Becoming interested—the evolvement of research interest in case study research on sports

Abstract

This article challenge research political assumptions of research interests as context specific phenomena predefined by researchers and others in case study research on sports. By adopting a Deleuzian perspective of materiality, the aim is to overturn academic power dimensions as well as anthropocentric focuses and instead explore how research interests emerge in case-assemblages. This is a radical shift that re-theorizes the production of research interests as co-produced capacities in researching bodies. The analysis is done by mapping territorializing, deterritorializing, and reterritorializing affects as well as molar and molecular affects. We use these affects to explore how our research interest evolved in a case study on a swimming event. We conclude by extending this critical exploration to the production of research interests in general and the exaggerated belief that research interests are attributes of specific human bodies (researchers) that precede studies.

Introduction

In the social sciences of sport, traditional case study methodology is quite common. Often, we conduct case studies as empirical in-depth investigations of context specific phenomena that are of specific interest to ourselves (see, e.g., Barker-Ruchti et al., 2019; Edmonds, 2020; Ketokivi & Choi, 2014; Longhofer et al., 2017; Puddle et al., 2019; cf. Yin, 2009). In focus are objects of our perceptions that in turn constitute cases that we want to explore in order to fill various gaps of knowledge. As researchers, we are driven by curiosity, desire, or what we in this paper call research interest. Without always being clearly stated, though, the proceedings within which our research interests emerge often include vertical productions that can be related to Aristoteles’ conceptions of episteme and phronesis (cf. Flyvbjerg, 2001; Irwin, 1999). Along the epistemic thread, our research interests are established by ourselves and the specific academic communities we belong to. As researchers we are authoritative and define research interests strongly linked to our overall research field and its cultural-political ideas of what “new” knowledge that is needed. In this way, the production of research interests is downward and preserves the sociocultural order of the field and from there supports a wider social and political order. Along the phronetic thread research interests are shaped and set in collaboration with others, that is, “extra-academics” (Burawoy, 2005) outside the academic field, and only then they become objects of our perceptions. As researchers, we obtain knowledge from extra-academics and are loyal to that knowledge. In this sense, phronetic interest productions are upward and may resist the overall research field and its quest for a specific social and political order. The reason for producing such research interests is to give extra-academics voice regarding what new knowledge that is needed. Thereby, the intention is to challenge the existing cultural and political order in the field.

One difference between epistemic and phronetic case study research is thus for whom knowledge is produced (Burawoy, 2005; cf. Lee, 1976). While epistemic case studies are directed to an academic audience, phronetic case studies are addressing people outside the academic field. Another difference is for what knowledge is produced (Burawoy, 2005; cf. Lynd, 1939). In this regard, epistemic case studies are interested in the ends, while phronetic case studies are more concerned about the means to reach these ends (cf. Weber, 1978.). What is rarely discussed, however, is that in both epistemic and phronetic case studies, we often try to save ourselves from criticism of credibility by protecting defined research interests (and cases) from external influences during the ongoing exploration. Nor is it noted that epistemic and phronetic case studies tend to maintain an “anthropocentric” (Braidotti, 2006:40) conception of the human and the human individual as a privileged locus where research interests appear (along with other aspects of the research process). Once the planning phase is over, we are politically conceptualized as subject-positions based in mandatory excellence, isolation and homogeneity that in turn constitutes academic power, institutionally, experientially, and discursively. It manifests within an execution culture that regards the gap between researchers and all other entities, human and non-human, as normal, convenient and plausible.

Even if the perspectives of epistemic and phronetic productions of research interests may serve as a satisfactory basis for discussions about for whom and what various knowledge is produced, it may also be argued that these cultural models of interest production have relegated the evolvement of research interest, desire and the physicality of research practice during ongoing explorations to the status of largely unexamined backdrops to ethical discussions of power relations. One reason is that the production of predefined research interests embraces a considerable amount of power forms that may control the (life) processes of the event under study. For instance, our cognizance, awareness, and attention to specific phenomena easily become factors for the transformations of the event and hence the organization of concrete elements within the event. Drawing on Foucault (1981), Rainbow and Rose (2006:204) perhaps would call these forms of power “biopolitics.” At the same time as we as researchers are considered qualified to maintain predefined research interests, there is a significant risk that we in the name of credibility will exercise strategies to influence the existence of these phenomena of interest. Not least to be able to find answers to the right questions which is absolutely crucial in relation to most of today’s research funders. Phenomena of interest simply risk to be regulated under our truths and within discourses we speak.

