Proclaiming the New: An Introduction

Abstract

This introduction to a special issue of Qualitative Inquiry on “new approaches to inquiry” questions the need for preexisting social science research methodologies for inquiry that aspires to produce the “new,” that which is unrecognizable and incomprehensible in the Cartesian onto-epistemological arrangement that enables those methodologies. Quite a few contemporary scholars encouraged by the lure of the new have found “old” philosophies promising in dislodging that dogmatic image of thought and its concepts that weigh us down. Whatever the “new” is, it will be different every time, so the articles in the special issue cannot be models of new approaches to inquiry that can be copied and repeated but, instead, are bursts of intensities that have not yet been rendered ordinary. New inquiry, then, is always not-yet, to-come, a force of pure difference pushing through what has been normalized and stratified as it comes into existence.