The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Группа авторов
option for more than a few people each month, what would others do who did not win a ticket in this lottery?
An inquiry into how current residents are affected by illness and lost relatives through radioactive toxicity brought into their worlds by local factories or nuclear plants (see the moving ethnographic research by Cathy Richardson/Kinewesquao (2018)) could ask:
Do the spirits of your ancestors speak to you about their experience or yours? How do they communicate? What do they advise you to do?
What are the languages that you feel local government officials are most likely to listen to when local people express worry about their sickness?
How can research support local people to teach government officials local knowledge and practices of knowing?
If local government officials understood your experiences and could listen to what the land has to say and took advice from your ancestors, what would persuade them to act on this understanding and knowledge? What would they see that convinced them that this had been a good thing to do?
How have you managed to keep alive practices that give life and hope?
These systemic questions invite relational reflexivity from the people being asked the question. The questions are based on an idea that questions are never neutral and are a contextual intervention for the person being asked a question (Selvini Palazzoli et al., 1980; Tomm, 1988). Some questions invite an ‘ethic of care’ in ‘imagining the other’ (McCarthy and Byrne, 2007). Others are hypothetical questions (Tomm, 1988), context-setting questions, appreciative inquiry, hope-oriented, narrative questions. Systemic therapy has a rich array of types of questions, a theory of transformation through dialogue and relational response-ability theories (for example, Burnham, 1992; Fredman, 2004; Hedges, 2005; McCarthy and Byrne, 2007; Tomm, 1988; Waldegrave et al., 2003).
Signposting for Transmaterial Worlding
Underpinning this signposting is the notion that social constructionist research is inevitably and intentionally perturbing, disruptive, creative, generative, transformative and unexpected – not homeostatic, representational or eliciting of a single truth (Simon and Salter, 2019). These signposts can support the development of new research practice and new professional practice.
The signposts are a fusion of:
1 Criteria for what counts as quality in qualitative research (for example, Bochner, 2000; Cho and Trent, 2009; Denzin, 2000, 2003; Ellis, 2000; Etherington, 2004; Richardson, 2000; Simon, 2018; Spencer et al., 2003; Tracy, 2010);
2 Social constructionist and systemic principles, values and theory (for example, Burnham, 1992; Markovic, 1993; McCarthy and Byrne, 2007; McCarthy and Simon, 2016 McNamee, 2004; Selvini Palazzoli et al., 1980);
3 New materialist theory (for example, Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2011, 2013; Haraway, 2015, 2016).
Research material…
1 shows critical consideration of where and how voices of transmaterial participants are included in the research;
2 extends communication to include multilingual transmaterial narrative;
3 understands research as an intervention that moves the reader to learn or do something differently;
4 employs creative strategies to tell authentic stories well;
5 clearly states a social responsibility objective which addresses real concerns for people, organisations and the communities in which they live, showing how the practice in the inquiry shows care for/transforms the lives of others;
6 asks daring questions intended to provoke social change and explores the power of narrative and discourse alongside discussion of whose voices and lives matter, and what counts as knowledge, evidence or relevance to the subject;
7 situates experience and description in power structures, local and global contexts, discursive and material systems, historic and contemporary experience, richly inclusive of material from other cultures, materialities, human and non-human systems;
8 provides intimate detail of relational communication from within activities;
9 offers an honest, transparent and reflexive account about the selection of material and interpretation and/or use of the material, why the researchers are doing this research, why now and with what intentions;
10 discusses relational ethics throughout the research process through a rich and overt consideration/critique of power relations, colonising practices, and differences in personal and communal experience, in research relationships and wider socio-political systems;
11 discusses and evidences how the research makes an original and impactful contribution to the field of social constructionist and systemic inquiry, to members of the public, or other professionals, communities or organisations.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have set out how transmaterial worlding as onto-epistemological inquiry supports transformative research into relations between discourse and a transmaterial world. Transmaterial worlding as a method of inquiry has an important role to play in showing how language works in and between human and non-human relationships to maintain or disrupt practices of power that enable or prevent social justice. Co-construction as a form of inquiry and worlding process is an important tool in (i) understanding and supporting decolonial, new materialist strategies to show, extend and disrupt relationships between language and material structures, and (ii) locating human activity as co-inhabitation within a wider fluid sphere of human and non-human environmental context. Examples of systemic questions demonstrate transformative possibilities for generating new and old knowledges that impact on daily practice. Signposts are offered for co-constructionist inquiry as transmaterial worlding to support research which aims to transform lives and create sustainable futures. Transmaterial worlding encourages the development of new practices and is curious about accounts of the fluid and shifting connections between experience and explanation, between theory and practice, language and matter.
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