New-materialist bricolage: presenting an ontological position for qualitative internet-based research

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to make a novel contribution to new-materialist approaches, toward advancing existing ontological debates. We present a new-materialist bricolage method that was developed from an existing interpretive Community of Practice (CofP) known as the Pivot Project research consortium. This interpretative community was used to theorise the ontological implications of research in the COVID-19 global pandemic. The specific focus was on digitalisation of five qualitative multidisciplinary research projects because of the impacts of an unexpected pandemic. We were able to formulate a bespoke new-materialist bricolage that successfully allowed us to overcome existing impasses of our multidisciplinary ontological differences, whilst enabling us to remain attentive to both abstract and material considerations. We conclude by reflecting on what new-materialist ontology can tell us about what internet-based qualitative research is, could be and perhaps should be, in an ever-changing world.

KEYWORDS:

• New-materialism
• ontology
• qualitative research
• documentary analysis

Introduction

The intention of this paper is to present a bespoke new-materialist advancement through the bricolage method as an intervention for existing ontological debates. To undertake this work, the paper will first introduce and explain its key concepts and approaches. This includes new-materialism (see Coole & Frost, 2010), the bricolage method (see Denzin & Lincoln, 2008, 2011; Kincheloe, 2001, 2005, 2011), and the Community of Practice (CofP) approach used to formulate our advancement (Wenger, 1998).

To articulate our work in the clearest terms possible, our customised new-materialist approach must also be contextualised. Such context entails our circumstances as leading academics for five distinct multidisciplinary research projects that, without notice or expectation, bore the impact of an unprecedented global pandemic (World Health Organisation, 2020). Thereafter, the imperative of explaining the phenomenal reality we were thrust into, led us to come together within a Community of Practice (CofP). Our intention in forming this CofP was to theorise methodological, ontological and practical impasses before us. In particular, the challenge of rapid reconfiguration of our methods to permit remote internet-mediated data collection was of utmost urgency and concern (Dube & Xolisile, 2021). All projects were qualitative and utilised either a semi-structured interviewing or focus group method of data collection. We formed our CofP, and from here, began to conceptualise our concerns theoretically, methodologically and reflexively.

From the outset of our CofP, we were drawn toward new-materialism as a critical and theoretical field of inquiry (Coole & Frost, 2010; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). In particular, a set problem underpinned this attraction: our perceived need for a new ontological and methodological tactic that could account for the changes we were forced to make to our studies. More broadly within qualitative research practice, after the early 2000s, a plurality of methods had emerged for qualitative research. Many of these approaches were insistent upon the centrality of the immaterial world. They placed cultural, social, affective, discursive and lingual issues at their helm. Owing to such tendencies within the social sciences, one particular approach has gained traction generally within qualitative research, referred to as new-materialism. A contention of new-materialists is that within the vie for abstract analyses, the material embodied world ought to be accounted for also (Coole & Frost, 2010). As such, the new-materialist position becomes somewhat like an ontological half-way house, occupying the convergent space between physical and immaterial worlds. Fortunately, new-materialism fit our needs well. After immersing in its rich literatures, we took up new-materialist theory, as a productive theoretical orientation for our CofP.

Over time, our own unique new-materialist tactic emerged. This arose from the nuance of our needs. Our studies were originally conceived pre-pandemic and now our former ontological positions, which were aligned to relativism, idealism and post-modernism, were insufficient for the complexity of the research challenges and milieu dictated by government-mandated social distancing and travel bans (Government of Ireland, 2020). To account for the associated move to online data collection, we concluded from the work of our CofP that a paradigmatic shift in the philosophy of our research was unavoidable.

We rationalised this shift across several lines. The online environment threw up complex ontological questions for us, which the onto-epistemological approaches that we held beforehand, could not effectively answer. These diverse questions spanned from whether entities actually exist in virtual spaces to whether virtual spaces can exist separate to social practices or human perception. Another key set of concerns is whether and how boundaries ought to be demarcated for phenomena perceived across and within digital and material worlds. Unlike other philosophical approaches, we found that new-materialist explanations best illuminated these sort of ontological questions (see Barad, 2003; Coole & Frost, 2010; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012; Haraway, 1985).

