethical term to describe social constructionist research with social justice politics. Co-constructionist research allows us to co-research from an alongside or within position. It encourages us to acknowledge the inevitability and impact of power relations in making something together. Social construction is not owned by those with any one group of people with specific political leanings or social conscience. It is an ideology which can be used to play significant political or interpersonal games to protect those in power and their resources. It is, in itself, neither ethical nor unethical.
Co-constructionist inquiry encourages situated research where researcher and participants collaborate, are transparent and open, and work towards creating a culture of co-production and transformation. It can be a result of negotiated and collaborative inquiry (Anderson, 1997; Anderson and Gehart, 2007; McNamee and Hosking, 2012) reflecting decolonial practice and epistemic witnessing (Pillow, 2019). Research as a listening and witnessing activity can be seen as an act of resistance (Salter, 2017a, 2018; Wade, 1997; White, 2007), can support transformation through personal and collective story-telling, and can be a form of co-production (Linds and Vettraino, 2008; Salter and Newkirk, 2019; White, 2007).
For example, the question, ‘What are they making with each other?’ is different from ‘How am I constructing what they are doing?’ and ‘What are we making with each other?’ When researchers position themselves as observers external to the observed, they must identify how they are co-constructing meaning from what they (think they) have observed. When researching reflexively from within living moments, they can inquire into their inner dialogue, with co-participants and co-respondents, to check meaning. This is co-construction.
Reframing ‘Social’ Inclusivity
We propose that transmaterial worlding can be understood as embracing all forms of communication between and beyond human forms. It steps away from an anthropocentric focus so that ‘social’ extends beyond human, reframes language to include transmaterial multilingual communication and sets all these relations within a critique of institutional discourses and material structures. We integrate the concern of protecting the ecology of the planet. This involves our understanding research as an onto-epistemological activity fluidly situated in a range of emergent transmaterial communicatory activities.
Transmaterial worlding as a form of inquiry requires that we re-think our relations with-in our environment, that we re-position ourselves from in-habiting or co-habiting the world (both separate us from other materiality) to co-inhabiting (Simon and Salter, 2019). Co-inhabitation emphasises not simply collaboration and intra-action (Barad, 2007) but a humility to re-position humans as living in a vital-emergent-disappearing world as well as alongside and as vital-emergent-disappearing matter.
Material-Discursive Practice
In transmaterial worlding, we understand researching linguistic practice as a form of mattering. There are no final conclusions – though there may be useful knowledge – and the need to attempt to describe journeys of knowing in which contextualised, situated ways of knowing extend or close down ways of accounting and the potential for transformation of participants. Transmaterial worlding is a process of moving, constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing and reviving stories which include the voices of those normally heard through privileged channels and the voices of marginalised, silenced or exterminated peoples, places, human and non-human, across many matters, across context, across time. Inevitably, material changes depending on where the describer is standing, how they are dressed, how the light is falling or arranged (Simon and Salter, 2019). Any ‘apparatus’ that is used, is part of the research and therefore part of the world that is being co-constructed (Barad, 2007). Discursive mattering is inevitably influenced by the limits of the describer's own apparatus – cultural lenses and filters which frequently result in a reproductive mattering of dominant heteronormative, white supremacist narratives and practices (Chen, 2012; Pillow, 2019).
How we configure ‘other’ people, places or things can happen through taking an aboutness position and become an act of colonisation in attributing meaning or interpreting meaning. Acts of colonisation separate the knower from their knowing and know-how, leading us into binary constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and stories of people who apparently know nothing. Histories are lost and communities fractured. People are silenced in a myriad of ways. This has resulted in unmitigated loss of indigenous knowledge and contextual know-how. Colonised groups of people who have been researched have 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 further and render invisible issues of concern facing those communities (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Salter, 2015, 2017b; McCarthy and Byrne, 2007; Pillow, 2019; Richardson/Kinewesquao, 2018; Simon, 1998; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999; Visweswaran, 1994). This has resulted in catastrophic changes in societies and land ownership, such as loss of rainforests, sustainable communities, homelands, dunes, clean air, uncontaminated sites, the ozone layer and much, much more. So it becomes an ethical imperative to ask, ‘What and who are in focus?’ and ‘Why?’ and ‘How can other silenced voices or erased matters be animated, rendered audible through our research?’
Living in a transmaterial world, parts of which we have largely ignored messages from, we need to learn how to listen to relational communications in transmaterial relationships. Transmaterial worlding, as inquiry, is a process of co-constructing new ways of understanding, meaning-making and ways of being across human and non-human activity, motivated by a concern for social justice with the aim of challenging oppression,