New Materialisms and Digital Tools in Qualitative Research

Across many fields, there is a growing critique of anthropocentrism and foregrounding the role of the non-human materials within that which is human, with this critique commonly positioned within new materialisms (e.g., Coole & Frost, 2010). This “ethico-onto-epistemological project” calls us to rethink being, matter, and agency (St. Pierre, Jackson, Mazzei, 2016, p. 100). Further, some scholars have argued that our thinking and very being as researchers is co-constituted through the technologies we leverage (e.g., Adams & Thompson, 2016). In this way, technology use in qualitative research can be envisioned as a material network that involves both human activity (e.g., on the part of researcher, participants, etc.) and non-human materials (e.g., technologies) – with both positioned as having agentic possibilities. In this presentation, we discuss a way of thinking about and working with digital tools in qualitative research within this ontological turn.