The shift from in-person to online methods plausibly could have been accommodated with other major onto-epistemological approaches such as social constructionism and critical realism (Bogna et al., 2020). We contend, however, that the explanations these approaches could ultimately yield, would be exceptionally more truncated, shallow and limited, than with new-materialism. Specifically, the latter held a strong tradition of relevant bodies of philosophical scholarship and literature that elaborated on the issues we encountered. Moreover, by the time we had adapted and aligned other philosophies to our needs, they became so deformed that they were theoretically unrecognisable. This then precipitated a sense of philosophical crisis for us. New-materialism, however, provided timely onto-epistemological scholarship aligned to the cutting-edge nature of digital advancement. Whilst we were already superficially aware of new-materialism before forming our CofP, in-depth understanding was pursued thereafter, through critique of the literature. This led us farther afield from conventional theory, and closer toward something new-materialist, methodologically and ontologically bespoke.

We took up a well-rehearsed CofP approach in addition to applying theoretical guidance (McDonald & Cater-Steel, 2017; Wenger, 1998). Evident from within our interpretative CofP were practical and methodological impediments to progress arising from the pandemic. Specifically, our CofP which we named the Pivot Project research consortium, was initially formed in line with Wenger’s (1998) ground-breaking analyses for the social sciences. The consortium was formed to help us to think through the implications of digitalisation of our multidisciplinary research projects during the pandemic. Wenger (1998) contends that rather than institutions or individuals, it is social practices within informal ‘Communities of Practice’ (CofP) composed by people that are the spine of shared enterprises. Contemporary literature has since gone farther to express the utility of CofP for higher education institutions such as ours (McDonald & Cater-Steel, 2017). This is notwithstanding intellectual clashes and ontological idiosyncrasies owing to our multidisciplinary perspectives and various qualitative methods. Certainly, these have been complex and inviting of curiosity.

Finally, what must be introduced is our practice as bricoleurs. We took up a bricolage method articulated and developed in the work of Kincheloe (2001, 2005, 2011) and Denzin and Lincoln (2008, 2011). The bricolage method is a multimethodological and multi-theoretical approach to social research (Kincheloe, 2001, 2005). We applied the bricolage method when producing and translating thematically analysed materials to a final synthesised account of findings of our CofP work. The method was chosen to account for the complexity introduced by digital technology, remote working, multi-disciplinarity and multi-methodological elements of our CofP. As Kincheloe (2005, p. 323) contends, ‘the bricoleur constructs the object of study in a more complex framework’ leading to ‘multiple dimensions of multilogicality’.

Ultimately, we sought to create coherence from complexity. As bricoleurs, we have become eager to share our modest but novel adaption of new-materialist bricolage to inform wider ontological debates. Here we progress understanding of ontological problems in multidisciplinary qualitative work (Belleri, 2020) associated with remote internet-based research. We present new renditions of new-materialism as a transformative theoretical optic and ontological state of inquiry. These renditions became available for qualitative researchers following the material turn in social science philosophy (Coole & Frost, 2010; Feely, 2020; Schadler, 2017).

In its entirety, this paper theorises how our bricolage may be revisionist for the current state of knowledge around qualitative ontologies in interest-based research. We draw on diverse literatures to undertake this work. This includes Dona Haraway’s (1985) seminal cyborg manifesto and Karen Barad’s (2003) ground-breaking work that challenges materialist intellectual orthodoxy. The global pandemic cast our five discrete qualitative research projects into the realm of internet-based methods with striking velocity. Here it is valuable to pause for thought around the ontological implications of large-scale pandemic-related research changes. We contend that questions raised in this paper are transformative and can radically refigure common ideas about what qualitative internet-based research is and ought to be.

We outline our methods and insights with the intention of supporting other qualitative researchers to use them and to take them up for their future work in online spaces. Researchers forced to reconfigure their research designs due to extenuating circumstances may draw upon our learning. They may use new-materialist theory, form their own CofPs and critically apply the bricolage method. The scope of our work extended only to qualitative data collection methods of semi-structured interviewing and focus groups. These methods, however, parallel many others within the diverse qualitative research paradigm (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011).