In other fields, similar dilemmas of the prioritized position of researchers have generated an increased interest in anti-dualist materialist approaches that provide ontological status not to researchers as conscious subjects but to pre-human elements that interact in a web of forces, that among other things produce various bodily capacities in researchers throughout the inquiry (see, e.g., Osborne, 2006). Important to remember, though, is that these materialist approaches do not fully refuse epistemic and phronetic perspectives. Rather, epistemic and phronetic perspectives are considered to be in juxtaposition and the capacities of researching bodies to be produced horizontally. In this paper, we want to explore what might come out of this ontological step regarding the production of research interests in case study research on sport. Starting from a Deleuzian perspective of materiality, we will explore research interests not as vertical predefined phenomena, as linear consequences of academic or extra-academic research preferences, or as related to solid cases, but as becomings in assemblages of multiple human and non-human bodies, ideas and social formations that cut across the natural and cultural realms of epistemic and phronetic case studies. By expanding these sociocultural approaches to a materialist approach, we not only challenge the biopolitical control epistemic and phronetic case studies seem to include in sustaining research interests and case definitions through the execution phase, we also open up interest productions and hence cases for micro-political influences. Rather than merely emerge as political results of academics’ or extra-academics’ need of knowledge, the production of research interests become more biological, endless, and fluid. Thus, we are interested in how the production of research interests proceeds in various directions during the ongoing exploration of a case, and we explore empirical data on the evolvement of two researchers’ interests in a case study performed at a swimming event. Thereby, we provide a third, immanent, perspective on case study research that shifts the locus of research interests away from human bodies and individuals toward affective flows within case-assemblages (Andersson et al., 2020). Particularly, we are interested in how various forces between human and non-human bodies produce, but also challenge specific interests in the researchers, and hence change the researchers’ desire to explore various cases.

Materiality, assemblages and case-assemblages

Starting from a perspective of materiality entails that we recognize humans as one materiality among many, and that material forces continuously produce the world (Fox & Alldred, 2017). Given that these processes are rhizomatic and entirely experimental in contact with the real, it could perhaps be considered an onto-epistemological divergence to trace various Deleuzian concepts in the way we might do in this section. And, perhaps it would be quite unethical to pretend that this inquiry is a straightforward process where we deliberately move from one concept to another when we much more pick up speed in the encounter with these concepts, and continuously become with these concepts. Immanence is arguably the terrain here, which includes a rejection of two-world ontologies and their transcendent perspectives that acknowledge privileged standpoints from which external point of views can be taken. Hence, the often so dominant understanding that language represents the world as well as the conventional mind-matter dualism in social theory is put into question. There are simply no vertical orders or underlying and overlying realities. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari (1994:47) describe an immanent terrain as an absolute immanence and a plane. The plane of immanence is not inside anything or the uppermost layer of something, it does not belong to anyone, nor is it dependent of an object or related to a subject. Rather it is “a virtual, an open whole that (ontologically) prevents absolute closure” (Hein, 2019).

Entering this terrain, we are interested in the relational character of matter, and how matter is linked to other matter within assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988:88). Assemblages develop unpredictably around events or actions, and comprise a web of forces and encounters between various materialities (human and non-human bodies). Within the encounters various affects are produced. In tune with the immanent terrain, these affects are not in polemic and try to attack each other on disagreements, nor do they seek consensus based solutions. For Deleuze (1988:101), these affects rather change states and capabilities of bodies in relations by chance. Simultaneously, they are the means by which bodies in assemblages unfold, “become” something new (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988:258), and give off new affects. Hence, the agentic capacities of bodies always change. Within an assemblage, every affect produces new affects, like a subsequent flow of affects that continuously produce new capacities in bodies to act and desire. Desire, then, is a pushing and performative force that moves bodies in various directions. Unlike the conventional use, the Deleuzian desire is not a representation of the absence or the lack of something. Driven by affects in assemblages, desire is rather unconsciousness-productive of actions, interactions, ideas and interests (Fox & Alldred, 2017:101) that in extension produce new affective flows in assemblages.

