Rhizomatic Inquiry
In educational research, much empirical and conceptual work is undergirded by dominant ideologies and employs methods that reflect arborescent thinking. That is, these approaches to education research are linear processes that aim to reproduce a series of
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RHIZOMATIC INQUIRY
INTRODUCTION
In educational research, much empirical and conceptual work is undergirded by dominant ideologies and employs methods that reflect arborescent thinking. That is, these approaches to education research are linear processes that aim to reproduce a series of research steps to find an “objective truth” (St. Pierre, 2011; Martin & Kamberelis, 2013). As such, these mainstream forms of research and their accompanying protocols may be viewed as molar formations that segment and striate research, binding inquiry to an acceptable status quo method, whether quantitative or qualitative, and dictating what forms of empirical and conceptual investigations can be considered “research”. To produce research that matters, or indeed, is considered research at all, a researcher must adhere to previouslydetermined protocols or procedures that are rooted in Enlightenment rationalism and positivist epistemology, and fidelity to this set of rules will produce valid or true results that correspond to reality. In this way, positivist methods and research protocols (which are molar formations) serve as exclusionary mechanisms, denying any validity or trustworthiness to insights, understandings, or interpretations that emerge from other forms of investigation that do not necessarily conform to pre-set methods. Ultimately, such conditions determine what types of knowledge count as true, and what types are disregarded as superfluous, unscholarly, or unreliable. From a Deleuzian perspective, the world (and the human understanding of the world) is conceived as inherently multiple, shifting and mobile, composed of singularities, and open-ended, with no determined starting or ending point (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Thus any research perspective predicated on ontological stability, universals, methodologies that reproduce the same bodies of knowledge, and the capacity to discern an ultimate “truth” as a given would be incompatible with a Deluzian lens. In fact, we question if Deleuzian and Deleuzoguattarian concepts are compatible with any articulated qualitative research protocol. By “research protocol,” we are referring to a set of steps, that while perhaps not entirely linear, generally entail reading available research literature on the topic, crafting some sort of guiding question(s), adopting a procedure that outlines what data to collect and from whom to gather information about that question, following interpretive guidelines, and finally, sharing the “findings” to a primarily academic audience in some sort of consumable form (e.g., a journal article, a book chapter, a monograph).
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CHAPTER 3
Yet, we do exist in a stratified academic system overcoded with rules. To produce a book, one must be able to impose order, to organize thoughts and information in particular, conventional ways, to generate a text composed of linear sentences stacked on top of another. Thus, eventually, one presents an interpretation, printed on a piece of paper, which turns the initial research inquiry into a representation—a tra
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