ABSTRACT
This chapter struggles to avoid the over-knowing tendencies of conventional humanist qualitative inquiry. The struggle began in an everyday office conversation about affect and writing between the co-authors about a story author two had read about Janina Heshele’s experiences with writing before and after surviving imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp as a 12-year-old girl. This conversation grew into a year-long inquiry process through which the authors read about Janina’s life, read her poetry and autobiographical writing and talked with her online. As the authors continued to read affect theory and process philosophy throughout the same time period, they slowly came to a seemingly paradoxical insight: that a posthuman perspective may bring inquiry closer to more human expressions of literacy and social life. This chapter argues that that, in resisting an overly rational, constructivist analysis and interpretation of Janina’s experiences, the authors come closer to Janina and to themselves, especially through writing.
