L A Mazzei
Biographic Data
| ID | 41457 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L A Mazzei |
| GIVEN NAMES | L A |
| FAMILY NAME | Mazzei |
| SIGNATURE | MAZZEI L A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oregon |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4312-3938 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 726 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Living Through Fieldwork Duration: Rhythm as Temporal Apparatus
This conceptual paper examines assumptions about time latent in traditional qualitative fieldwork. It draws on the work of Bergson, Campt, Kirby, Manning, and Phillips to enact a concept of fieldwork duration . Fieldwork duration is a co-constitution of seemingly disparate spacetimes that emerge in haptic (touching) relation. Fieldwork duration pushes beyond traditional ideas of “the field” being “out there” somewhere and the time of fieldwork as…
Thinking like a feminist and reading with love
In this paper, we expand the Foucauldian question of what is thinking doing? We approach the question in the context of reading as an entirely ontological enterprise. Aligned with the special issue theme of reading as a "long preparation," and prompted by Deleuze's discussion of "reading with love," we link the two to present how reading with love has been enacted in our work, both collective and individual, as transformative and intensive. The f…
Minor pedagogy: Education as continuous variation
Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry
Cascade questioning is offered as a manner of inquiring into / co-enabling a research phenomenon. I follow and elaborate an agential realist ontology as formulated by Karen Barad (2007) considering questions as worlding practices (instead of subject-object relations between the knower and that which is to be known). Cascade questioning is about tracing entanglements all the while that this activity is also the production – or enabling - of entang…
Inquiry as Unthought: The Emergence of Thinking Otherwise
This article is derived from a webinar series conversation titled “Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry,” co-hosted by Candace R. Kuby and Viv Bozalek. This article is based on a conversation that the authors had, facilitated by Candace Kuby, on November 19, 2020
Foucault
In the middle of sensing relations between the performative accounts of Cassandra and Sera and encounters of negotiating power relations, the authors became attentive to Foucault’s theory about the relation between power and knowledge: not that one is the other (“knowledge is power”), but how they express one another. Everybody knows that the academy is an institutional structure, yet Foucault’s concepts engender different thought about power (th…
Why Butler?
Critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up the possibility for different modes of living; in other words, not to celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation. Performativity explores (and exposes) how gender identities get done (and undone) as iterative and citational practices within dis…
Why Foucault?
In the context of an inquiry, the purpose of a power/knowledge reading is to explain how the cultural and material practices of Cassandra and Sera, as first-generation women faculty, combine power and knowledge to produce their subjectivities. Cassandra’s and Sera’s practices and the production of their subjectivity as they negotiated their entry in higher education are effects of a network of social, material, cultural, and power relations withi…
Why Barad?
Barad calls into question the givenness of previously uncontested categories of “humans and nonhumans” and the implications for a thinking with that seeks not representation, but relationality. While much of what has been written under the guise of material feminism comes from the philosophy of science, feminist scholars and feminist materialists are theorizing agency as distributed in the social world. Barad’s mobilization of apparatus is inform…
Spivak
Spivak demands a rethinking of center/margin politics as a binary, oppositional structure and for whom those spaces are privileged. She does so by relying on Foucault’s theories to position the teaching machine (the university) as a vehicle of power/knowledge that seeks to locate and define what counts as “authentic” inhabitants of the margin. Reading and thinking Cassandra’s performative account with both Foucault and Spivak, readers in the chap…
Barad
The work of Karen Barad incites becoming-questions as to how intra-actions of bodies (human, nonhuman, and more than human) produce subjectivities and performative enactments not previously thought. The authors put thought in motion in Chapter 6 with Barad’s agential realism alongside the material ↔ discursive intra-actions of suits and offices and bodies. Through the authors’ plugging in, the reader will encounter enactments of knowing in being …
Plugging one text into another
In this opening chapter, new to the second edition, the authors describe their plugging in technique, one they enact as a constant, continuous doing. Their aim is to capture and convey the movement of plugging in as readers encounter this doing in the chapters that follow. They situate the book itself not as a telling, but a doing, an enactment of this plugging in that keeps thought on the move. An “overview” of each of the thresholding chapters …
