Post-Qualitative Filmic Research in Education: Utilizing a “Re/Active Documentary” Methodology

Abstract

This article discusses a filmic research methodology that notices the tangible aesthetic affective entanglements of entities. It explicitly notices traces of self as discernible in others as mattering and is understood as an affirmative movement that may enable an uptake of equal opportunity in education. This filmic work with former Australian schoolgirls expands on Bill Nichols’ framing of performative documentary by drawing on Karen Barad’s new materialist theory of intra-action, during the making and multiple re-presentations of the research. This phenomenon demonstrates the political power of the named “re/active documentary” as a perpetual and co-created intra-action with participants, image, “things,” and virtual audience. Difference in this research is not exterior but a movement of connections where the entanglement of participants, researcher, film artifact, and audience are fluid emergent parts co-constituted within the world.