Our paper develops in the following way. Firstly, new-materialism as a transdisciplinary space is further explained (Feely, 2020; Smith & Monforte, 2020). Secondly, the concept of an interpretative CofP is introduced as an analytic endeavour based on social and relational exchanges (Wenger, 1998). Within this is provided an explanation of the Pivot Project research consortium. Thirdly, specifications of our new-materialist bricolage method are presented in the method section. Fourthly and finally, concluding discussion presents five key conventions of our new-materialist theorisation that throw into question wider implications for qualitative internet-based research. These conventions are (1) space and place, (2) permeable boundaries, (3) material-semiotic considerations, (4) complexity of relations, and (5) temporality.

In drawing to a close, we reaffirm the new-materialist imperative of freeing ourselves from the reductive effects of dichotomies and dualisms in our thinking and our methodologies (Coole & Frost, 2010). Only by holding certain constants, can we radically reform our tendencies and consider new possibilities for qualitative research moving forward.

New-materialism

New-materialism is a broad and contested interdisciplinary field driven by ‘novel understandings of and renewed emphasis on materiality’ (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 5). In the social sciences and humanities, the turn towards new-materialism departs from theoretical concerns of poststructuralism and cultural theory. It is characterised in part by a focus on subjectivity and textual approaches to representations, discourse and culture grounded in dualisms.

Within the wide-ranging and often eclectic scope of new-materialism, Coole and Frost (2010, p. 7) identify three interrelated but distinctive themes: ontological reorientation; biopolitical and bioethical considerations of the status of life and of the human; and critical re-engagement with political economy. This renewed focus on the dynamics of materialisation probes the nature of matter and the place of embodied humans within the material world. Alaimo and Hekman’s Material Feminisms (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008) brings into proximity writings that expressly address the loss of the ontological, material and corporeal in feminist theory and practice. This is a loss caused by the postmodern turn.

Alaimo and Hekman (2008, p. 6) call for a radical rethinking of materiality which is ‘the very stuff of bodies and natures’. Karen Barad (2003, p. 803) proposes a materialist and ‘posthumanist performativity’ which comprehends matter as ‘an active participant in the world’s becoming’. Barad (2003, p. 822) further envisages relational ontology as ‘agential realism’. This is informed by the ground-breaking quantum theory work of physicist Niels Bohr, who advances that things do not have inherently determinate boundaries or properties. Within this ‘matter is substance in its intra-active becoming – not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency’ (Barad, 2003, p. 822). For Barad agency is not solely confined to humans but extends to all matter. Though crucially, agency is not an inherent attribute but something that is enacted (Barad, 2003, p. 818; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 55).

Within new-materialism, the writings of Deleuze and Guattari also propose an ontology that shifts from ideas of ‘objects and bodies as occupying distinct and delimited spaces’ to understanding human bodies and other material, social and abstracted entities as relational (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; Fox & Alldred, 2015, p. 401). These relations produce assemblages of actions and events (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; Fox & Alldred, 2018, p. 5). DeLanda’s conception of assemblage theory, derived from the work of Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) posits assemblages as ‘wholes whose properties emerge from the interaction between parts’ (DeLanda, 2006, p. 5). Deleuze’s assemblage is a ‘relations of exteriority’. This is unlike a theory of the relations of interiority in which ‘the component parts are constituted by the very relations they have to other parts in the whole’ (DeLanda, 2006, p. 9). It is made up of different components that have the ability to be detached and reconfigured ‘into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different’ (DeLanda, 2006, p. 10; Deleuze & Guattari, 1988). Fox and Alldred (2016, p. 57) argue that ‘assemblages do not exert some kind of force over relations: these forces are a consequence simply of how relations affect and are affected by, other assembled relations’.

We certainly accept in this context that new-materialist ontology is productively sensitive to the material world. We wish to acknowledge however that it remains an ontology grounded in Western thought. This departs from Indigenous relational ontologies of the world. These predate and were marginalised by westernised thinking and ought to be honoured. Such Indigenous relational ontologies differ by centralising the idea that a constitutive component of the existence of entities is the relations that are occurring between them (Abadía & Porr, 2021).