At this point, we want to flag this approach to desire and how desire is produced and produces new affects in assemblages as an important companion in our further exploration of how research interests evolve. It is important to note, though, that Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of assemblage differ fundamentally from the conventional English understanding of assemblages (Nail, 2017). While the conventional understanding of assemblages means the union of two things or things gathered in units, the Deleuzian understanding of assemblages means arrangements of heterogeneous entities. Not paying attention to this difference brings at least two implications that may jeopardize the ontological understanding of immanence that Deleuzian assemblages comprise: First, the emphasis on the multiplicity of entities risks to be mixed up with the state of entities as joint units and second, the emphasis on events risks to be mixed up with essences. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari´s philosophy of immanence provides a different logic than that of an organic whole. While a whole is defined by its intrinsic relations and each part carries out a function that reproduces their relations and finally the balance of the whole, assemblages as well as the elements of assemblages are defined only by their external relations. When it comes to change, organic wholes may develop, but never change what they are nor can their parts be re-combined without being destroyed (imagine the human body and its organs). Assemblages (and the elements of assemblages), on the other hand, change by being added, subtracted, or recombined with each other in never ending processes. Rather than being a whole or a part of a whole, assemblages are multiplicities and thus “fragmentary wholes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994:16).

For the social sciences of sports, the immanent perspective of materialism and theories of assemblages are far from new. Over time, a number of authors have applied the perspective of materiality to sport and physical culture (Andrews, 2016; Markula, 2014; Millington & Wilson, 2016; Pavlidis & Fullagar, 2014; Pringle et al., 2015; Roy, 2014; Weedon, 2015) and used case study design (Enright & Gard, 2016; Hordvik et al., 2019; Thorpe & Clark, 2020). Perhaps, it would be fair to say that this materialist literature involves a spectrum of methodological approaches that more or less embrace the theory of assemblages as well as the complex and entangled relations of our embodied lives as researchers. Hence, the methodological challenges of assemblage theory that require us to think theory and method together (cf. Jackson, 2017; Mazzei et al., 2018; St. Pierre, 2017) in order to unsettle the isolation and homogeneity of the researcher and produce different ways of doing research have been recognized to varying degrees. Inspired by this literature, we suggest in a previous paper (Andersson et al., 2020) that out of respect for the bodies involved, qualitative case study research in the social sciences of sports need to challenge traditional boundaries of knowledge production and thus transgress what has being normed as constituent of qualitative case study research. For instance, if a qualitative case study should align with the Deleuzian perspective of materiality it is not possible to extract a case from its context and all the social units and circumstances that made possible the specific case. Instead, we need to acknowledge that a vast network of processes shapes the case continuously. In the aforementioned paper (Andersson et al., 2020), we call these networks “case-assemblages.” When it comes to the production of research interest we also suggest that case-assemblages, rather than individual researchers should be in focus. Thereby, we move the production of research interests away from individual bodies. In relation to traditional case study research, this is a radical shift that re-theorizes the production of research interests as a pre-human affective flow within case-assemblages that in turn produces various capacities (interests) in researching bodies.

However, case-assemblages are not just mixtures of diverse elements involved in the research process, but just like all other assemblages (cf. Nail, 2017), they entail constructive processes that lay out at least three characteristics that define their arrangement. First, all case-assemblages are networks of specific external relations. Each case-assemblage is defined by its own set of relations. Deleuze and Guattari would call these relations their “abstract machines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988:141). Abstract because they do not really exist in the world, but consists of various relations within which concrete elements and productions appear and become visible in the moment. Machine because various concrete elements meet each other and where one element creates a flow which is broken by another element. What happens in this machinery of a case-assemblage is that things are felt, desired, and produced.

