ABSTRACT
This chapter explains Jane Bennett's concept of the agentic assemblage to position the discursive artifacts of qualitative inquiry as always already material and the material as an always already discursive construction. It provides positing voice in qualitative educational research as a thing that is entangled with other things in an assemblage that acts with an agential force. Voice as present, stable, authentic, and self-reflective such a voice is imbued with humanist properties and thus is attached to an individual. Voice is ‘there’ to search for, retrieve, and liberate. Thinking voice, and analysis, thus provokes a different set of analytic questions when voice is thought in the agentic assemblage. Approaching analysis as a “plugging in” that opens up potentialities, we advocate analysis as a process of developing analytic questions that seek the provisional emergence—of voice, subjects, agents—in the assemblage.
