Reading: the long preparation for inquiry

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International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
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Reading: the long preparation for inquiry
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre & Elliott Kuecker
To cite this article: Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre & Elliott Kuecker (06 Oct 2023): Reading: the
long preparation for inquiry, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, DOI:
10.1080/09518398.2023.2264244
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION
Reading: the long preparation for inquiry
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierrea and Elliott Kueckerb
aMary Francis Early College of Education, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA; bUNC School of Information
and Library Science, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
ABSTRACT
This introduction to the special issue titled, “Reading: The Long Preparation
for Inquiry,” asks why reading has not been as prominent as writing in
educational and social science research. The authors suggest reading may
not seem as empirical as writing and so has been assigned fairly limited
roles in the research process—reading for the literature review at the
beginning of a research project and reading to review research reports at
the end. Reading, especially reading philosophy, which the authors
encourage, can be considered speculative and ephemeral and bound
more to the rational than the empirical side of the rational/empirical
binary that structures empirical research’s epistemological goals. Also, it
can be difficult to control reading—who knows what a reader might
read? The authors recommend that researchers commit to reading as a
necessary, lengthy preparation for scholarship and research.
This special issue titled, “Reading: The Long Preparation for Inquiry,” aims to turn the attention of
educational and social science researchers to reading after more than half a century’s focus on
writing. We first provide a brief historical sketch of the work of writing in qualitative research in
education and the social sciences after the twentieth century’s dual crises of representation and
legitimation challenged the presumed validity of the scientific text. Next, we consider the rela-
tively minor role reading has played in textbook descriptions of that research and recommend a
robust, rigorous, and lengthy commitment to reading, especially to reading philosophy, as
researchers grapple with the daunting challenges of the twenty-first century. Finally, we intro-
duce the articles in this special issue whose authors provide insight into how reading has worked
and mattered in their academic careers.
Writing in empirical educational and social science research
U.S. social science in the first half of the twentieth century, informed chiefly by positivism and
psychometrics, assumed social scientists’ written research reports could accurately represent the
truth about the reality they investigated. The Truth was in the text, and the text was valid. After
World War II, however, the interpretive turn, the linguistic turn, the postmodern turn, the histor-
ical turn, the rhetorical turn, and others challenged that claim and produced the double and
related crises of representation (e.g. Jameson, 1984; Marcus & Fischer, 1986) and legitimation (e.g.
Habermas, 1973/1975; Denzin, 1997; Lather, 2001). In his foreward to Lyotard’s (1979/1984) book,
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre stpierre@uga.edu Mary Francis Early College of Education, University of Georgia,
Athens, GA, USA
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 16 August 2023
Accepted 13 September
2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2023.2264244

2 E. ST. PIERRE AND E. KUECKER
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jameson (1984) summed up those crises as
follows:
The so-called crisis of representation in which an essentially realistic epistemology, which conceives of rep-
resentation as the reproduction, for subjectivity, of an objectivity that lies outside it—projects a mirror the-
ory of knowledge and art, whose fundamental evaluative categories are those of adequacy, accuracy, and
Truth itself. (p. viii)
After the “turns,” those evaluative categories would be left behind along with realism, objec-
tivity, and Truth and become, for example, “Interesting, Remarkable, or Important” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 82).
The crisis of representation, fueled especially by the linguistic turn, questioned the belief that
language can stand in for the real in the hierarchy of reader-text-world, where the text in the
middle is presumed to be neutral and transparent, a mirror of nature (see Rorty, 1979). Derrida
(1978) famously argued that words cannot capture and close off meaning, that meaning always
escapes, is deferred. If language cannot, and never could, stand in for the Real that exists out
there in the world—if language cannot secure the Truth of the world—that contrived hierarchy
disappears, is flattened. Once we understand that sentences do not correspond to the world but
to other sentences, we must reconsider everything about the scientific text—its purpose, its
validity, and so on. Though writers can continue to try to represent, “accurate representation is
no longer important” (Rorty, 1979, p. 371) when the normative function of language “either to
reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true” (Butler, 1990, p. 1) has been refused. Some
championed the death of representation, the “powerful refusal to be named, represented, brought
in, domesticated” (Houle, 2009, p. 192) and argued that the “turning of lives into writing is no
longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection”
(Foucault, 1975/1979, p. 192).