Ontological writing
In the final chapter, the authors position this second edition as a between-book and discuss it as an ontological becoming. Doing so, they take up affective dimensions of thinking with in this new concluding chapter. Relying on concepts from Massumi, Manning, Deleuze and Guattari, Stengers, and Whitehead, the authors offer a glimpse into what it is to unleash worldings and becomings in ontological writing. The chapter concludes by inviting reader…
Butler
Judith Butler’s theory of performativity brings attention to undoing normative categories that place rigid structures on how people live out their lives. Butler’s theory, relying on linguistic action rather than on the theatrical, transforms thought about how gender identities get done (and undone) as a reiterative and citational practice within discourse, power relations, historical experiences, cultural practices, and material conditions. Readi…
Deleuze and Guattari
For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is about production (in a similar way that Foucault’s power is productive, and that Butler’s subject is produced). Desire’s production is active, becoming, transformative. It is produced out of a multiplicity of forces that form the assemblage. Making room for encounters in the unthought, relations are sensed between Deleuze and Guattari’s desire and the performative accounts of Cassandra and Sera. Desire is read …
Why Spivak?
Eagleton is gesturing toward Gayatri Spivak, whose deconstructive project is a critique of postcolonialism. Spivak goes on to write that what are being reclaimed are “regulative political concepts” that have been inherited from Western Europe; thus, she rejects postcolonialism as an adequate referent for the times because decolonization has not happened. In some feminist literature (e.g., bell hooks, Audre Lorde), the margin is positioned as a ra…
Derrida
In this chapter, the authors plug in the performative accounts with Derrida, attentive to the deconstructive moment – the jarring and excessive nature of events that do not fit neatly into categories, nor capture an experience, but that rupture structures and received notions of the academy. Staying with the event, and rereading the performative accounts, readers will continually encounter the Black, white, working-class, and gendered bodies of S…
Why Deleuze and Guattari?
One of the hallmarks of the writing of Deleuze and Guattari is their creation of a new language. They stretch language and its possibilities by intentionally using words to connote something other than what the people ordinarily take them to mean, as a way to interrupt and rupture ways of thinking. While Derrida had much to say to the reader about the absent present, the people began to brush up against the limits of methodological thinking about…
Why Derrida?
Deconstruction in a nutshell: “the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to the reader, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break.” While Derrida’s early naming of deconstruction in of Grammatology was concerned with the problem of language and the undoing of texts, he went on in future years to demonstrate that deconstruction is not just about unsettling texts, but c…
Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research
Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Second Edition demonstrates how to enact various philosophical concepts in practices of inquiry, effectively opening up the process of thought in qualitative studies. Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research functions as a refusal of pregiven method, intensifying creativity, experimentation, and newness. Readers are invited into the threshold of theory to traverse philosophers and their concepts, …
Speculative Inquiry: Thinking With Whitehead
This article explores what Whitehead’s process philosophy opens up for “new” approaches to philosophically informed inquiry. The article begins with a brief discussion of Whitehead’s process philosophy, an explanatory section that develops key concepts necessary for understanding his ontological principle, followed by a discussion of how Whitehead offers a recalibration of experience and the subject in his process philosophy. The article ends wit…
Postqualitative Inquiry: Or the Necessity of Theory
In this article, the author presents postqualitative inquiry not as a method with a script, but as that which emerges as a process methodology. This type of inquiry happens in the middle of things, in the threshold, as theoretical concepts and data constitute one another in an analytic practice of thinking with theory
Philosophy of education in a new key: Future of philosophy of education
What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the Philosophy of Education in a New Key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—a…
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 expert…
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 w…
Plugging One Text Into Another: Thinking With Theory in Qualitative Research
In this article, the authors describe the work of their recently published book, Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. The purpose of this article is to show how they use theory to think with their data (and use data to think with theory) in order to accomplish a reading of data that is both within and against interpretivism. The authors put to use a concept picked up from Deleuze and Guattari to…
