Qualitative Inquiry in the Making: A Minor Pedagogy

This article builds on Mazzei’s concept of minor inquiry to advance the concept of a minor pedagogy. We do so by folding poststructural theory into the evidence of experience, spotlighting a collective enunciation of the pedagogical event among individuated concepts, speakers, and moments. These pedagogical events are at once quotidian and more than one. In this spacetime individuation falls away, and the production of qualitative research expertise becomes a function of the entanglement of human and more-than-human pedagogues. At the level of the everyday, we recount our experiences in a doctoral program as professor and advisor (Lisa) and student and advisee (Laura). These experiences are selections from our (continuing) joint encounters with qualitative inquiry instruction. Enfolding these everyday pedagogical-theoretical practices of qualitative inquiry produces minor pedagogy, and minor pedagogy produces these folds. As such, minor pedagogy is a pedagogy of the ontological turn.

Enactments of a Minor Inquiry

In this article, we map conditions and enactments for a new plane of inquiry, what Mazzei named a minor inquiry. Informed by our collective thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of a minor literature and its attendant characteristics, deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective assemblage of enunciation, we present the conditions for inquiry on this new plane, provide enactments from our individual projects, and conclude with incitements for escaping the dogma of prescribed method.

Following the Contour of Concepts Toward a Minor Inquiry

In this article, I describe how following the contour of concepts can enable a minor inquiry in which voice might be rethought as what Deleuze and Guattari called a “collective assemblage of enunciation.” Following the contour of Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature” and thinking voice as an assemblage, I both explain the characteristics of a minor literature and provide examples of the conditions for a minor inquiry. Mapping an enactment of a minor inquiry with examples from my previous work on voice, I conclude with what minor inquiry might look like as I experiment further with collective assemblages of enunciation.