We utilise progressive literature around new-materialism to understand and declare a new-materialist lens for our consortium. This lens is most helpful as whilst much of our initial research projects inhabited material, physical worlds where social and relational practices unfolded, the COVID-19 pandemic required virtual research. As such, the role of matter and material reality are called into question. New-materialism offered us a sufficiently sophisticated approach (Coole & Frost, 2010) to accommodate some of these new challenges of internet-mediated research: challenges that will be outlined in more detail at a later stage. For now, it remains the case that the intellectually instrumental lens of new-materialism became a fundamental attribute of our CofP. This CofP, named the Pivot Project research consortium, will now be considered in more depth with respect to its key characteristics and processes.

Pivot Project research consortium as an interpretative Community of Practice (CofP)

The Pivot Project research consortium is a CofP that was formed with the coming together of six social researchers, from the same school within the one university. We, the six researchers, were engaged in five separate studies, all at diverse stages of development. An invitation to the CofP was extended to researchers at the start of the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic (World Health Organisation, 2020). The commonality that drew the group together was the impact of public health measures, put in place to manage the pandemic (Government of Ireland, 2020), upon the process of data collection for our research projects.

Specifically, reflective theorisation occurred with respect to the pivot to online data collection methods that many researchers were compelled to make due to COVID-19 (Dube & Xolisile, 2021). What evolved was a CofP that facilitated ongoing dialogue, that transcended the use of online data collection, to invoke a deeper conversation about wider methodological, epistemological and ontological issues that inhabit virtual research spaces (Salmons, 2021). Seven weekly meetings of one-hour or more duration were conducted through the University approved platform of Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) in order to curate our ideas (Conlon et al., 2023; Microsoft, 2022). A peer reflective practice approach was taken to discussion in line with Wenger (1998) in which our social practices and social interactions as researchers provided space for innovation. For qualitative data collection, each meeting was recorded and transcribed verbatim and fieldnotes were collected from the transcripts of these meetings. This allowed the group to identify shared issues and common themes within individual projects and to document our internal debates surrounding these topics. We thematically analysed the transcribed and recorded content through documenting reoccurring issues and patterns. To supplement and extend this work, we shared and reviewed a bank of materials like ethics committee applications and reflective notes. Finally, we wrote up all materials and analytic products into one synthesised account (Conlon et al., 2023).

The focal qualitative research projects cover a range of themes and issues. This included a study of people’s experiences of unplanned pregnancy and abortion care services in Ireland (Conlon et al., 2022). Methods used within this were qualitative interviewing and grounded theory methodology. Another project delved into the experiences of newly qualified social workers as they navigate the transition from social work education into professional practice (Byrne & Kirwan, 2019). This involved qualitative interviewing with thematic analysis. A realist synthesis of ‘Signs of Safety’, a child protection framework used internationally within child protection and welfare services, was also within the sample of studies (Caffrey & Browne, 2023). Here synthesis was combined with a focus group method. Moreover, included was a project seeking out a better explanation of the impact of growing up in a stable and permanent foster family for young adults as they transition out of care (Whiting, 2021). Methods used were qualitative interviewing, narrative inquiry and reflective thematic analysis.

Finally, the fifth project entailed a mixed methods study investigating safeguarding practices for children with disabilities, in light of their heightened risk of child maltreatment (Flynn, 2021). This adopted qualitative interviewing with thematic analysis. The diverse nature of these social science projects was unproblematic as our CofP provided space for discussion to evolve that surpassed the level of content of each study. Instead, discussion focussed upon issues of process and methodology.

Method: presenting a new-materialist bricolage

We formulated a new-materialist bricolage through the work of our consortium. Bricolage is a creative methodological tact used in the social sciences and in qualitative research practice (Corbett-Etchevers & Parmentier-Cajaiba, 2022). The bricoleur is like a methodological jack of all trades. They are like the maker of a patchwork quilt, mosaic or montage, creatively moulding together various research tactics and epistemological strategies (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). Bricolage involves ‘making do’ with the available resources, artefacts, and epistemological insights available to a researcher or team of researchers, by creatively crafting something new and oftentimes bespoke (Corbett-Etchevers & Parmentier-Cajaiba, 2022). Whilst the core essence of bricolage is about merging together diverse and appreciated epistemological tactics and research bric-à-brac to devise a new approach, defining bricolage further than this, is not an easy thing to do. This is because a set of rules or conventions by which bricolage could be recognised and explained is not available. Such conventions would simply defy the creative, artistic, flexible, unbounded nature of the bricoleur’s work (Patton, 2002).