Baudrillard (1983/1993), stressing the outsized significance of representation, wrote, “all of
Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could
refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something
could guarantee this exchange” (p. 346). The belief in that “something,” something outside the
world of human beings, something transcendent or foundational which can legitimate meaning
and truth, links representation to legitimation. What can guarantee truth, especially in science, if
not its texts that claim to represent the real and true? Without that authorization, how do we
know science is valid? The grand epic of state science—Lyotard (1979/1984) wrote that the cur-
rent version is positivism—described as early as Plato, posed questions of legitimation—“How do
you prove the proof?” and “Who decides the conditions of truth”—and then created, through the
consensus of scientists, rules for answering those questions.
Lyotard (1979/1984) identified representation, legitimation, and other metanarratives (grand
récits) of Enlightenment humanism’s powerful and privileged science, an a priori prescriptive sci-
ence that exists in advance of the doing of science. He argued those grand narratives could no
longer legitimate scientific knowledge because science always occurs in local contexts in which
it is different each time it is accomplished (petit récits) and in which validity shifts depending on
local rules and descriptions of goodness and adequacy. Validities are thus contingent on con-
texts. For that reason, “the old master-narratives of legitimation no longer function in the service
of scientific research” (Jameson, 1984, pp. xi–xii). Further, after the linguistic turn and the crisis of
representation, science, like everything else, participates in “language games” (Lyotard, 1979/1984,
p. 41) whose rules and practices come into being in different discursive and material systems of
thought. As a result, the Truth cannot be, and never could be, secured in a scientific text.
By the 1970s, interpretive and critical social scientists, countering positivists and psychometri-
cians, had begun to acknowledge their own language games and expose the scientism of the
scientific text. For example, in 1973, the anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, published his classic
book, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, explaining that ethnographic description is

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 3
neither objective nor neutral but rather inscription governed by theory (p. 26). In other words,
ethnographers do not and cannot find culture and then accurately represent it in words. What
they do is create culture in their texts based on their interpretations; they write the culture into
existence (e.g. Behar & Gordon, 1995; Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Importantly, their texts are always
governed by the theories that govern their “seeing.” For that reason, a Marxist and a feminist
ethnographer studying the same culture are unlikely to produce the same research report. That
difference upends claims of pure representation as well as the validity criteria assumed by posi-
tivist empirical observation that rely on objectivity, transparency, and replicability and assume
“multiple observers can agree on what they see” (National Research Council [NRC], 2002, p. 25).
State science crumbles. In that regard, Geertz (1973) explained the following:
In short, anthropological writings are themselves interpretations, and second and third order ones to boot.
(By definition, only a “native” makes first order ones: it’s his culture.) They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the
sense that they are “something made,” something fashioned. (p. 15)
Science, too, is a narrative, a fiction; moreover, through the consensus of its scientists, it pro-
duces its own story to legitimate itself (Lyotard, 1979/1984).
Geertz (1988) identified an inevitable consequence of interpretation, the “burden of author-
ship,” and explained that “once ethnographic texts begin to be looked at as well as through, once
they are seen to be made, and made to persuade, those who make them have rather more to
answer for” (p. 138). Latour and Woolgar (1986), anthropologists of science, agreed, arguing that
even a scientific fact in the physical sciences is a kind of “literary inscription” (p. 105). At some
point in time, a text loses “all temporal qualification” and “all historical reference” (p. 105), transi-
tioning from what might at the time of publication have been a contentious statement to what,
years later, most would agree is established truth. If texts are not mirrors of the world but human
creations of worlds, researchers become responsible for their inventions.