Second, a case-assemblage includes concrete elements. The concrete elements constitute the visible form of a case-assemblage. Even if abstract machines work as case-assemblages’ local conditions of possibility, they do not define the concrete elements of case-assemblages in advance, nor do they provide them with a certain course along which they will move. Rather, abstract machines support combinations of concrete elements and admit the possibility of their simultaneous occurrences. Hence, abstract machines and concrete elements are mutually decisive and immanent to each other (Deleuze & Guattari 1988:141). If abstract machines change, concrete elements change and vice versa. Following this movement, formations of our researching bodies are always dynamic and include relatively intense capacities to both affect and be affected. Likewise, the capacities of our researching bodies are constantly changing. This is also why concrete elements of case-assemblages should not be confused with essences. There are no transcendent relations between abstract machines and concrete elements. Defined by constantly changing external relations, concrete elements are only being settled at a given point.

Third, case-assemblages have agents. These agents are immanent to both external relations and concrete elements in case-assemblages. Thereby, they are not rational subjects making decisions without being affected by the concrete elements and external relations of a case-assemblage. Nor are they enslaved by these features and completely incapable of action. Rather, the agents are mobile figures able to “connect various concrete elements together according to their abstract relations” (Nail 2017:27). Important to remember, though, is that Deleuze and Guattari treat agents as collective subjects of ongoing events meaning that agents never act in first person, but rather as a collectively immanent third-person (Deleuze & Guattari 1994:64–65) of a case-assemblage.

Within case-assemblages external relations, concrete entities and agents can be arranged in different ways. In these arrangements, they may have different opportunities to exert influence on each other and produce various processes of change (Nail 2017). Each potential change is a result of its network and thus the social and historical processes it is connected to (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1994). Deleuze and Guattari clarify that there are at least two processes of change going on in (case-)assemblages. First, there is a territorialization–deterritorialization–reterritorialization process (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988:88–89). This process addresses how concrete elements as well as relations between concrete elements continuously are affected by various features in their immediate environment. A territorialization appears when a specific environment of external relations establishes a concrete element’s capacity to produce specific qualities. Imagine a stick lying in the woods. If you pick the stick up and use it as a tool to put the sausage on as you cook it over an open fire, the capacity of the stick simultaneously will change from a random stick to a barbecue stick able to produce a sense of well-being, security and control when it comes to your cooking. The stick has become territorialized. A deterritorialization, on the other hand, appears when an environment of external relations generalizes and destabilizes concrete elements and their capacities to produce specific qualities. For instance, when you have finished grilling and the stick is no longer needed you may throw it back into the woods. In that moment, the stick changes from a barbecue stick to a random stick. Thereby, its capacities to produce qualities also changes from being specific to become more generalized. In its most radicalized form, the deterritorialization may lead to a “line of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988:277) moving the stick towards new and unforeseen possibilities. Sooner or later, however, the stick will end up in a new environment with a new set of external relations that will reterritorialize the stick by (re)specifying it and (re)shaping its capacity to produce “new” specific qualities. It is not our intention, however, to diminish the concepts of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization while they are explained. In an assemblage, there are only co-constitutive forces. For instance, while you are working with and upon the stick, the stick is also working with you. Hitting each other and becoming hit by each other you simultaneously become other. Perhaps, Deleuze and Guattari (1988:249) would say that you and the stick become with each other, you become (with) stick as stick becomes (with) you. This implies that neither you nor the stick is defined by your internal elements. Rather you are multiplicities defined by the number of dimensions you have. At the same time as you gain or lose a dimension, you also change in nature. I guess it would be fair to say that both you and the stick are composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that you in the encounter in the wood are transforming yourselves and each other into a string of other multiplicities according to the threshold.