Bricolage was particularly suited to our consortium’s needs on several grounds. First, we needed to methodologically strategize around our pivot to online methods due to the pandemic. The bricolage approach had been found to be effective in dealing with methodological challenges prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, including pivoting to online platforms (Dube & Xolisile, 2021). As such, it was of utmost relevance and utility to our work. Second, our consortium was straddling the needs of five distinct multidisciplinary research projects with diverse methods and ontological views. We therefore needed to craft a creative, flexible approach to overcome existing impasses of our multidisciplinary ontological differences. Bricolage as a qualitative method of inquiry was so methodologically malleable that it came to be referred to as the bricolage arts in relevant literature. This is because bricolage deviates from common research practice by expanding understanding (Patton, 2002). It thereby allowed us to find a point of reconciliation between ontological and methodological discrepancies within our CofP. Thirdly, from thinking through the ontological obstacles before us, we became aware that there was a need to remain attentive to both abstract and material considerations in progressing our research work. As bricolage is an approach that can accommodate a constellation of theories and ideas, it allowed us to bring in a new-materialist ontological stance which met our needs as multi-disciplinary researchers (Corbett-Etchevers & Parmentier-Cajaiba, 2022; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011).

In total, there are five implications of our new-materialist bricolage that can be understood as constituting our bricolage, produced from the CofP work of our consortium. These five implications were based upon our identification and definition of thematic problems and impasses encountered with respect to our pivot to online methods. Our new-materialist bricolage was created in a remedial fashion to attend to these thematic problems. In the next section, our prerogative is to present our new-materialist bricolage in the form of these implications.

Discussion

Employing a bespoke new-materialist bricolage, we theorise five key ontological implications evident across our five digital and multidisciplinary research projects. An overarching theme was our rejection of a dualist conceptual framework in favour of a holist, socio-technical understanding (Uttal, 2004). Rooted in Cartesian and Newtonian ontologies, a dualist perspective would view the realm of digital research by considering the digital and material as ontologically separate from the human and social (Jurgensen, 2012). The methodological implication is a reductionist approach, that assumes that digital research can be understood by considering the constituent parts of digital research as separate. Yet technology is not neutral or passive in its ontological implications (Caliandro & Gandini, 2016; Jurgensen, 2012). We observed how digitalisation, in the cyborg tradition, creates something of an ‘augmented man’. Technology was not separate from but rather an inseparable, integrated part of the human actors in the worlds of our digital projects (Haraway, 1985). Indeed, a focus on the technology alone would seem to belie the reality that the tools of digitisations only come to have meaning and effects when they are part of social processes (Suchman, 2006).

Our attentiveness to these material integrations is central to discussion under five subsections. Specifically, below we will discuss five conventions of our new-materialist bricolage. These conventions are (1) space and place, (2) permeable boundaries, (3) material-semiotic considerations, (4) complexity of relations, and (5) temporality.

Space and place

Our first convention refers to space and place. Here, a core ontological implication of this convention for our research processes was that it rendered visible the dynamic effects of absence, and of human and object agency. Toward providing context, literature concerning traditional in-person qualitative data collection is expository. This literature suggests that the location of data collection plays an important reflexive role in the process. It can be considered ‘space’ and ‘place’ where power dynamics, social relations, identities and meanings unfold in multiple ways (Gagnon et al., 2015). ‘space’ here refers to a physical location (Agnew, 2011), while ‘place’ is the lived space that emerges from relations and practices and that colours experiences (McGrath & Reavey, 2013). In the digital space, the participant(s) and researcher(s) can see and hear each other but are not in the same physical space. Each occupy a digital/technological as well as physical space. This creates ontological and epistemic implications for research. There is an urgent need to consider the ways in which the digital space may present new configurations in the relational process through which ‘data’ is constructed. New-materialism’s sensitivity to discursive, material and embodied forces (Coole & Frost, 2010), presents us with an opportunity to notice new things about social processes (Flynn, 2017; Flynn & Feely, 2023), within the ontological and epistemic space of the digital qualitative research forum.

