Simplified understandings of qualitative inquiry as mere method overlook the complexity and nuance of qualitative practice. As is the call of this special issue, the author intervenes in the simplification of qualitative inquiry through a discussion of methodology to illustrate how theory and inquiry are inextricably linked and ethically necessary. The goal of this article is to explore the ways in which Derridean deconstruction inspired an analytics of disruption as quasi-methodology, and to use this as an entry point to discuss how theory is a move toward ethical practice. The author discusses how this analytics drives quasi-methodological practices that embrace intertextuality, aporias, and difference. The author’s study of a high-achieving, high-poverty high school in Ohio provides a micro view of how theory serves to hold me accountable to the complexities of doing research with/for/on the lives of “urban” students. In conclusion, the author attends to the notion of ethics itself as a quasi-concept to think about the refusal of an innocent ethics as a last gesture against simplicity.
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