A voice without organs: Interviewing in Posthumanist Research
In keeping with the editor’s call for this special issue, this paper discusses how a posthumanist stance has enabled me to materialize a different conception of the interview and interview data in postqualitative inquiry. More specifically, I am thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, the Body without Organs, one they use to enact thinking without a subject and to liberate thought from overcoded images in order to confront a reliance on obj…
Beyond an Easy Sense: A Diffractive Analysis
In this article, I use Karen Barad's concept of diffraction as a methodological practice of reading "insights through one another" in response to the editors' call for examples of analysis after coding in qualitative inquiry. A diffractive reading of data through multiple theoretical insights moves qualitative analysis away from habitual normative readings toward a diffractive reading that spreads thought in unpredictable patterns producing diffe…
"Complicating Voice in a Refusal to "Let Participants Speak for Themselves
In this article, the authors respond to the editors' call to challenge simplistic and mechanistic approaches to qualitative research that preclude dense and multilayered treatment of data. The editors assert that such practices can lead to (over)simplified knowledge claims, something especially risky when participant "voice" is presented as an expression of "experience" devoid of context. The authors approach the methodological project of a simpl…
Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research
Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Second Edition demonstrates how to enact various philosophical concepts in practices of inquiry, effectively opening up the process of thought in qualitative studies. Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research functions as a refusal of pregiven method, intensifying creativity, experimentation, and newness. Readers are invited into the threshold of theory to traverse philosophers and their concepts, …
Inhabited Silences: In Pursuit of a Muffled Subtext
In the conversations in which qualitative researchers engage, silences often occur, particularly when researchers pursue issues of race and culture in education. The author proposes that qualitative researchers not dismiss silence as an omission or absence of empirical materials but rather engage the silences as meaningful and purposeful. To do so, the author attempts to call attention to what has been absent in an analysis of conversations with …
Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives
Winner of the 2013 American Educational Studies Association's Critics Choice Award!Thinking With Theory In Qualitative Research shows how to use various philosophical concepts in practices of inquiry; effectively opening up the process of data analysis in qualitative research. It uses a common data set and utilizes various theoretical perspectives
Silent Listenings: Deconstructive Practices in Discourse-Based Research
In this article, I respond to Wanda Pillow's (2000)challenge to Educational Researcher and other educational journals to provide more working examples of postmodern research not in an effort to contain such research, but in an effort to irrupt or break apart efforts at containment. Specifically, I present a methodological approach for listening to the "silences" revealed in my conversations with White teachers regarding their racial identity. Tho…
Silence speaks: Whiteness revealed in the absence of voice
Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research
This special issue that we are calling, ‘Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research’, presents writings from qualitative researchers across various disciplines and contexts who are attempting to work with these new analytics and practices made possible through their engagement with Deleuzian concepts and processes. These researchers engage epistemological questions and try out methodological practices inspired by thinking with Deleuze in quali…
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 …
Materialist mappings of knowing in being: Researchers Constituted in the Production of Knowledge
In keeping with the editor's call for this special issue, this paper demonstrates how reading data with and through a new materialist lens opens up different ways of seeing and thinking. Drawing on material feminist theory, the author presents an illustration of how such practices produce a different encounter with data, research settings, and participants as she is made and unmade in intra-actions with matter, both material and discursive
Thinking data with Deleuze
In this paper the author is thinking with Deleuze's philosophical concept of the ‘image’ of the speech‐act in cinema and the implications for methodology and ethics in qualitative research. Drawing on research in the USA with white teachers, this paper will specifically engage with Deleuzian concepts presented in his two books on cinema and his philosophical concept of the ‘image’ toward a re‐imaging of voice. To think with the ‘image’ of speech‐…
Philosophy of education in a new key: Future of philosophy of education
