A Researcher With Conclusions in Search of Questions: On Wandering Toward Ignorance

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to provoke new understandings of the roles and uses of research. Specifically, I argue for the productive and creative potential of ignorance in educational research.

Design/Approach/Methods

This conceptual paper undertakes a playful experiment, beginning with conclusions and working backward to create a paper within a paper based on these conclusions. The paper then offers philosophical critiques on the generation and use of research.

Findings

It is a thinkable discourse that educational research begins with conclusions and works backward to justify those prefigured conclusions. It would make sense, therefore, to suggest a re-centering of inquiry. Yet, this approach to research remains grounded in stable understandings of knowledge. Rather than the transcendent approach to research, which moves from ignorance toward knowledge, this paper finds that ignorance resides in a plane of immanence, situated within and pursuing new questions. It calls for ignorance not as a means of research but as an ends.

Originality/Value

The paper contributes new understandings of how research can be conducted and used, welcoming new playful understandings of research, attending to shifting roles, and blurring the lines drawn between the researcher and research subjects or academic research and creative projects.

“We had never stopped asking this question previously

and we already had the answer, which has not changed.”

—Deleuze & Guattari

I have no idea where this paper ends, but I want to start there. I end, or at least conclude, that “students are less attentive during lectures than discussions.” The meaning of this conclusion, or why my research arrives at this point, or even how, is something I am completely ignorant of. Begrudgingly, I admit that these conclusions are not my own. I stole this conclusion from a textbook on how to conduct educational research (Fraenkel et al., 2012). My methods were simple: I intentionally turned to an early section of the text, one that walks the reader through the scientific method. There, the authors provide an example through which they proceed step by step, ultimately arriving at the aforementioned conclusion. Questions remain, however, of what questions, processes, theories, or assumptions lead to such conclusions. How can these conclusions be applied? By whom? What is the point of drawing conclusions before posing questions, exploring answers, and decoding data?

The title of this paper is derived from Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1950). As the play begins, the curtain rises and the lights are only slightly dimmed. A theater troupe is engaged in preparation. Suddenly, six characters arrive. They have come from nowhere, emerged from nothing. They are unfinished characters, intruding on a director's rehearsal in search of an author. Authors, depending on one's perspective, typically precede the making of characters. Yet, the play opens with characters already present, in need of an author to give them purpose and direction. As the scenes unfold, the characters, working with the theater troupe they interrupted, and with no author to guide them, make up their play as they move from scene to scene. The work proceeds, much like the present paper, in search of itself.

This paper learns with and steals from Pirandello's play. Accompanying me on this journey are not six characters, but rather the common characteristics of a research paper. Since I begin with conclusions only, I am left to wonder and play, asking questions about what theoretical frameworks, methods, or discussions might befit these already present conclusions. What would this mean and what would become of research questions to be designed by one who had not determined the conclusions? This paper begins here, with a playful experiment attempting to write different sections of a traditional research paper to align with already-present conclusions. In imagining these possibilities, the different aspects of research become the characters in the story of this paper.

Having meandered through these aspects of academic writing, I turn to a critique and exploration, asking how educational research commonly proceeds in this way. Rather than starting from the point of open inquiry, it is all too recognizable to find work that begins with a thing to say, with research working backward to justify assumptions that preexist any form of inquiry. Entwined with a focused discussion of ignorance, this paper thus also touches on how content, much like educational research, can be generated as a usable commodity. It serves as a not-so-subtle critique of how researchers often lead with prefigured arguments rather than pursue inquiries and the possibility of unknowability. Therefore, this study begins with the end. In the middle, in search of meaning, it meanders toward a beginning, then it sprawls outward toward critique. However, I do not end up here.

An expectation here may be that I am calling for a more robust and open form of ignorance at the beginning to arrive at meaningful and thoughtful conclusions. In a way, this is true. I argue that researchers may open themselves up, listen to, and be changed by the research process. However, the suggestion of inquiry leading to clear conclusions posits a move from ignorance to knowledge: a stable, enlightening process that affirms rationality and discounts the productive potential of ignorance. Thus, conclusions transcend ignorance. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1994), I instead argue for immanence. Let us remain within the curious state and pursuit of ignorance. The purpose of philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is not to find answers but to open new questions, new routes for thinking and considering the world. Ignorance is thus called for at the beginning, with improvisation and listening centered in the work of educational research. And, ignorance is called for at the end, with conclusions leading only to more uncertainty and new questions. Ultimately, it is ignorance all the way down.