The burden of authorship produced much angst for those educational and social science
researchers who tried to come clean about their values, positioning, and theoretical attachments
as they chose topics to investigate, designed their studies, did fieldwork, and then wrote their
research reports. Reflexivity became a new marker of validity, but it maintains the subject/object
binary that grounds the human sciences and assumes researchers can somehow step outside
themselves, objectify themselves, and determine whether they are fair and just (see Pillow, 2003,
for a critique of reflexivity). To be properly reflexive, researchers began to incorporate features of
identity politics and autoethnography in their written texts, refusing calls for orthodox scientific
objectivity (e.g. Anzaldúa, 1987; Visweswaran 1994), what Haraway (1988) called the “god trick of
seeing everything from nowhere” (p. 581). Writing personal narratives, poems, novels, plays, and
experimental texts (e.g. Lather & Smithies, 1997) to represent data become de rigueur. “Messy
texts” (Marcus, 1994, p. 567) and alternative forms of representation, such as singing and paint-
ing, flourished. When writing became a method of inquiry (Richardson, 1994; Richardson &
St.Pierre, 2005), social science writers finally acknowledged what humanities scholars had always
known: we write not just to represent but to think, to create.
Writing in educational and social science research has become a profitable sector of the meth-
odology business machine with, for example, publications, conferences, workshops, and univer-
sity courses on “writing it up.” Even after the crisis of representation, researchers in the soft or
immature sciences still write to represent, sometimes with appropriate angst and apologies. They
also write to inquire and create. They write for the pleasure of it. The point is that writing various
texts—e.g. fieldnotes, researcher logs, anecdotes, research reports—remains deeply embedded in
research practices.
Interestingly, the texts researchers write continue to serve as empirical proof that research
accomplished is legitimate. For example, researchers list on their vitas their peer-reviewed publi-
cations published in highly ranked journals and their books published by renowned presses to
signal and represent the quality and legitimacy of their research. Ignoring all the turns

4 E. ST. PIERRE AND E. KUECKER
mentioned earlier, positivism continues to pervade legitimation and, though evaluators may pro-
fess that quality counts more than quantity, a researcher who publishes 10 journal articles a year
appears superior to one who publishes two a year. A 25-page journal article counts more than
a ten-page article. The assumption seems to be that the best scholars and researchers are the
most prolific writers. Decades of critique of positivism’s rage to count, measure, and quantify
everything have not deterred researchers in the interpretive empirical sciences from quantifying
writing. Those texts, those words on a page, those representations, continue to serve science’s
rage for legitimation. Educational and social science research, even positivist research, is utterly
textual, and researchers continue to write to think, to reflect, to know, to represent, to legitimate,
to critique, and so on. Writing pervades every aspect of inquiry to such an extent that we are
increasingly concerned that researchers are encouraged to write before they have read enough
to marshal the resources necessary for outstanding scholarship. In other words, we ask them to
bypass the long preparation of reading and write too soon.
Where is reading?
That brief sketch of the history of writing in social science inquiry may be familiar to readers who
helped create it as well as to other scholars who inherited it. The question this special issue asks
is where is reading in educational and social science research?
We can identify at least two commonplace reading tasks, both of which are built into the
conventional research process: reading for the literature review at the beginning and, at the end,
reading to review papers submitted for publication. The rest of the research process mostly
focuses on various aspects of data collection and analysis, which necessarily involve reading but
perhaps not so obviously.
Reading for the literature review helps researchers bound and focus a research project by
identifying prior research about a topic before a study begins. Researchers are expected to
become experts on their topics—e.g. teacher retention, high stakes testing—by retrieving, read-
ing, and writing at least a summary, preferably an analysis, of published peer-reviewed journal
articles and appropriate books that inform their projects. This kind of reading serves “application,”
reminding us of Marx’s (1867/1967) caution that we must not fail to move from knowing to
doing. Reading for too long or reading outside prescribed bounds may not desirable because
reading for the literature review should be intentional, useful, applicable to the “real-world” prob-
lem the empirical researcher intends to investigate. The risk of haphazard reading, of reading that
has “no path or method: simply the effort and the fatigue of the difficult chance” (Keenan, 1997,
p. 192), the risk of random reading which isn’t obviously useful for the task at hand is not desir-
able. Reading in the methodological enclosure is purpose-driven, constrained, and commodified
for efficient application.