What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the Philosophy of Education in a New Key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—a…
Problematizing Methodological Simplicity in Qualitative Research: Editors’ Introduction
Desiring silence: Gender, race and pedagogy in education
In my work with white teachers, predominantly female, I assert that ‘desire’ is functioning to produce silent discourses that serve to perpetuate a continuation of white privilege. Based on a qualitative research study exploring the nature of silences in teacher education classrooms, this paper seeks to explore how desire is functioning to produce such silences and how they can be productively understood. Using the concept of desire as presented …
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 expert…
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 w…
Postfeminist education: Girls and the sexual politics of schooling
Weighing in on the question “has feminism gone too far?” is a recent book by Jessica Ringrose, Postfeminist Education?: Girls and the Sexual Politics of Schooling. Instead of merely offering a crit
Inhabited Silences: In Pursuit of a Muffled Subtext
In the conversations in which qualitative researchers engage, silences often occur, particularly when researchers pursue issues of race and culture in education. The author proposes that qualitative researchers not dismiss silence as an omission or absence of empirical materials but rather engage the silences as meaningful and purposeful. To do so, the author attempts to call attention to what has been absent in an analysis of conversations with …
Silent Listenings: Deconstructive Practices in Discourse-Based Research
In this article, I respond to Wanda Pillow's (2000)challenge to Educational Researcher and other educational journals to provide more working examples of postmodern research not in an effort to contain such research, but in an effort to irrupt or break apart efforts at containment. Specifically, I present a methodological approach for listening to the "silences" revealed in my conversations with White teachers regarding their racial identity. Tho…
Silence speaks: Whiteness revealed in the absence of voice
Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research
This special issue that we are calling, ‘Thinking with Deleuze in qualitative research’, presents writings from qualitative researchers across various disciplines and contexts who are attempting to work with these new analytics and practices made possible through their engagement with Deleuzian concepts and processes. These researchers engage epistemological questions and try out methodological practices inspired by thinking with Deleuze in quali…
Thinking data with Deleuze
In this paper the author is thinking with Deleuze's philosophical concept of the ‘image’ of the speech‐act in cinema and the implications for methodology and ethics in qualitative research. Drawing on research in the USA with white teachers, this paper will specifically engage with Deleuzian concepts presented in his two books on cinema and his philosophical concept of the ‘image’ toward a re‐imaging of voice. To think with the ‘image’ of speech‐…
Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives
Winner of the 2013 American Educational Studies Association's Critics Choice Award!Thinking With Theory In Qualitative Research shows how to use various philosophical concepts in practices of inquiry; effectively opening up the process of data analysis in qualitative research. It uses a common data set and utilizes various theoretical perspectives
Desiring silence: Gender, race and pedagogy in education
In my work with white teachers, predominantly female, I assert that ‘desire’ is functioning to produce silent discourses that serve to perpetuate a continuation of white privilege. Based on a qualitative research study exploring the nature of silences in teacher education classrooms, this paper seeks to explore how desire is functioning to produce such silences and how they can be productively understood. Using the concept of desire as presented …
"Complicating Voice in a Refusal to "Let Participants Speak for Themselves
In this article, the authors respond to the editors' call to challenge simplistic and mechanistic approaches to qualitative research that preclude dense and multilayered treatment of data. The editors assert that such practices can lead to (over)simplified knowledge claims, something especially risky when participant "voice" is presented as an expression of "experience" devoid of context. The authors approach the methodological project of a simpl…
Problematizing Methodological Simplicity in Qualitative Research: Editors’ Introduction
Postfeminist education: Girls and the sexual politics of schooling
Weighing in on the question “has feminism gone too far?” is a recent book by Jessica Ringrose, Postfeminist Education?: Girls and the Sexual Politics of Schooling. Instead of merely offering a crit
A voice without organs: Interviewing in Posthumanist Research
In keeping with the editor’s call for this special issue, this paper discusses how a posthumanist stance has enabled me to materialize a different conception of the interview and interview data in postqualitative inquiry. More specifically, I am thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, the Body without Organs, one they use to enact thinking without a subject and to liberate thought from overcoded images in order to confront a reliance on obj…