Brief notes on metamethods

To take up this experiment, I simply needed a clear, concise statement of some kind of research conclusions. Yet, my (or rather, “my”) conclusions are the product of a number of failures. I initially attempted to create a Twitter Bot ¹ that would produce completely random-sample research conclusions. Uncomfortable with my methodological ignorance, I pivoted to familiar territory: academic searches. I sought to find something arbitrary, concise, and legible within fields of educational research.

Ideas for this paper stirred as I observed conference presentations that conjured elaborate methodologies and complex frameworks, all of which seemed decorations for ideas that had been there from the start. I was further inspired as colleagues described being asked about their academic perspective by parents who were opposed to children wearing masks. When they shared their research opinion that wearing a mask protected against COVID and did not cause speech delays or negatively impact children's mental health, the parents were unmoved. They pivoted and looked elsewhere to support their already-present conclusions. Certainty and knowledge persisted throughout the study. Despite this starting point, I intentionally avoid using names or engaging in critiques of specific research projects. However, the problem is more general. The point is not to push against any type of work or field of thought but to provoke conversations around how research is made and used, to ask why certainty and knowing are so present and why ignorance is so undesirable. Taking such a broad approach makes this project slightly more difficult and may seem as though I am setting up phantasmagoric strawmen. I am not attempting to prove this point. I am also not setting out to do something similar to what Ioannidis (2005) undertook in his provocation that “Most Published Research Findings Are False.” I am not concerned with the veracity of specific projects; I simply point to a recognizable discourse in which researchers guide the research, rather than letting the research act, speak, and think.

Again, the point of using these conclusions is simply to take something arbitrary, experimenting with the possibility of writing research backward. That is not to say that researchers should become blank slates in search of objective truth. In no way do I suggest a call to abandon epistemology or political commitments. Within these frameworks, I hope to provoke a different kind of openness to play, gesturing toward the productive potential of educational research moving toward a position of ignorance.

Where research begins and how it moves are highly contextual and always changing. Denzin and Lincoln (2003) adduced the phases of research (p. 32), starting with the research traditions and subjectivity of the researcher and moving all the way to the fifth phase of interpreting and using research, which is where I begin. In their discussion, Denzin and Lincoln show the complexity and dynamism of each phase of research. Agee (2009) also points out that, even in more traditional forms, there is an iterative process in qualitative research. The research questions may be sketched before engaging in the research. They are also refined, altered, and shifted throughout research. The phases of research lead to a common structuring of research papers. Following Denzin and Lincoln, the experiment below focuses on certain sections of a research paper. These characters bleed into each other and swirl together, filling in research stories. For the sake of space and focus, I center the three aspects of this research. In this section, I ease myself into the trap of linearity. I also intersplice my own ignorant meanderings. I think aloud by writing and periodically interrupt this backward design experiment with wandering unknowings.

In search of alignment with the conclusion “students are less attentive during lectures than discussions”

Research questions

Ok. Ok. Let's do this. Research questions. What would be some research questions that match that conclusion? Alright, you’ve been sitting here for 10 min. Come up with something! What if? Ok. If the answer concerns pedagogical formats in classrooms, the question may be self-evident. Perhaps it could simply be related to the learning style. “In what learning style do students best learn?” Maybe, “How do kids best learn?” This kind of question matches the floating, decontextualized nature of the statement. There could be a more rigid comparative element to it, a question that would lead to methods supporting the conclusion. Something like “Do students focus more in lectures or discussions?” Of course, I cannot leave the question so open that it may lead to a different conclusion. What if I posed the question and did not reach this conclusion? What if I do not end up with a conclusion at all!? I know what the answer is, so I have to design the question(s) in a way that champions discussion. It could be something easily altered such as conflating attentiveness with participation. Clearly, students participate more in discussions. So, “do students participate more in lecture or discussion?” The right methods will certainly help here, but for the moment, I will focus solely on the research questions.