Positivism’s tenacious grip on educational and social science research is evident in the litera-
ture review when researchers are charged with reading to find a “gap in knowledge” their studies
can fill. Incrementalism is the positivist theory that knowledge steadily accumulates but can have
“gaps,” so later science is more correct than earlier science (for a critique, see Kuhn, 1962/1970).
Hacking (1983), however, wrote that “there can be heapings up of knowledge without there
being any unity of science to which they all add up” (pp. 55–56), and Kuhn (1962/1970) wrote
that “the result is a persistent tendency to make the history of science look linear or cumulative”
(p. 139). One problem with incrementalism is that once knowledge about a particular topic is
heading in a particular direction, accumulating “findings” that fill gaps one valid brick at a time,
it may be difficult to change courses.
Latour and Woolgar (1986) noted that in the natural sciences there is often a niche of research-
ers trying to break with existing theory and method, to interrupt accumulated dogma. However,
that labor can involve an immense amount of difficult, dull, repetitive, and costly work few want

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 5
to take on. Persistence can produce change, but change also occurs through new requirements,
for example, “proof” (p. 120), which can make old or sidelined approaches newly legitimate. Kuhn
used the phrase paradigm shift to describe the permanent upheaval and break that occurs—typ-
ically from the margins of a field—when the accumulated knowledge of normal science is chal-
lenged so profoundly, so fundamentally, that it cannot hold and a new, incommensurable
paradigm emerges.
If the purpose of the literature review, then, is to read in order to present a mostly coherent,
unified body of knowledge to which a study contributes, reading, and thought, is constrained
and domesticated from the beginning, absorbed into methodology’s enclosure. Reading is
reduced to a preliminary step in the forward movement of a research project: read; find a gap
in knowledge; identify a research question whose answer will fill the gap; choose a pre-existing,
legitimated research methodology; design an empirical study; collect empirical data; analyze the
data; produce findings; represent the study in a text—fill the gap. Reading on the margins of a
field or reading outside the scope of a particular project may not be required or desirable at the
beginning of a study lest it disrupt the presumed unity of knowledge to which the researcher
must add. And once the research project has begun and follows the process that guarantees its
validity, reading may not be required at all. New researchers, especially those who become too
curious or troubled by their reading, may be advised to stop reading lest it interfere with their
progress. Coherence (the Same) is possible only when Difference (the Other) is excluded.
As noted, reading for the literature review is typically focused on the topic of the research
study: the object of knowledge. To varying degrees, researchers also include in their literature
reviews discussions of theories they’ve read that guided the conception of the study as well as
data analysis. Those theories are usually specific to a discipline, for example, a cognitive theory
in psychology or a theory about markets in economics.
Some researchers also engage larger systems of thought or onto-epistemological arrange-
ments or philosophical approaches in which the disciplines themselves and their objects of
knowledge are produced. We believe reading philosophy is critical in that it enables researchers
to understand that the concepts and conceptual orders of one system of thought (e.g. positivism,
poststructuralism, pragmatism) may be incommensurable with those in another. For example, the
philosophical concept rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987) that exists in an immanent ontol-
ogy cannot be used in a study that assumes a realist ontology. It may take many years of reading
philosophy for well-schooled qualitative researchers—those trained to read and apply—to under-
stand that philosophical concepts cannot be applied to empirical data collected using empirical
methods. Instead, they are intended to re-orient thought.
However, despite decades of critique, positivism continues to dominate research in education
and the social sciences and claims to be both value-free and theory-free. For that reason, it
eschews philosophy, especially metaphysics and ontology, as too speculative in favor of “the ana-
lytic, including the statements of logic and mathematics, and the empirically verifiable, including
the statements of empirical science. Anything else is, cognitively speaking, nonsense, an expres-
sion of emotion at best” (Haack, 2007, p. 32). Positivism, then, claims science is essentially sepa-
rate from philosophy (and theology and politics and aesthetics), so it should not be surprising
that researchers using positivism seldom read philosophy. But many others do read to find phil-
osophical approaches and concepts to help them think about their research.
