Dwelling With Wildflowers: Qualitative Inquiry as Life-Living and Life-Giving. (July 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kruger, Frans
• Is Part Of: Qualitative inquiry. Volume 27:Number 6(2021)
• Page Start: 731
• Page End: 736
• Publication Date: 2021-07
• Subjects: artfulness -- ecological thinking -- to dwell -- conviviality -- buttonhole flower; Social sciences -- Methodology -- Periodicals; Social sciences -- Research -- Periodicals; 300.72
• DOI: 10.1177/1077800420933294
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1077-8004

Abstract

In this short piece, I reconsider qualitative inquiry based on my chance encounter with a buttonhole flower. This encounter offered me an opportunity to explore not only my relationship with vegetal life, but also how dwelling with wildflowers allows one to reconceptualize qualitative inquiry as a practice of life-living and live-giving that emerges from a logic of conviviality. Practicing qualitative inquiry as life-living and life-giving serves as a means to unmoor our practices of inquiry from the abstraction of re -presentation and the predicative logic on which this is based, and to offer instead a conceptualization of inquiry as a process of dwelling with/in the world, and in this togetherness, experience (the potential of) life.