Alternatively, maybe a question precedes the question. What is attentiveness? Attentive to what? Perhaps students are quite attentive during lectures—to their phones, lives, and friends. I am currently feeling quite attentive to my Twitter feed, making me less attentive while writing this paper. In addition, when does teaching cross the border of a lecture? For that matter, researchers might want to ask which students. What about the making of the category of student? But no, I need to rely on stable categories, assumed agreements about these terms. Stick to the starting point of knowing. Researchers know who the students are, what a lecture is, and what counts as attentiveness.

The questions on attentiveness and comparison imply concerns regarding efficiency and causality. I, as the researcher, must interrogate the teaching method that leads to attentiveness. It is about pedagogy! Teaching that increases class engagement. Attentiveness can be measured through eye contact or by raising hands. Something in the teacher's teaching will lead to a desired outcome, specifically within the classroom space. This returns us to the question of format and learning style, and there is a universalizing quality here. I do not know who the teachers are, who the students are, the environment, the day, or their stories about students or teachers. However, I know discussions are better. That leads me back to where I started: “Are students more attentive in lectures or discussion?”

Here is a question, though: What is the purpose of a research question? This depends on who is asking and answering. However, questions might seek to address a problem, explore some line of curiosity, or pursue some objective. Since I have my conclusions, I can quickly discard any line of inquiry. Verschuren and Doorewaard (2010) point out that a research design is intimately bound up in its objectives. The question about my question is, therefore, what I am trying to do with this project. In the experiment I have conjured, I am occupying a kind of apolitical and ahistorical space. I am nobody in particular. I could be a researcher with funds from the Discussion-Based Teaching Institute or a policymaker backed by Big Discussion, but I have a goal. My goals may entangle a problem, at least as far as I can see. There's too much lecturing going on! Kids these days don’t pay attention! The goal wants to prove this fact, to make it observational and measurable. So …

Research Question: In which of two distinct instructional settings—lecture and discussion—can teachers most efficiently force individual students to maintain a Level-5 attentiveness during a 45-minute class?

Methods

What processes might guide this question toward this conclusion? Since I have now created an arbitrary metric for attentiveness (although Level 5 is undeniably the most attentive), I might design a research tool that crosses teaching boundaries in a seemingly neutral way. Body posture, speaking turns, and much else can be categorized as measurements. I could then analyze data by simply comparing scores. Hopefully, the structure of lectures in whatever setting I observe would lull students into inattentiveness.

To shore up any uncertainty, I need to create an inhospitable environment for lectures. I could design categories in which the very presence of a lecture ensures the triumph of discussions. I am already engaged in some rather unethical research (maybe unconsciously). If the goal of this experiment were nothing more than to arrive at this conclusion, I could simply fabricate data. The trick here, though, is to build thinkable, at least semi-plausible (though maybe absurd) research as a way to solidify and support my ideas. It is to create methods that could be real but do not challenge my thinking, do not open themselves up to new possibilities, stagnate, in the prefigured reality, the conclusions that I have constructed.

Is there already a methods book out there for arriving where you started? Finding out what you already know. Becoming who you already are. The steps to tamp down uncertainty. The process of casting out doubt and solving the icky feelings of stuckness in research. A method, in short, for ensuring that ignorance never enters the equation. This section would really benefit from something like that, a guide to administer certainty, shore it up, and guarantee it. I feel the pull of methodological ignorance, but there is an allure to knowing.

Methods may include a process, but research is imbued with theories and ideologies used to rationalize and justify these steps. As Smith (1999) points out, research and researchers bring an entire set of assumptions and values that work to validate research. For Smith, these assumptions act to give research methods a universalizing voice that silences or marginalizes indigenous voices. My conclusions share a universalizing quality, one that means I must reject any kind of decolonizing methodologies in favor of scientific and apolitical methods. My conclusions ask that I speak for, rather than think with, those involved in my research. To arrive at this conclusion, I can rely on colonial structures that discount local forms of knowledge or situated results.

I should also consider the craft of research. With coursework, practice, and familiarity with certain approaches to research, methods are not as easy as a menu from which to select a choice. Good, expert researchers must master a particular method. I guess I can rely on my disciplinary background here, so, ethnographic methods it is (minus any criticality or post-qualitative work).