A second common reading task in educational and social science research is reviewing,
inspecting, and judging research reports before they are accepted for publication. Once studies
have been completed and written up, research reports are submitted to publishers for possible
publication. Publishers ask so-called experts in the field to judge the adequacy, accuracy, signif-
icance, and truth of the text, the representation of the study, based on pre-established criteria.
This reading task, too, seems designed to serve conformity, and if authors stray too far from
orthodoxy, their work can be rejected. Authors are familiar with readers/reviewers who deem
their work “too way out there” or who reject their research because it “doesn’t look like”

6 E. ST. PIERRE AND E. KUECKER
educational psychology or literacy or social work. Reading/reviewing can easily become an appa-
ratus of surveillance, discipline, and normalization. It is kin to the examination, which Foucault
(1975/1979) explained was a common feature of the new human sciences, “the deployment of
force and the establishment of truth” (p. 184). As we know, journals publish their “acceptance
rates,” quantifying the judgments of reviewers; and a low acceptance rate indicates the rigor of
reading/reviewing and the quality of the articles the journal publishes.
No doubt there are other tasks for reading in educational and social science research, but they
don’t seem prominent. We don’t know of graduate courses that focus on the work of reading in
inquiry, though there are many on writing. Even courses on literature reviews focus mostly on writ-
ing them. It’s not clear that researchers feel obliged to read much at all, perhaps because the focus
of conventional empirical research, still quite positivist, is on the empirical real—what can be sensed,
observed, recognized, identified—the brute concrete. Perhaps reading isn’t empirical enough to mat-
ter. It leans too far toward the rational, speculative side of epistemology’s rational/empirical binary.
Writing may be more significant because it appears to be an empirical reality in the logical
empiricism/positivism that informs much research. Observers can see writers writing, crossing out
words, adding words, and so on; and there is a tangible product at the end of writing—a mate-
rial text. Reading, on the other hand, seems mental, speculative, and ephemeral. Whatever it is
and in spite of cognitive scientists’ attempts to capture it, reading escapes the gaze of “the
strange persona of Investigator advanced by the empiricists” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994,
p. 72). Who knows what people are doing when they’re reading? They seem to just stare at
whatever counts as text. Why knows how reading is affecting thinking? What’s really troubling is
that five readers can read the same text and produce five different interpretations. Reading, then,
seems undisciplined, defies calculation in advance, and refuse(s) prediction (Keenan, 1997, p. 102).
More radically, in deconstruction, “the reader does not exist. Not before the work and as its
straightforward receiver” (Derrida, 1992, p. 74). Nor does the text exist before the reader but,
instead, is produced in reading, in interpretation, and is an effect of reading. So neither the
reader nor the text exists ahead of reading. And reading? Godzich (1994) explained that “reading
must remain immanent; it must not let itself slowly drift toward the uncovering of the presumed
content” (p. 180). The immanent ontology that enables those three statements about readers,
texts, and reading is incommensurable with and shatters the realist ontology that informs
conventional educational and social science research. It’s not surprising, then, that reading—-
mysterious, unseen, uncontrollable—gets short shrift.
If researchers did have to account for their reading, what might that look like? Researchers are
expected to include texts they write on their vitas but only if the texts have been peer-reviewed,
judged, and have passed a validity test. As far as we know, researchers aren’t expected to include
texts they read on their vitas. If they were, would there be a list of books in various disciplines
deemed worth reading—those official canons do exist—with a marker of each text’s significance,
e.g. this text is more prestigious than that one? We know school children must pass tests to
prove they can find the correct meaning of a text—the “main idea.” Would researchers have to
do the same before announcing a text they’d read on their vitas? Would administrators then
count texts read as they count texts written for faculty members’ annual evaluations, for promo-
tion, for tenure? Though that approach parallels the treatment of writing in social science
research, we certainly don’t recommend it for reading.
