Disrupting qualitative research: a bag-lady-narrative methodology as research–creation

Le Guin’s (2019) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction explains that bags are the holders of things, such as stories, that do not weaponize, dominate, or hold court, and it has been used as a political and feminist tool to reimagine qualitative research. These bags, and the stories that they carry, can gesture toward what is happening and reveal the capacity to perceive life differently. They propose a bag-lady practice of storytelling as speculative fabulation, where “storying” and “worlding” can reimagine the destructions of the Anthropocene and, instead, make kin across multispecies. In our qualitative research, our bag-lady-narrative methodology draws on feminist posthuman materialist theories to act as navigational tools for us to think beyond humanism, and we seek to blur the boundaries that are imbricated in language technologies and Cartesian dualisms that have been privileged to date. In this sense, philosophy becomes a method in our approach to qualitative research that frees us to rethink the importance of more-than-human matter in knowledge-making. We embrace difference and cast out categorical thinking through affirmative kinship in a period of troubled times.