ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses new materialism, post-qualitative inquiry, and post-humanist critiques of reflexivity and reflection. This includes Donna Haraway and Karen Barad’s works on diffraction and diffractive methodologies. These emerging forms of inquiry and qualitative research propose that we challenge normative assumptions and think differently, ‘within and beyond the reflexive turn’ in order to problematize inquiry, identity, experience and ‘what it means to know and tell’. This chapter outlines the criticisms of post-qualitative research and diffraction, and then provides a defence of reflexivity which, it is argued, new materialist analyses have caricatured and traduced. It is argued that instead of replacing reflexivity with diffraction we need to focus on the further development and discussion of reflexivity’s current uses and incarnations as a methodology and a methodological tool in qualitative research. Post-qualitative researchers have set reflexivity up as a straw (wo)man in their adoption of an ‘inflationary logic’ in which they confuse reflexivity and reflection as both involving ‘mirroring’ and ‘sameness’, when reflexivity has ‘difference’ at its very core.