Nonetheless, it is puzzling that reading has not had the attention writing has in educational
and social science research. Perhaps that’s because empirical research is typically conceived as
separate research projects that end in published reports. Once a project has been completed and
the report published, the researcher goes on to the next study and the next. Reading, then, may
be spotty, almost incidental, a once-off task focused on a particular topic for a particular study;
and, given the pressure to write and publish, who has time to read except when necessary?
Though it’s understood that researchers should write a lot, there’s little pressure to read a lot. But
those who do can always tell when others don’t.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 7
The long preparation
We are reminded of Richardson’s (2000) confession that “for 30 years I had yawned my way
through numerous supposedly exemplary qualitative studies” (p. 924). She found those social
science texts boring because, even if they reported unpredictable, immeasurable, and even
inconceivable human behavior, they tried to conceal life’s messiness by mimicking the scientific
authority and objectivity of natural science texts. Almost 25 years later, we recognize a similar
scientistic view of reading—reading to validate the appropriateness and applicability of a study
before it begins and reading to judge its validity as reported once it’s completed. Reading in
inquiry seems almost unaffected by the last century’s double crises of representation and
legitimation.
Our position, however, is that reading is primary in educational and social science research,
that it is necessary to read a lot, to ready constantly, to read for years and years, and to read
across disciplinary boundaries. It is especially important to read philosophy to find concepts and
conceptual orders that reorient thought. We believe reading is the long—lifelong—preparation
for inquiry that provides access to thought we didn’t know existed, thought so threatening it was
abandoned or refused, thought we did not know we could think, thought that encourages
experimentation and creativity, thought that might make possible people and worlds that do not
yet exist. If we confine our reading to what we recognize and understand, then we’re constrained
by what “everybody knows” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 130), the curated, the normalized, the
dogmatic.
We want to be very clear that we do not believe reading should be methodologized as have
been other everyday activities like talking with people, observing people, writing, and so on. In
other words, reading should not be made another method of inquiry. It should not be regulated
and disciplined within the methodological enclosure. Reading should not be limited to a one-off
preface to a particular research project or a search for theory to explain data already collected.
Instead, we argue that reading must be the lifelong ground of scholarship that entails a com-
mitment not “to direct or methodically apply a thought which pre-exists in principle and in
nature, but to bring into being that which does not yet exist” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 147). The
reading this special issue promotes serves experimentation and creation, not confirmation and
application. Ideas encountered in this reading may not be recognized by and easily accommo-
dated in dominant systems of thought. We support reading that threatens with collapse “the flow
of opinion, the doxa, the flow of convention, idle talk and idle chatter, the discourse of the ‘they’
(what ‘they’ say)” (Smith, 2012, p. 184) and what they know—that which has been domesticated
by the empirical lived. We encourage reading that unleashes difference.
The necessity of reading philosophy, especially, has become apparent as educational and
social science researchers engage the new empiricisms, new materialisms, posthumanisms, theo-
ries of affect, and other “new” approaches to inquiry enabled by the ontological turn. These
approaches begin with philosophy and philosophical concepts, not with pre-existing social science
research methodologies. They require studying, at minimum, epistemology’s rationalism and
empiricism; different ontologies, including realism and immanence; various humanisms and their
critiques; and different theories of affect. That work involves reading non-hegemonic Western
philosophers such as Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Deleuze, Foucault, and others who
always refused the traditional philosophy of Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel that continues to
constrain our work. It seems irresponsible for educational and social science researchers to skim
the surface of philosophy and pluck philosophical concepts out of their milieu and drop them
willy-nilly into an empirical study. For example, it is problematic for empirical researchers to claim
to use the new materialism without studying the history and politics of materialism which, in
Western philosophy, would begin, at least, with Aristotle.