The second process of change going on in case-assemblages relates to the distinction between molar- and molecular flows of affects produced in environments of external relations (Deleuze & Guattari 1984:273). While molar flows of affects produces aggregative effects that tend to organize concrete elements into groups by assigning them converging identities and capacities, molecular flows of affects produce singular outcomes in concrete elements without grouping these elements into categories or other clusters. In the example above, the stick in the woods become aggregated into a barbecue stick in the moment you chose to pick it up. And, as soon as your satiety makes you stop grilling sausages and throw the stick back into the woods, the immediate environment of external relations produces molecular affects and the stick become singularized. Politically, then, molar and molecular affects operate as two extremes in a continuum where molar affects include systems of social organization, categorizations and standardization of cultural norms, and where molecular affects simultaneously enable concrete elements to resist these constraining forces. By revealing the forces that trespass concrete elements, these affective flows enable critical understandings of power not far from the biopolitical effects of epistemic and phronetic interest productions we discuss initially and hence how micropolitics of power acts upon the actions of researchers. However, it is important to notice that the process of change related to biopolitics is downward and has its starting place in the mass of knowledge at a certain time and place, while the processes of change related to molar and molecular affects are horizontal and start with interactions between external relations. This shift in perspective makes it not only possible, but also inevitable to discover and map molecular affects, and in the extension create critical understandings of resistance. This since various relations (social, cultural, psychological, emotional, physical, and biological) make available new capacities in concrete elements to act and desire and thus resist forces of territorialization. For Deleuze, this is a process of becoming. For us it is undoubtedly an experimentation of what is and what might become in a case study on sport.

Dead-data and the emergence of research interests in a case-assemblage

We will now explore how the affective flows within these two processes of change (territorialization/deterritorialization/reterritorialization and molar/molecular) contribute to the production of new capacities of bodies to act and desire and hence play an important part when it comes to the evolvement of research interests in a swimming event. The data we present is drawn from observations and dialogues within a case study of this swimming event in elementary schools in Gothenburg, Sweden conducted by the authors in 2018–2019. Initially, our research interest was to explore how young people become healthy by increased swimming skills. Traditionally designed along the phronetic thread, the case was defined as the production of health in the ongoing swimming event, the context as the overall school project within which children were supposed to learn how to swim and the embedded units of analysis as the children and teachers involved in the swimming education. However, in our further exploration of the evolvement of research interest, we do not start from this upward and hence vertical approach to case study research, but operate also in a horizontal dimension of materiality with the attempt to map the conditions that (for the very first time) made us think differently (cf. Deleuze, 1994:183–184) about case study research and predefined research interest, and consequently moved our recognition of research interest out of its dominant tradition of predetermination and the human individual as a privileged locus for its appearance. Central to this movement was the abstract machine of a case-assemblage. We pay attention to the abstract machine of the case-assemblage because it consists of external relations, and thus encounters that provided us with the opportunity to catch a glimpse of how our research interest evolved during the ongoing exploration of the swimming event. We then extend this critical exploration to the production of research interests in general and the exaggerated belief that research interests are attributes of specific human bodies (the researchers) that precede studies.

So, how can the relationality and the flows of affects within this case-assemblage be illustrated? Considering a learning event in the water involving two bodies at the simplest. The one who learns and the one who teaches. While the affects within this assemblage are in part physical, stimulating specific movements and swimming techniques, perhaps producing trust and self-confidence, there are typically many more relations in a case-assemblage than just the two bodies. Except other relations linked to the physical learning event such as personal and cultural contexts, past events, water, codes of conduct, memories and experiences and so forth, there are at least two other bodies involved in a case-assemblage, namely, the body of a researcher and the body of traditional case study methodology. Even if these relations are in part physical, they are also sociocultural and psychological creating anxiety, curiosity, pride, distance, uncertainty and so forth among the researcher. Consequently, the case-assemblage comprises at least four bodies, the learner, the teacher, the researcher, and the body of traditional qualitative research. Moreover, it comprises physical elements such as water, social norms, past experiences and circumstances, personalities and expectations.

However, of far more interest than simply listing these external relations are the changes of capacities and states produced by these relations within the case-assemblage. Such changes of bodies and the micropolitics they reveal will help us to map how our research interest transformed from being considered predetermined and of particular interest to us into a becoming with all the elements in the swimming event. Despite that the body of traditional case study methodology did its best to territorialize us and force us into a relative stable form of recognizable case study research and apply what we had learned from academic textbooks and university courses, the encounter with the swimming event was quite confusing. For instance, while we tried to stay focused on gathering the data we needed to answer the predefined aim of our study (to explore how health comes into beings with increased swimming skills, and with what effects?), new questions came cross our bodies quite uncontrollable. The children did not seem to learn to swim in the way we had expected. Nor did the teachers act in the way we had foreseen. While the children often perceived the water too scary, the teachers acted much more caring than we could ever imagine. We also discovered that for some of the children, increased swimming skills were not the obvious goal of the swimming event. An 11-year-old girl found other capacities just as important to develop:

The most important thing is to learn to trust others, only then can you learn to trust yourself. If you don´t trust yourself, it is very scary to do things you don´t know how to do. Today, for example, we have jumped from the edge of the pool without knowing how to swim.