Methods: I conducted a multi-sited ethnographic research project of two controlled classroom settings. Over the course of two years, I conducted daily observations of 10th grade social studies classrooms. The pedagogy of one classroom used lectures exclusively, while the other classroom used only conversation. During observations, I used the aforementioned attentiveness measurement tool, a surveillance app that tracked attentiveness features, including the amount of time students spent speaking, making eye contact with their teacher and peers, and postural attentiveness such as leaning forward or nodding along. I also conducted single structured interviews with each student. Interviews focused on comprehension of material as another metric of attentiveness rather than personal feelings about learning style. Data were then coded and analyzed to understand which classroom setting generated more attentiveness.

Discussions and implications

Almost there. So close to returning to where I began. I still need to find a way to infuse meaning into my findings. Certainly, this section should help make sense of the work. More importantly, the work should show its uniqueness within the field. Even if someone else has made the same claim and found the same thing, even in a similar setting or with similar methods, there needs to be a way to frame the whole thing that reveals my undisputed originality. Discussion-based attentiveness addresses a clear gap that is distinct from anything that has occurred so far in the history of educational research.

It is not just that it is unique but that the project carries significance beyond itself. The isolated project of examining students in two classrooms needs to be understood as something that implies something large, calls for further research, and addresses core issues in many educational fields. These implications must be generalizable and citable by hundreds of people. Maybe do not be too ambitious. Just, make it easy enough to say, “blah blah discussion-based pedagogy blah blah attentiveness (author, 2023).” The scholarly significance is that I have found something that applies broadly, despite the situatedness of the research. My work is not only significant in the field or subfield in which I work, but is meaningful for policy and practice as well.

These sections often ask big questions. They peer into the unknown. Thus, this section might allow a form of ignorance to creep into the work. Not ignorance as a permanent state but as the not-yet-known. The discussion gestures toward what I know, what I will soon know, and what my expertise will conquer next. Implications for what? The implications for curing us of our ignorance, recall our attention. Everything is fine. Research works. It is impactful.

Arriving at some discussions/implications, I could make a causal link between attentiveness and broader outcomes. Doing so requires a bit of a jump, moving from a focus on attentiveness to think that attentiveness inherently links to other aspects of schooling and life. Of course, I could easily draw on the literature to support such claims while simultaneously reinforcing how my work is better and unique. There might be research showing that if someone is attentive in a classroom, they will have better life outcomes. Perhaps this is where I call for further research. Longitudinal studies could further the point that I have wanted to make all along. Perhaps more comparative work is needed. It should be pretty generic, honestly quite arbitrary. Ultimately, I do not know.

Discussion/implications: This study set out to explore the impact of different instructional models on student attentiveness. The results make clear that every classroom across time and space would benefit from doing only discussions, ever, always. Previous research has explored the role of instructional style in classrooms, yet the present research provides a distinct understanding of how teachers may best engage students. Student attention, and thus academic and other outcomes, positively benefit from discussion-centered approaches. Such conclusions are novel in the field, moving beyond what other research has ever, ever said. Indeed, this study proves the way in which specific pedagogical approaches influence student achievement and life outcomes. The research has deep implications for the field of education and probably all academic fields. Further research such as longitudinal mixed-methods comparative multimodal projects would further prove how discussion-based teaching leads to high achieving model citizens whereas lectures lead to not that.

Arrival: a problem of conclusions

Working through this paper within a paper, I have now arrived back at my conclusions. Hopefully everything lines up and I can conclude this study. Its loose ends may be trimmed so that the project may be packaged and used for conferences and grants, and maybe even a publication in the Journal of Student Attentiveness Studies Quarterly. However, questions remain of what undertaking such an experiment shows. What, if anything, does this inverted inquiry process reveal about educational research? How might it challenge the process and logics of research? What assumptions does it make or make visible about the problems in educational research?