We recommend reading widely and indiscriminately across disciplinary boundaries. We recom-
mend scandalous reading that shocks thought so it can think otherwise. We encourage

8 E. ST. PIERRE AND E. KUECKER
educational and social science researchers to embrace reading as the necessary and lengthy
preparation for inquiry. Our desire is for readers to find and invent strange and singular concepts,
conceptual orders, and systems of thought in which we can finally think and live differently.
With that said, we conclude by briefly summarizing the articles in this special issue in which
their authors describe how they have engaged reading based on their different philosophical
approaches and empirical projects thereby illustrating that reading has always already been
inexhaustible.
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre focuses on the work of reading, especially reading philosophy, in
post qualitative inquiry. She explains that, from the beginning of her academic career, she has
been intrigued by concepts and the conceptual orders they create in which scholars accomplish
their work. To that end, she has created several dictionaries of concepts she struggled with
during decades of reading, dictionaries that have served well her teaching and writing. She
encourages educational and social science scholars to read texts that may seem too hard to read
in order to destabilize what is known and familiar and open up space in which to think
differently.
Elliott Kuecker’s “A Closer Kind of Reading,” digs into the notion of close reading to explore
reading in relation to proximity. In his theorization, the ways we read—of which there are numer-
ous—have more to do with our orientations to the world, the text, and materialities than with
methodological practices. Further, not only do readers get close to their texts, but texts can get
so close to their readers that they seem to co-constitute the reader, presenting a hermeneutics
informed by the mingling of reader and text.
In “‘Something Comes Through or It Doesn’t’: Intensive Reading in Post-Qualitative Inquiry,”
Maggie MacLure distinguishes between professional and intensive reading, the first represented
by the conventional literature review in social science inquiry and the second focused on reading
in the midst of turbulent and unexpected flows that cannot be constrained. She explains that
reading, writing, and thinking are not separate practices in her research but that they form an
assemblage that is not predictable or controllable bringing disparate things into unpredictable
relation.
Elizabeth Macedo mobilizes Derrida’s quasi-concepts, trace and specter, in her article, “The
Commitment of Research: Reading-Writing as Openness to the New,” to refuse the dominant
belief that the text is stable, present, waiting to be deciphered and read. She also refuses the
belief that language can capture meaning and so domesticate and represent something that
exists in the world. Following Derrida, she argues that the text must remain unintelligible, leaving
room for the reader to read. Macedo provides examples from various research projects in Brazil
in which she and her colleagues complicated conventional approaches to inquiry that separate
the theoretical or philosophical from the empirical. She describes the long preparation of reading
for that scholarship that requires an ethical commitment to the specters of texts we inherit, to
their unassimilable difference.
In “Transindividual Reading Tactics in a Complex Technical Milieu: Philosophy Confronts the
Large Language Model,” Elizabeth de Freitas argues that reading involves both an aesthetic
encounter and a technical milieu. Her article is especially timely in this age of algorithms and
large language models when reading is increasingly automated, and reading philosophy, for
example, may seem anachronistic. The French philosopher, Gilbert Simondon, provides concepts
like the transindividual that are helpful in understanding that human being does not precede the
world but is achieved within being, including its technical milieu. She argues that what we most
need today is philosophical inquiry into technology. Particularly intriguing is her description of
her own reading practices that might be considered monstrous as the reader disappears in a text
and re-surfaces. de Freitas also emphasizes the importance of reading groups in her scholar-
ship—power in numbers—and the ethical and political commitment of collectively reading a text.
Jonathan Eakle’s article “Reading Migratory Flows in the Warmth of Oher Suns,” is about cre-
ativity through reading and what reading can do. He takes us on an excursion across land, over

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION 9
water, and into the air of a museum show about migration and the search for America, using the
ideas of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, visual art, and elements from Lewis Carroll’s Alice.
Dovetailed with dream-like sequences of worn academics, Eakle’s adventure invites us to enter
into our own creative productions through reading.