At that moment, curiosity was created in our researching bodies about what was really going on in the pool. This desire to know was further reinforced by another 11-year-old girl who was unsure of what grade she would receive next year for school physical education because she could not swim. Nevertheless, developing swimming skills was not her only focus during the swimming lesson. She was also paying attention to various challenges and to build pride in herself by overcoming these challenges.

I always feel so proud in the afternoons when I leave this swimming education because I have always done things I never thought that I would do

On these occasions, our desire to explore specific phenomenon changed rapidly in various directions. Before we even knew it, we wished to explore both how young people become confident- and how they become proud with increased swimming education. These changes not only felt fun and positive, they also created uncertainty in our researching bodies. Questions like, what are we really looking at? Are we paying attention to the right things? And how do we know what to focus on? Immediately turned up. In retrospect, we appreciate that these occasions were encounters that provoked our understandings both regarding the development of swimming skills and the privilege of researchers to hold on to specific predefined phenomena of interest in a case study, and that it was in this moment we started to perceive our presence at the swimming event differently. We were not in a controlling position anymore. And, we were certainly not alone in deciding what phenomena to observe. It was like our eyes were becoming increasingly cloudy and we could only see clearly for short moments. Sometimes, it felt like we could not see anything at all. And, if so, what was it that we saw? Was it a real phenomenon or a fictional one? Did it exist or was it an imagination brought into existence like a creation? At the same time as we realized that the data was not only “dead-data” letting themselves be understood in a predetermined manner, our research interest became increasingly unspecified. Moreover, we began to doubt our possibilities to make observations on data. The volatile images we managed to catch in the swim event were rather created in collaboration with data, which in turn forced us in to a situation of what we may call creative observations. Creative because we associated these observations with movement, and within which we increasingly seemed to lose our position as subjects and instead become the ones who got things moving by highlighting interesting phenomena produced in various interaction in the swim event. However, this was not an easy process and it certainly did not happen without resistance. Along with the traditional body of case study research, the physical environment with swimming pools and benches to sit on beside the pools repeatedly tried to (re)territorialized our researching bodies into traditional observers as well as experts regarding swimming education. One swimming teacher honestly apologized for addressing one of us as we sat on benches on different sides of the pool:

I shouldn’t really bother you while you do your observations, but what do you think about the swimming education so far? What exactly are you looking at? And, do you think we are doing alright, or can you give us some advice so that we can improve?

While answering politely by giving a brief explanation of what we were doing and what we have noticed so far, this conversation also led to a friendly chat about research approaches. Was it appropriate to have a conversation like this with the “data” during the observations, or not? And, how would such a conversation be considered by other researchers? Even if the talk between us was easygoing, it was also a reminder of conventional research and the importance of being able to perform research that is considered rigorous and trustworthy by others. Our concern probably arose because neither we, nor researchers in our vicinity, seem ready to trouble the notion of one-directional relations between researchers and “data” and ultimately give away some control to “data” during the exploration phase. Due to the slow drip of neoliberalism (including market-orientation and expectations of increased productivity and cost-efficiency) as a normalized pattern of interactions, we often lack time and work with limited financial resources, and hence we prefer to stay safe and conduct epistemologically tailored data collections that are just as large as they need to be in order to answer specific research questions. Thereby, we are also accustomed to focus more on the procedures of data collection and data analysis and less (if anything) on the roles of data. Rather than being an aspect of production, data is thus habitually treated as a distant object possible to possess. From a materialist perspective, this is a severe limitation of data that tends to further limit our capacities to produce knowledge. Rather, we are suggested to shift focus from acting on data to the workings data is doing on us and thus destabilize the roles of both data and ourselves and in extension become with data. However, the physical effects of data as always knowable, fixed and certain combined with the status the very research title seemed to entail further stabilized and ranked the bodies in terms of physical attendance in the research process. The one who learned and the one who taught were participating in the water while the body of established qualitative methodology and the researching bodies sat on the bench and watched the show, even though the latter no longer were sure of what they were looking at, or what roles they were undertaking.