One example of this is interviews that took place in the research project about newly qualified social workers, that involved two researchers and a participant. In a face-to-face interview, the second researcher might have moved her chair to a distance of a few feet away to lessen her prominence and allow a focus on rapport between interviewee and primary researcher. However, the ‘space’ of the digital environment did not allow for this possibility. The participant was therefore faced with two video images, one of each researcher, although just one researcher was conducting the interview and asking questions. For the researchers, the ‘place’ in this sense seemed to create imbalanced social dynamics, requiring the participant to ‘ignore’ someone who was very obviously present.

Alternatively, in the study around professional practice and the high prevalence of child maltreatment for children with disabilities (Flynn, 2021), the researcher was acutely aware that the ‘lack of physicality’ in the digital process could make it more difficult to gauge the social temperament and tonality of the group (Caliandro & Gandini, 2016). Further, group discussion about both this study and the realist synthesis study (Caffrey & Browne, 2022) highlighted the diminution of researchers’ capacity to facilitate, manage and negotiate group dynamics by using our physical bodies to imply permissive social relations (Caliandro & Gandini, 2016). For example, we did not have the opportunity to use body positioning or eye contact with individuals to imply to the group the intended focus of attention. However, as one researcher noted, participants’ ability to turn off their camera in a large group may have provided a sense of anonymity, that would be unavailable in person. This could lower inhibitions and flatten social hierarchies such as between the lay and professional participants in this group.

Overall, we theorise a key ontological implication of these reflections on ‘space’ and ‘place’ for our research processes. Specifically, we now recognise the dynamic effect of absence and of human and object agency therein. New-materialists conceptualise material objects, and not just living organisms, to be agentic, productive and dynamic (Barad, 2003; Coole & Frost, 2010). What we add to this, through our use of peer reflective practice as part of a CofP (Wenger, 1998) is a set ontological conclusion. We have found that the very absence of a material object or human action is also powerfully agentic and performative within the online qualitative research environment. One example of this, for us, was the causal effects produced by the felt absence of the secondary researcher in the backdrop of the digital screen window. In this sense, ontologically, both the absence, and the materiality and corporeality of objects and people, can do something, and as such we came to understand these as performative. Matter appeared lively to us rather than dead or inert (Coole & Frost, 2010), and absence accomplished more than deficiency: it was instrumental rather than null and void.

Permeable boundaries

After some ontological appreciation of space and place, the next convention for us to consider is ‘permeable boundaries.’ What this convention actually did, as an onto-epistemological implication for our research processes, was furnish a shared conclusion. The specific conclusion was that the researcher’s ontological construction of reality is constantly impressionable. Reflexive approaches to qualitative research emphasise that both researchers and participants influence the research process and its findings, such that research findings are a synthesis of the perspectives of all parties in the process (Wengraf, 2001). Thus the researcher, not just the participant, inevitably influences the process. The interview is not just a technique for gathering data but an inherent part of the construction of individual subjectivity and the broadening and deepening of knowledge (Darawsheh & Stanley, 2014; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Gubrium & Holstein, 2002; Rubin & Rubin, 2011). The human interaction in the interview not only collects, but produces knowledge (Kvale, 1996).

There has been less focus, however, on how the location of the interview can play a role in constructing reality. Yet as Herzog (2005) notes, the location of the interview is not just a technical issue but an integral part of the ontological construction (Herzog, 2005). In this sense, the discursive and material reality that is observed in research is inevitably bounded and expanded in practical ways that influence the subjective ontology. The move online can change those boundaries in ways that affect our observed reality and the ontological construction of that reality.

