This methodology as a three-legged stool. Each leg is essential, and they work together to create a stable platform for our inquiry. The legs are Post-Qualitative, Post-Humanist, and New Materialist. Each one gives us a specific lens and is directly tied to one of the core concepts: Movement, Affect, and Entanglement.
1. Post-Qualitative Inquiry (PQ) → The Lens for Seeing MOVEMENT
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What it means in this context: A traditional qualitative study aims to find and represent a stable “truth” that is supposedly waiting in the data. It takes a snapshot. Post-Qualitative inquiry rejects this. It starts from the premise that reality isn’t a fixed thing to be found, but a fluid process that is constantly being enacted or made. The goal of the research, then, is not to capture a static picture, but to trace the process of reality being made.
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How it connects to MOVEMENT: If reality is a process of becoming, then the only way to study it is to focus on movement. We can’t understand a river by analyzing a single, frozen photograph of a drop of water; we have to watch the flow. A PQ commitment demands a focus on movement, on how things shift, change, and reconfigure over time. It asks, “How did this practice become what it is?” rather than “What is this practice?”
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Why this is significant: An instructor’s relationship with AI is not a fixed opinion. It is a journey. It changes dramatically from week to week, influenced by a frustrating experience, a student’s clever use-case, or a new institutional policy. A static, snapshot-based study would be a lie; it would miss the entire story of adaptation, resistance, and becoming. The movement is the phenomenon. A PQ approach is the only way to study it honestly.
2. Post-Humanism (PH) → The Lens for Seeing AFFECT
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What it means in this context: Post-Humanism challenges the idea of the exceptional, rational, autonomous Human who stands apart from the world. It argues that we are always already mixed up with our technologies, our environments, and our non-human others. The cyborg is the ultimate post-human figure—a hybrid whose boundaries are breached and productively blurred. It decenters the rational mind as the sole source of agency and knowledge.
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How it connects to AFFECT: If we decenter the purely rational human, we must pay serious attention to the non-rational, the pre-cognitive, the embodied ways of knowing. Affect is the term for this. It’s not a simple emotion like “anxiety” that we can neatly label. It is the visceral, bodily charge of an experience—the tension in the chest when reading an uncanny AI text, the jolt of frustration at a nonsensical output, the wave of relief when a paragraph is generated flawlessly. Affect is the body’s immediate, intelligent response to being in an entanglement. The cyborg’s experience is fundamentally affective because its very being is a constant, embodied negotiation of its boundaries.
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Why this is significant: Instructors’ pedagogical decisions are not just rational calculations. They are profoundly driven by these deep affective currents. To ignore affect is to ignore the primary engine of their choices in this disruptive moment. Understanding the affective texture of cyborgification—the friction, the violation, the awe—is essential to understanding why they make the pedagogical cuts they do.
3. New Materialism (NM) → The Lens for Seeing ENTANGLEMENT
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What it means in this context: New Materialism insists that the material world is not a passive backdrop for human action. “Stuff”—technologies, documents, algorithms, bodies—has agency. It does things. It shapes possibilities. It pushes back. NM rejects the clean split between a human “subject” and a material “object.”
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How it connects to ENTANGLEMENT: If matter has agency, then we cannot study the instructor in isolation. we must study the entire network in which they are embedded. The instructor, the AI model, the assignment prompt, the university’s academic integrity policy, the physical classroom—they are all knotted together in what Barad calls an entanglement. They don’t just interact as separate entities; they are fundamentally inseparable and mutually co-produce what is possible.
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Why this is significant: Because if we only look at the instructor, we get the story wrong. We might conclude that “the instructor decided to change their syllabus.” A new materialist lens allows us to see a richer truth: the syllabus was changed by the entire entanglement. The AI’s capabilities pushed for a change, the institutional policy constrained the options, and the material document of the syllabus itself afforded certain kinds of revisions. It provides a more complex and accurate explanation of how change actually happens, preventing us from wrongly attributing all power and agency to the human alone.
Tying It All Together
These three paradigms are not separate ideas; they are a single, coherent theoretical toolkit. They are the necessary lenses for studying a phenomenon that is itself fluid (PQ/Movement), embodied (PH/Affect), and relational (NM/Entanglement). We have chosen them not because they are fashionable, but because the very nature of our research problem demands them.