From Out of Glow, Glitter: A Novice Researcher’s Travels in Post-Qualitative Inquiry

This paper explores an episode from a post-qualitative doctoral study on university students’ interest in and commitment to allyship. Using Maggie MacLure’s ideas around ‘Glow’ – those unanticipated, compelling, affective moments in research that open up research enquiry – it explores a moment of discomfort and the insights that arose from it. This emerged when the same group of student allies expressed their ideas about allyship in sharply contrasting ways in individual ‘moving’ interviews and in a workshop. This contrast was puzzling and unsettling, more like an icy, spiky ‘glitter’ than a warm glow. The paper uses the metaphor of the snow globe to describe the meandering pathways opened up by this event, as an illustration of attending to affective moments that disrupt and go beyond traditional practices of research. This article, as a whole, responds to the challenge that post-qualitative inquiry can act as a filter that divides who is ‘in the know’ in research communities and offers a novice researcher’s reflections on the trials and possibilities of attempting such an inquiry.