In this process, however, various material components in the swimming event somehow took action and external relations within the case-assemblage affected our researching bodies into positions where the given concerning development of swimming skills and emergence of research interests no longer sufficed. The familiar landmarks of our thoughts regarding case study research began to fall apart and we felt like we lost our orientation for a while. As concrete elements, we were in a process of deterritorialization and our capacities to produce specific qualities were both generalized and destabilized. No longer able to define a long-lasting research interest and consequently a solid case, it felt like the conventional approach of phronetic case study research started to undo itself. To a large extent, however, the assemblage we inhabited comprised ready-made methodological designs and normative forms of thinking that did their best to prevent us from these liberating forces. The main objective seemed to be to maintain credibility, validity and stability. Among other things, this representation of conventional thinking also constantly tried to make us (re)define the case, its context and its embedded units of analysis into spatial and activity based boundaries. The case was (again) defined as the production of something (health, confidence or pride) in the ongoing swimming event, the context as the overall school project within which children were supposed to learn how to swim and the embedded units of analysis as the children and teachers involved in the swimming lesson. Micropolitically, these interactions produced formal and informal hierarchies which further reinforced the gap between the researchers and all other material components as normal, and who might have the right to define and investigate whom, and consequently the right to define what phenomenon that is of specific interest to explore. The researchers, the context, the case, and the embedded units of analysis were all assigned different roles. It also produced limited research capacities in that our researching bodies were focusing more upon doing the right things and not challenging existing arrangements, than interacting and exploring the ongoing swimming event by following the rhythm of occasions.

The traditional body of case study research (re)territorialized our researching bodies and again ascribed value to traditional case study designs. The playful and friendly exchange of ethical and methodological remarks with peers as well as the competitive posturing of qualitative research in general sustained us within this position, aggregating our research into what many qualitative scholars would describe as rigorous and trustworthy. As aforementioned, however, not all occasions at the swimming event were aggregative. Sometimes, singularizing affects derived from disrupting encounters during the observations and imposed themselves on our thoughts. Simultaneously, these affects effectively generated new relations that completely changed our understanding of research interests and how they evolve. This was not a smooth awakening, but rather turbulent to our researching bodies. For instance, we experienced such a turbulent encounter when we realized that the production of knowledge in the swimming pool was not one-directional, but at least two-directional if not multi-directional. The one who was supposed to teach also learned and the one who was supposed to learn also taught. An example of this is when a girl would learn to float and the swimming instructor habitually holds her hands under the girl’s shoulders. After a short moment of panic and fear, the girl placed her hands on the swimming instructor’s arms and as a response to that movement, the teacher moved her whole body closer to the girl’s shoulders. At the same time as the girl learned how to float, the teacher learned that physical contact and closeness were important for the girl to feel safe in the water. In relation to this, the swimming pool also had different meanings. One moment it was an arena for a child’s education, the next moment it was an arena for the instructor’s further training and the development of the swimming education in general. When it comes to case study research, these specifications were not only non-aggregative regarding case study research, but produced capacity generalization and thus a deterritorialization of our predetermined research interest opening up new possibilities for action and interaction with various material components in the swimming event. In this moment, the research interest also became an experimental tool born out of the materiality of a case-assemblage. Simultaneously, we realized that this was a “line of flight” propelling that once we have entered the terrain of immanence research interests cannot be known in advance and regulated by gaps in previous research or by extra-academics’ predefined need for knowledge nor can they be a plan or starting place. Rather, they are emergent and evolving and have to be uncovered in fragments in collaboration with all other material components during the ongoing exploration.