Melissa Freeman’s contribution to this special issue, “Reading, Rhetoric, Rhythm,” questions
what it means to interpret a text while reading. In her philosophical hermeneutics approach,
inspired particularly by Gadamer’s work, interpretation is not a matter of understanding, in which
a reader captures the intended meaning of a text, or even settles on a meaning at all. Rather,
reading is a risky and radical act in which the reader encounters something unknown and is
willing to let things arise as they will. Part of reading is thus attuning to the rhythms of the
rhetoric of the text, listening with great attention and being willing to receive. The risk in reading
lies in how reading with such attunement can have a revelatory impact on an individual or on
public discourse, causing discomfort, triggering new meanings, or subverting known truths. For
Freeman, reading is an aspect of world-making, suggesting that all readers are thus implicated
in this responsibility to read with great attentiveness and care, aware of possible ethical
ramifications.
In “Thinking like a Feminist and Reading with Love,” Alecia Jackson and Lisa Mazzei similarly
see reading as an act of creation that must be informed by ethical motivations. They launch
from Foucault’s question, what is thinking doing?, to argue that it is through intensive reading
that directions of thought are changed and influenced, which results in ontological changes
within research projects and the living of everyday life. They argue that the ontological dimen-
sion of reading is particularly transformative when combined with the concepts of thinking like
a feminist (Grosz, 2011) and acts of love (Deleuze, 1995). Chronicling some of their own reading
and accompanying seismic shifts that resulted in their research and living, Jackson and Mazzei
describe how intensely reading with love allows space for the “not yet” to be welcomed in the
moment. In this way of reading, old thoughts and things may be destroyed, and new thoughts
and things are created, revealing the ontological force of reading toward feminist
transformation.
The ethics of reading—and the responsibility of the reader—continue as a central concern in
Georgina Stewart and Nesta Devine’s article, “Nothing Outside the Text in Aotearoa New Zealand,”
as they explore reading as inquiry into all things beyond written text, such as one’s own land-
scape, people we come across, and signals from the ecological environment. Derrida wrote that
nothing exists outside the text in the sense that everything can be considered a text. Stewart
and Devine take this proposition to be true as they see reading as a broad mode of inquiry into
the world. They describe specific instances in their context of Aotearoa New Zealand where the
mingling and tensions of White culture and Māori, Pacific, and Pākehā identity complicate sys-
tems of meaning in the shared world. These tensions are of consequence to scholars, who
Stewart and Devine argue, have the responsibility to read in a manner that prepares them to
speak back to other texts, construct critiques and counter-critiques, and bring with them the
culture, life experiences, and landscapes that inform their readings.
In “Emergent Reading,” Bronwyn Davies agrees that reading makes an impact on the culture
and being of the reader. In her contribution, she considers how childhood schoolbooks intended
to teach the young how to read actually teach the young many “truths” about the way the world
is and should be. Davies notes studies which have found that schoolbooks establish gender
norms and notions of etiquette, but she explains those texts work to turn unruly children into
sedimented and subordinate beings. Through these books, children are dissuaded from pursuing
lively and intra-active tendencies that embrace other humans and more-than-human beings. In
this way, schoolbooks severely limit what is possible in the world, closing down the possibilities
and disciplining being. On the other hand, Davies’ own research presents ways of teaching read-
ing literacies, a concept she terms emergent reading, that encourage the lively and intra-active
tendencies of children to embrace a space of sympathetic openness to the other.

10 E. ST. PIERRE AND E. KUECKER
Disclosure statement
No competing interests were reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Elizabeth Adams St.Pierre is Professor in the Mary Frances Early College of Education and Affiliated Professor of
both the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Program and the Institute for Women’s Studies at the University of
Georgia. Her work focuses on poststructural theories of language and human being and post qualitative inquiry.
She’s especially interested in the new empiricisms, the new materialisms, and the posthuman enabled by the onto-
logical turn
Elliott Kuecker is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the School of
Information and Library Science. He teaches courses in archival methods and information needs and publishes on
pedagogy, qualitative methodologies, and theories of reading and writing.
ORCID
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5585-8173
Elliott Kuecker http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5567-3841
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