Materialist mappings of knowing in being: Researchers Constituted in the Production of Knowledge
In keeping with the editor's call for this special issue, this paper demonstrates how reading data with and through a new materialist lens opens up different ways of seeing and thinking. Drawing on material feminist theory, the author presents an illustration of how such practices produce a different encounter with data, research settings, and participants as she is made and unmade in intra-actions with matter, both material and discursive
Plugging One Text Into Another: Thinking With Theory in Qualitative Research
In this article, the authors describe the work of their recently published book, Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. The purpose of this article is to show how they use theory to think with their data (and use data to think with theory) in order to accomplish a reading of data that is both within and against interpretivism. The authors put to use a concept picked up from Deleuze and Guattari to…
Beyond an Easy Sense: A Diffractive Analysis
In this article, I use Karen Barad's concept of diffraction as a methodological practice of reading "insights through one another" in response to the editors' call for examples of analysis after coding in qualitative inquiry. A diffractive reading of data through multiple theoretical insights moves qualitative analysis away from habitual normative readings toward a diffractive reading that spreads thought in unpredictable patterns producing diffe…
Thinking with an Agentic Assemblage in Posthuman Inquiry
During the autumn of 2014, a 50-pound standard-issue dormitory mattress made its way across various spaces on the campus of Columbia University in New York. At times, the dark blue foam mattress was carried by one woman, Emma Sulkowicz — a senior visual arts major at Columbia. At other times, Sulkowicz was joined by others on campus (friends and strangers) in a collective carry to share the burden of movement. These solitary and participatory car…
Lines of Articulation
Kathleen Stewart describes Ordinary Affects as an experiment set in “a present that began some time ago.” In this essay, I consider voice similarly, as not bound by a temporal linearity, but as voice of duration, absent of origin and as an articulation of a present that began some time ago, always becoming. I conclude with an experimentation of voice in the form of what I name lines of articulation
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 …
Voice in the Agentic Assemblage
This chapter explains Jane Bennett's concept of the agentic assemblage to position the discursive artifacts of qualitative inquiry as always already material and the material as an always already discursive construction. It provides positing voice in qualitative educational research as a thing that is entangled with other things in an assemblage that acts with an agential force. Voice as present, stable, authentic, and self-reflective such a voic…
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 expert…
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 w…
Speculative Inquiry: Thinking With Whitehead
This article explores what Whitehead’s process philosophy opens up for “new” approaches to philosophically informed inquiry. The article begins with a brief discussion of Whitehead’s process philosophy, an explanatory section that develops key concepts necessary for understanding his ontological principle, followed by a discussion of how Whitehead offers a recalibration of experience and the subject in his process philosophy. The article ends wit…
Postqualitative Inquiry: Or the Necessity of Theory
In this article, the author presents postqualitative inquiry not as a method with a script, but as that which emerges as a process methodology. This type of inquiry happens in the middle of things, in the threshold, as theoretical concepts and data constitute one another in an analytic practice of thinking with theory
Philosophy of education in a new key: Future of philosophy of education
What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the Philosophy of Education in a New Key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—a…
Foucault
In the middle of sensing relations between the performative accounts of Cassandra and Sera and encounters of negotiating power relations, the authors became attentive to Foucault’s theory about the relation between power and knowledge: not that one is the other (“knowledge is power”), but how they express one another. Everybody knows that the academy is an institutional structure, yet Foucault’s concepts engender different thought about power (th…
Why Butler?
Critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open up the possibility for different modes of living; in other words, not to celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation. Performativity explores (and exposes) how gender identities get done (and undone) as iterative and citational practices within dis…
Sociology (28 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (22 works) · Epistemology (21 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Qualitative research (13 works) · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics (13 works) · Social science (10 works)