ABSTRACT
The impact of de Certeau’s writings on cultural studies and beyond is widely recognised, with his contribution to cultural studies attracting much positive attention as well as criticism1. In particular, concepts operationalised in his characterisation of everyday practice have been widely deployed in fields such as culture studies, policy studies and education research2. However, Certeau-ian scholars have at times criticised the reception of his work, arguing that certain of his ideas have often been taken up to the neglect of others, and in reductive ways (Buchanan 2000; Highmore 2007; Rothbauer 2010). Referring to the popularity of de Certeau’s formulation of strategies and tactics, Highmore (2007, pp. 14-15) observed, ‘the export of this figuration has been so successful that at times the name de Certeau simply seems coterminous with the idea of “strategies and tactics” ’ and Buchanan (2000, p. 2) refers to these terms as ‘unruly orphans’. Buchanan (2000) argued that many who appropriate these terms in anti-theoretical ways overlook de Certeau’s broader onto-epistemic theory and associated methodological sense as explicated and demonstrated in his writings. This might be seen as a more general neglect of the ontological engagements of the ‘posts’ as has been noted by St Pierre (2013, p. 653) who, drawing on the example of Deleuze and Guattari, argued that their concepts ‘are so immediately useful that it is too easy to pluck one or two . . . out of a dense system of imbricated concepts and wrongly insert them into a humanist ontology’. Similar criticisms can be made of the uptake of de Certeau’s most popular concepts. In this chapter, we engage with de Certeau’s neglected onto-epistemology, and use his ideas to render research writing as an everyday practice.