Collective production of research interests

The analyses above demonstrate that research interests are areas of material affects that refuse to be reduced to expressions of the single body of a researcher or collaborations with extra-academics during the planning phase of a case study. Rather, our materialist perspective shows that data and other material components that researchers encounter during ongoing explorations seem pretty much alive and claim to be party to the production of research interests. Perhaps this is also what Koro-Ljungberg (2016:48) implies when she writes about “methodological fluid spaces,” “data-wants,” and “data´s desire” to enable researchers to think differently about the relationship to data, and what Safron (2019:6) suggests when she encourage us to re-imagine what matters in inquiries through an affective lens. In company with these lines of thought, we illustrate at least some of the complex relations that surround the evolvement of research interests in a case-assemblage at a swimming event. And, while Hickey-Moody (2013:82) argues that human bodies are extensions of substances and constantly re-make themselves through their relations, interests and actions in the context which they live, our findings indicates that relations between researchers and other material components are not stable but constantly in change and affected by processes of territorialization and deterritorialization as well as molar and molecular flows that aggregate and singularize bodies that at least sometimes cut them loose on a line of flight regarding research interests and how they evolve. Following these analyses, research interests evolve as causes of interactions between various bodies, and the process of researchers becoming interested is placed in the middle between these bodies. Yet, one interest does not become the other; a research interest evolves between the bodies. Hence, the evolvement of research interest is an issue of assembled relations in a “case” that produces various desires to explore. Informed by our collective thinking with Deleuze (1987:361), Jackson (2017), St Pierre (2017), and Fox and Alldred (2017) we call this a multiplicity and a “minor case” (Andersson et al., 2020) where all components in an event come together and (among other things) produce various research interests. Important to remember though, is that these interests in our bodies do not emerge from cognitive decision making. As Mazzei et al. (2018:5) imply, we are no subjects who speak from positions of knowers or act independently of assemblages. Rather, the desire to explore produces specific capacities in researching bodies to act and engage in various phenomena, be it an interest, frustration, curiosity, or something else. At the same time as the desire to explore a phenomenon makes other affects flow in the “case” under study, it is also the force that drives researchers as well as research interests to become other.

This materialist analysis challenges traditional case study methodology and its predefined cases that are of specific interest to the researcher by suggesting that the production of research interest are far more complicated than epistemic and phronetic approaches reveal. Instead of treating research interests in ongoing case studies as linear results of predetermined research focuses and risk to end up in situations where even the most sincere intention of equal knowledge production in phronetic case studies seems to be depended on the idea of solid cases, we need to go further and consider research interests as collective productions that evolve throughout the research process and thus at a socially just level (Strom & Porfillio, 2019:3) of actions and interactions in case-assemblages. Ultimately, we enroll ourselves into a dialogue about the importance of thinking with theory in qualitative research (see, e.g., Jackson & Mazzei, 2013:261; Lather, 2007; Ringrose, 2019:2; St Pierre, 2009), and we (re)orient research interests and case productions beyond method and methodologies to an engagement with an immanent philosophy of inquiry (Giardina, 2016:262). The non-linearity of interest production is made up by a web of forces and encounters between various affects deriving from nature and culture, including the physicality of water, the culture of traditional methodology, grades, curriculums, and the awareness of bodies. Despite that the body of traditional methodology tending to position the researchers as subjects, it seems pretty clear that affective flows in case-assemblages also comprise deterritorializing as well as singularizing effects that occasionally release the researchers from being territorialized in conventional case study research, and thus from being based in mandatory excellence, isolation and homogeneity when it comes to maintaining a research interest. The researching bodies simply break free from the aggregated form of “researchers” showing us that even though epistemic and phronetic research often is strongly limited in execution, there are always affective forces making it possible to become other and participate in more equal processes of interest production. It should be mentioned, though, that letting the material components of the research process take action and equally participate in the creation of “new” research interests like we do in this inquiry, is not a solution to ethical problems of academic power dimensions in case study research on sports. Like Fullagar (2017:248) implies, the field of sport (as well as the fields of health, exercise and leisure) is “governed by range of normative assumptions” and hence an interplay of forces that include policy narratives, institutional contexts, disciplinary conventions, and academic traditions. Nevertheless, the engagement with re-imagine and change the production of research interests in accompaniment with the Deleuzian philosophy of immanence is important to the extent that it offers an opportunity to perform research otherwise, transgress what has been normed (Kuby et al., 2015:141) and thus become interested in “new” phenomena along with other material components involved in the ongoing exploration.