More Just Futures are Possible: Connecting Post Qualitative Inquiry and Social Movement Organizing

Abstract

In this article, I explore how post qualitative inquiry can connect with social movement organizing in the United States to expand the scope of what’s possible for thought, action, and justice. I briefly review social movement organizing’s alignment with emancipatory theories and gesture toward the promise and importance of a collaboration between liberation struggles and theories that critique humanist and modernist thought. Poststructuralism, in particular, enables an exploration of that which might be but is not-yet and a deconstructive ethic of unsettling normalized categories, offering generative heuristics for thinking about power and justice without falling into descriptions that essentialize and homogenize. Post qualitative inquiry offers a starting point for considering how social movements might operationalize poststructural theories and theories of the ontological turn. It encourages experimentation and the creation of different ways to think/act in the face of not knowing what else to do. I argue that features of post qualitative inquiry can be useful not just in conventional research settings but also in the community organizing settings from which social movements often emerge.