To begin, I do not intend this as a cynical statement about how research is meaningless, easily manipulated, or even a blank slate. Rather, I hope that this experiment simultaneously shows a problem with starting from and maintaining a thing to say, and the possibility of making research more open. Within the roadmap of research, regardless of the paths one takes, arriving exactly where one wants to arrive at an expected place, with conclusions that were already there, forecloses other generative possibilities for research. Working backward, I checked and rechecked, ensuring that each phase of the work did not challenge the conclusions I always wanted to reach. I forced myself to make things make sense rather than welcome the possibility of uncertainty. Other routes may have led to new and surprising directions that might have altered or challenged my conclusions. However, my experiment did not allow for such possibilities. Rather than research being what Rancière (1991) calls an “intellectual adventure,” it simply becomes a logic puzzle concerned with alignment. I now wonder if I am still in that logic puzzle. The experiment has concluded, but I have simply moved to the next section. Here, I analyze and discuss; I have to produce something. Even if open-ended, uncertain, I have to do something, right? I can ask questions and pose problems, but even here, in a paper on ignorance, can I leave the project of productive educational research? Changing direction is one thing, but what about leaving the one-dimensional line of research?

I do not want to stick a singular purpose to the grand scope of educational research, but one possibility is for research to more explicitly welcome ignorance as a starting point. Researchers might welcome surprise, a willingness to be challenged, and the stance of being moved by the research. Despite the allure of certain conclusions, a standpoint of ignorance opens research up to true questioning, a genuine move into unknown realms. That is not to say that any process of research should ignore hunches or disregard desires in order to extract what is “really there.” Instead, in the many forms and views of research, I suggest a recentering of the unexpected, the mysterious routes, even the dreadful possibility of mundane conclusions. Simply put, borrowing from Foucault (1972), do not expect research(ers) to stay the same.

To be sure, this already happens. Much research bursts from a point of ignorance. Even if my argument is ultimately read as a strawman, it could also be a caution, a suggestion to re-center openness and questioning throughout research. From this general argument and the experiment, it may appear as though I propose that researchers strip themselves, their tools, and their work bare. Of course, research and researchers entangle with craft, histories, and ways of knowing and being. Political commitments and much else drive the work. I do not see the issue of conclusions as something similar to why Marxists always arrive at Marxist things. Embracing and conducting research using specific ways of knowing and being may still challenge ideas, open researchers in the same ways. It is openness and inquiry that finds new routes and asks new questions within research traditions. Marxism is not a stuck term. Keeping the foregone conclusions and finding what one already wanted to say risks congealing ideas and stagnating them in the limitations of certainty. Through the act of inquiry, Marxists become Marxists anew.

I am not searching for the root causes (for there are many, and they are all contingent and situated). It is important to note that prefiguring conclusions has many sources. For example, why would one not craft results or cheer on the conclusions that best support opportunities for publication, grants, or tenure and promotion? For these reasons, I must root for lectures to be boring. This does not necessarily mean falsifying research, but it does mean limiting it and constantly keeping it under control. As research acts up, as it wanders to places that might risk these things; it needs to be brought back in line and tamed to conform to ever-present neoliberal demands. Not only must I produce, produce, produce, I must also produce sexy, thoughtful things that serve certain ends (the discussion-based industrial complex?) and offer certainty and move everything along. Conversely, I would hope that researchers not become dispassionate, as if they root for nothing but the truth. By leading with ignorance, those desires and hopes become part of the process, moving with research in an ongoing conversation. Here, researchers are not singular authors of research entirely in control of writing (truths, cultures, and policies). They are agentive participants in an unruly, messy process.

If certainty and productivity sit together, originality joins them at the table. Carney and Madsen (2021) point to the demand of making research unique when they describe academia as “preoccupied with its fetish for originality” (p. 7). Referencing Allen Ginsberg, they jokingly lament, “I’ve seen the best research ideas of my generation destroyed by a brief literature search” (p. 7). The demands of productivity and newness trump listening, questioning, uncertainty, ignorance, and the history and communal conversation of research. Yet, as Dunne (2016) suggests, to begin with ignorance (Dunne uses the term “unlearning”) opens space to move toward “a kind of originality and invention, of finding something new and discovering something old within the new for the first time” (p. 13). The point here is that research need not force itself into singularity, see its goal as originality solely for the purpose of individual accomplishment, to prefigure unique conclusions that can be commodified and packaged as if it owes or shares little.

