Project
Becomings
engage · learn · reimagine · grow
Reimagining recovery narratives following adversity
Post-Qualitative Inquiry
Exploring how knowledge emerges through encounters between people, bodies, materials, spaces and experiences — rather than treating it as something already there waiting to be found.
What Is Post-Qualitative Inquiry?
Post-Qualitative Inquiry (PQI) is an approach to research that questions the idea that knowledge already exists somewhere, waiting for a researcher to collect, analyse and explain it. Instead, it asks us to pay attention to how knowledge is continually being produced through the research process itself.
In conventional qualitative research, we might interview someone, turn their words into a transcript and then analyse that transcript as our ‘data’. PQI asks us to notice what this can leave behind. What about the body, the room, an object someone is holding, a silence, a feeling, a relationship, an artwork, or something that happens unexpectedly during the research?
Rather than separating these things into what does and does not count as data, PQI allows us to consider how people, materials, spaces, bodies, emotions, ideas and experiences can become entangled in producing knowledge.
In Project Becomings, this meant thinking about knowledge as “knowledge-in-becoming” rather than something fixed and already known. The research process itself became important: making, talking, feeling, encountering materials, returning to previous work and noticing how understandings changed could all contribute to what became possible to know.
Put simply, PQI encouraged us to ask not only “What does this mean?” but “What is happening here — and what might this encounter be making possible?”
Why Post-Qualitative Inquiry In Trauma And Recovery Research?
Trauma and recovery are not experienced through words alone. They can be felt through the body, encountered through relationships, connected to particular places and objects, and change across different moments in time. Asking someone to describe their experience in an interview can provide important knowledge, but it may not capture everything that is happening.
Post-Qualitative Inquiry offered a way of paying attention to more of this complexity. Rather than deciding in advance that particular things — such as interview transcripts — would constitute the research ‘data’, it allowed the research to remain attentive to what emerged through creative practices, conversations, bodies, materials, spaces, feelings and encounters.
This was particularly important in Project Becomings because some understandings of recovery became apparent through doing and making, rather than being known beforehand. For example, working with clay could involve its weight, texture, resistance and movement; an artwork could take on a different meaning when revisited; and something that appeared absent could become important precisely because its absence was noticed.
PQI therefore supported a different relationship with knowledge. Rather than assuming that the researcher's task was to uncover and report a single meaning behind an experience, knowledge could remain multiple, unfinished and capable of changing as different people, materials and ideas encountered one another.
For trauma recovery, this created space for what could be felt, made or encountered — but might be difficult to put neatly into words — to matter within the research too.
Post-Qualitative Inquiry In Project Becomings
In Project Becomings, Post-Qualitative Inquiry meant paying attention to the whole research process, rather than treating particular things produced by co-researchers as the only ‘data’.
Conversations and words mattered, but so did creative works, images, sounds, bodies, materials, feelings and the encounters through which they were produced.
The research therefore worked across different forms of ‘data’ together, recognising that knowledge could emerge through their relationships rather than needing to separate each into a distinct source to be analysed. This reflected the idea of the research itself as an assemblage — a continually changing coming-together of people, materials, spaces, ideas, experiences and other influences. For example, during the clay work, what mattered was not only what a finished object was said to represent.
The process of making could itself produce knowledge. Co-researchers described getting messy, feeling the clay on their skin, allowing their hands to work, destroying and remaking forms, or responding when the material did something unexpected. One co-researcher described watching a child make and remake clay without putting pressure on themselves, which prompted new thoughts about trying, asking for help and communicating their own needs within recovery.
Meanings could also continue to change. A creative work did not necessarily become a finished piece of ‘data’ once a workshop ended. Objects could be revisited, encountered differently or understood in new ways as the research progressed.
This meant the research could follow what was happening, rather than continually trying to make what happened fit categories decided beforehand. Something unexpected, uncomfortable, unfinished or apparently insignificant could become important because of what it did within the research encounter.
Rethinking Data And Analysis
Post-Qualitative Inquiry also changed how I thought about ‘data’ and analysis. Rather than imagining data as something produced during a workshop, collected by the researcher and then taken away to be analysed, Project Becomings approached knowledge as something that could continue to emerge through the research process.
This meant working across different forms of material — including text, audio, visual material and feeling — rather than automatically treating spoken or written words as the most important source of knowledge. The research process itself was understood as a research assemblage: people, creative works, materials, conversations, bodies, spaces, theories and the researcher could all affect what became noticeable and possible to know.
Analysis was therefore not something that happened only at the end of the project. Making, discussing, noticing, revisiting and responding were also opportunities through which understanding developed. An artwork might generate a conversation; a material might resist what someone intended to make; something missing from an artwork might become significant; or returning to an object later might produce a different understanding from the one that existed when it was first created.
I used the idea of ‘knowledge-in-becoming’ to describe this. Rather than assuming that there was one fixed meaning waiting to be discovered, knowledge could shift as different experiences, materials, people and ideas came into relation with one another.
This did not mean that interpretation became limitless or that anything could simply mean anything. Instead, it required close attention to what was actually happening within particular encounters: what was affecting what, what was becoming noticeable, what was changing, and what possibilities for understanding were being produced.
What Did Post-Qualitative Inquiry Make Possible?
Post-Qualitative Inquiry made it possible to stay with some of the complexity, uncertainty and movement of recovery rather than trying to reduce experiences into fixed categories or meanings.
It allowed things that might otherwise have remained at the edges of the research to become important. A bodily sensation, the resistance of a material, an unexpected creative response, a silence or absence, the atmosphere of a space, or a change in how an object was understood over time could all prompt new questions and possibilities for knowing.
This was particularly significant for understanding recovery. Experiences did not always remain stable: meanings changed, creative works continued to affect people after they were made, and understandings could emerge through encounters that neither the researcher nor co-researchers had anticipated. Rather than treating this uncertainty as something that needed to be resolved, it could itself become part of what the research attended to.
PQI also helped disrupt the idea that recovery knowledge belongs primarily to language, cognition or professional expertise. Working across text, audio, visual and felt experience allowed embodied, experiential, relational and material forms of knowing to participate in the research. This reflected the project's understanding of data as continually becoming rather than passive and already known.
Ultimately, PQI did not provide a different set of steps for finding the ‘right’ answer about recovery. It created space to remain curious about how knowledge was being produced — and what different ways of researching might allow us to notice that we could otherwise miss.
Explore The Research
Project Becomings and its participatory approach are explored in more depth through the doctoral thesis and publications arising from the research.
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