Inquiring with cascade questioning
Malou Juelskjær · 2023
This chapter focuses on Where do you start – how do you begin? How do you make it up as you go? What are you questioning, and how does your approach stay open to questionability? To take up these reorienting prompts, cascade questioning is offered as a way of inquiring into/co-enabling a research phenomenon. Juelskjær follows an agential realist ontology as formulated by Karen Barad, considering questions as worlding practices (instead of subject-object relations between the knower and that which is to be known). Cascade questioning, as a postfoundational approach, is about tracing entanglements while at the same time producing – and enabling – entanglements. In other words, inquiry is part of the phenomenon that emerges through questions – but not to be answered one to one. Rather, cascade questioning sustains an ongoing and open process, providing a space for sensing and being with questioning to consider the multitude of directions it enables in a search for insight. As iterative, cascade questioning opens multiple entanglements of time, space, and events. The workflow and rhythms of cascade questioning open, move, hold, and entangle multiple spacetimematterings, troubling a conventional sense of linearity – also in relation to (what is known as) research methods. This is a specific technique that materializes the research and the more-than-human bodies of the research phenomenon as well as highlights a sensitivity toward the response-ability of entanglements and the differences they make. To enact a postfoundational approach, Juelskjær draws upon elements from an analysis involving a memorial statue. With this specificity, research as an emergent process is also about Spivak’s incitement of “doing homework.”