Given these issues, there is a question regarding the subject of conclusions. Many others have problematized the use of “data” or asked for whom research is made. Fine et al. (2003) think with the concerns of how research is interpreted and used. As conclusions coalesce, they generate certain truths about those involved in research, creating what they call a “confirmatory edifice” (p. 187). Beyond the issues of representation and voice to which these authors attend, the problem of conclusions further dispossesses those involved in the research from both the process and the outcome. Voices, experiences, and perspectives never flow through research. They exist within research frames to support conclusions.

Ignorance might move toward openness, but the dominant approaches to research still seek a clean, bordered terrain of certainty. Hunches, desires, and much else might mess the search for conclusions. They might arrive too early, in monstrous forms, and maybe they could remain monstrous. Noddings (2016) builds on Popper to suggest that knowledge, claims, or conclusions arise not from certainty but “by a series of focused attempts to shake the various claims put forth” (p. 130). Might conclusions be the sticking of an unshakable hunch? Not starting from ignorance and researching toward knowledge but a messy journey where people study, bombarded along different pathways by knowledge and feelings, arriving somewhere distant and unexpected. Box 1.

In this liminal space between the end of one section and the beginning of another, I want to step away. The editors and reviewers have suggested revisions to make the manuscript more playful, moving away from the linearity of a conventional paper. That should be a simple invitation to play and imagine, to open up what is so often revised away. And yet I am stuck. A paragraph here. A deletion there. The section titles and flow remain. I return to a feeling that I remain in this logic puzzle. A narrative continues. Does this textbox or an interlude of Deleuzian rambling have the escape velocity to move beyond convention? Is it a short flight before the gravity of academic writing, of conclusions and knowing, pulls me back? What if I made two of these? Three? Wreckage of failed attempts to play with the norms of research and writing are cut and never pasted, piled into a useful word document. This is basically a memo, no? Honestly, I do not know. The characters in Pirandello’s play are left wandering, scrambling. They try to make the play but it never quite works. The director is left feeling like it is a wasted day. Maybe the trying and failing, the messing around together and wasting time, is the whole point. It is a way of centering ignorance.

What is research?

It would be possible to stop here. Through this small experiment I have suggested that research become more open. This paper poses questions about knowledge and ignorance, the influences and processes of research. Rather than starting with a conclusion and working backwards to justify it, educational research may reposition ignorance. In the process, it might become open to new routes and questions, and this is a kind of conclusion. I do not suggest concluding here. Within this framework, researchers begin in ignorance and end in knowledge. Their research leads to enlightenment, revelation, and a definite arrival at conclusions. This understanding of research remains grounded in rationalistic, Enlightenment-centered pursuits of knowledge. If research leads to conclusions, if it starts in ignorance and ends up learning something, it produces truth and pushes toward universality, even when it might see itself otherwise. What is unknown becomes known and is incorporated into a stable body of knowledge. An organized, observable, and measurable world develops new tools, knows new things, and uses what has been learned to support existing structures. Those involved in research, be they human interlocutors, nonhuman animals, places, or objects become known, named, and understood. However, they themselves do not know. They become alienated from research. “Only those who have the knowledge of the whole can show you.” Rancière (2016) describes. “It is demonstrated out of the incapacity of those who don’t know how to know” (p. 27). Researchers and the entire world of knowers conquer the unknown, speaking for, including, problematizing, solving, mapping their newly discovered knowledge onto a grid of conclusions. That is not to ignore the mountains of anti-colonial organizing, study, research, and praxis, but to speak against the dominant understandings of making and using research.

Maybe, to speak against this very paper and my own complicity in the machine.

To keep ignorance in the mix destabilizes, opening possibilities to challenge what research does, who it is for, how and where it is used, and the ordering principles of certainty. It is here that I turn from a proposal of simply asking for ignorance as a starting point or means and move toward a provocation that ignorance might in fact become a desirable end of educational research. This suggestion joins a long chorus of critiques of the deep entanglements between the Enlightenment and educational research. Certainly, facts still matter. Learning is a fantastic thing embedded in research. So too might be unlearning. Ignorance as both means and ends seeks to unmake the oppressive structures guiding research and wade into the unknown, in search not of finding and conquering but of swimming around in it, of moving and being moved with it. These pursuits are not, following Rancière (2016), “a question of finding the right way of acquiring knowledge,” but what he calls “the emancipatory virtue of ignorance” (p. 25).

In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) offer something similar. Rather than philosophy being the pursuit of logical understanding rooted in the outcome of knowledge, philosophy, in fact, is a space to open new questions, to remain in ignorance, pursuing. They suggest that from the time of Greek philosophy, philosophy has predominantly been understood as a pursuit of wisdom, desirous of its possession. This pursuit shifts the terrain of philosophy, pushing it toward “a transcendental lived reality … a relationship that is no longer a relationship with an other but one with an Entity, an [object-state]” (p. 3). Deleuze and Guattari counter with a notion that philosophy does not transcend and make ultimate claims, but remains in a state of becoming, operating within a plane of immanence open to new possibilities. Research, like their conception of philosophy, might yet refuse to move outside, arriving beyond research at some final point of knowing. It is not a logical conclusion reached through inquiry, but an ongoing communal act of study. Ignorance is not, though, an ethereal state of indeterminacy. Just as Deleuze and Guattari frame philosophy as a creative force, the ignorance of research opens new, wonderous possibilities. Or, as Biesta (2014) suggests, it is a risk, a leap into the unknown without the pathway or desire to arrive at somewhere specific. This type of research brims with routes, discovery, and wonder but not outcomes.

This approach additionally unauthorizes researchers. The people called researchers are supposed to know things (or to come to know things through research). The end product of our work should be authoritative, and we should be authorities (on an idea, a place, a “people”). But what if ignorance allows us to make the plane of research blurry, to give up that authority and engage in collective questioning? What if we researchers shifted from authors to actors participating in rehearsals and improvisation? Where Pirandello's six characters seek authorship, researchers might instead live in the messy ignorance of questions, always “in the making” (Pirandello, 1950, p. 209)? It is not about determining the proper findings, holding, finding, and using knowledge, but about w(o)andering along with others through a forest of questions.

Ultimately, these questions provoke a rethinking of the question, “What is research?” From the problem of conclusions or arrival, research is a thing to begin and end, enter and leave. Through the pursuit of knowledge, it seeks its own termination. Moreover, that knowledge must be new, challenging, and useful. It is here that those called researchers bypass inquiry altogether in favor of desirable conclusions. From a position of ignorance, research is an engagement with questioning and questioning and questioning. It is to ask when answering is not the goal. It is pure pursuit. Within ignorance, research is a constant, an ongoing movement. One does not follow steps, entering the field, collecting data, and finally analyzing them. Researchers also are not stable subjects that transcend research. Power relations still exist. Research as a craft may still exist, but its purpose, temporality, and work—all become something else. Research may be concluded or abandoned (the article must be published, the paper presented), but it keeps moving, finding new directions, moving further into the unknown, and opening new questions that wonder about new ideas, new worlds, ways of being and seeing that emerge in the process.

Conclusion, or have I done the thing I just critiqued?

At the beginning of this piece, I offered interrelated critiques. First, I suggested a tempting, recognizable discourse starting with conclusions that forecloses the possibilities of ignorance at any point in research. Second, certain research traditions favor inquiry that leads toward defined, stable knowledge forms, something that can have an alienating and limiting effect. Proposing something else, I offered ignorance as ends, a way to make research ongoing, playful, and open to new, unknown pathways.

Wait. Stop with the ordering and retelling. Has this paper in fact ended up where I thought it would all along? Or, worse, have I engaged in a deep inquiry and arrived at specific and useful conclusions? Have I failed to remain within the realm of ignorance? Was I ever, at any stage of this piece, ignorant? Perhaps I pretended and preached without making the leap? I hope that these engagements, from experimenting with conclusions to questioning the routes of inquiry, have held ignorance close. Perhaps because I aimed to pull out the rug from under the certainty of structure and the certainty of research itself, my uncertainty here reveals some measures of productive ignorance. This is, ultimately, an open question.

The call for ignorance is not about giving something up. It is about how things are made, responded to, and used. Ignorance does not stand in opposition to knowledge, but opens new understandings of its role. As Foucault (1984) suggests, “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting” (p. 88). Likewise, as research operates within the plane of immanence, answers might bloom. The task, though, is to remain within the pursuit. Much like Adams’ (2010) suggestion that 42 is the answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life,” the pursuit of what that question is continues—but we might better attend to that pursuit, of course, if it takes the form of discussions.