We observed in our studies that the digital process could resituate the boundaries between professional and the personal in ways that do not occur in the in-person process. The in-person process, for instance, negates the possibility of individuals occupying different spaces concurrently. For example, across our studies, interviews sometimes took place in a digital space in which both participant and researcher engaged in discussion while each was physically located in their respective bedrooms. This created an intimacy dynamic that was unique to the digital sphere. In the study focusing on women’s experiences of abortion, it was particularly highlighted how the sensitivity and intimacy contained within the discursive subject seemed to find physical expression within the physical location of both researchers and participants sharing a visual of their bedroom space. In this sense, the context-dependent capacity of personal bedrooms seemed to locate the research within an intimate space both physically and psychologically (Caliandro & Gandini, 2016). While working in one’s bedroom may not feel particularly intimate, sharing that space with another, even through a digital platform, may.

In entirety, we are prompted to consider what these reflections do ontologically and onto-epistemologically for the research process. We contend that the key ontological learning from the convention of ‘permeable boundaries’, is that a researcher’s ontological construction of reality must be known as subjective (Belleri, 2020), and constantly impressionable. Owing to this impressionability, occupation of a virtual reality such as a digital interviewing platform, can powerfully refigure a researcher’s subjective ontology (Caliandro & Gandini, 2016; Jurgensen, 2012). One can apply, for instance, a positivist logic to a digital reality, through determining that actual reality unfolds in the virtual space, separate to human perception, and instead of the everyday material and corporeal world. Moreover, ontologically understood boundaries between others and oneself, where the latter is embodied by a pixelated, digital rendering of one’s image, are technologically produced in the digital world. As such, within the digital world, the very onto-epistemology of oneself becomes subject to technological manipulation. This leads us back to the overall conclusion, within our convention of ‘permeable boundaries’, that the researcher’s ontological construction of reality is continually impressionable.

Material-semiotic considerations

The next convention refers to material-semiotic considerations. This ultimately led us to the ontological conclusion, that our research processes must account for the capacity of technology to construct multiple material-semiotic ‘realities’. Contextual here was Feely’s (2020) observation of the impossibility of separating material and discursive forces. An importance should be accorded to including material-semiotic considerations such as asking ‘what material and/or semiotic forces are affecting this story?’ (Feely, 2020, p. 180). The digital interview creates unique material-semiotic considerations (Caliandro & Gandini, 2016; Salmons, 2021). Indeed, in the digital ‘place’, both researcher and participant become semi-disembodied: their bodies perceived by each other through a co-located digital space while each occupies a unique physical space. In the digital research process only parts of bodies can be perceived and are filtered through the frame and lens of the technology. We observed across our studies how camera framing, lighting, audio and quality had potential to influence, not just what was recorded in the interview, but the relationship between participant and researcher. This in turn influenced the subjective ontology of the interview itself as well as the construction of data.

In the abortion study, for example, when a participant sat in a dark room with no light on and became distressed during the interview, it was difficult to offer support (Conlon et al., 2022). In the realist synthesis study (Caffrey & Browne, 2023), when the internet connection faltered and the participant’s image froze and sound was disrupted as she offered a personal and intimate account of her experience as a child protection social worker, it was difficult to know whether it was appropriate to ask her to repeat. The adoption study also presented thought provoking moments (Whiting, 2021). When participants became upset, the researcher observed that while she could provide verbal comfort and empathy through physical facial expressions, she could not provide physical comforts through other material symbolic artefacts: a tissue, a cup of tea, a pat on the arm. Therefore, technology had the capacity to deliver clear, uninterrupted images of individuals’ facial expressions and body language which are part of the complex, communicative, inter-relational dynamic that makes up the interview. Yet equally, the technology could deliver fragmented, distorted, and hard-to-discern material-semiotic dynamics that become part of the ontology of the research process (Caliandro & Gandini, 2016; Salmons, 2021).

We conclude that the overall ontological implication of our convention of ‘material-semiotic considerations’ is that technology has the power to construct multiple material-semiotic ‘realities’. Through critical reflection within our CofP, we came to know that layers and multiplicities of ‘reality’ were being technologically produced across our research processes (Caliandro & Gandini, 2016; Jurgensen, 2012). How this conclusion effected our direct research work, was through a concerted effort to disrupt the unthinking, intuitive ontologically ordering of these ‘realities’ in a hierarchy, whereby those with the most temporal and physical proximity to the interviewer’s in-person experience, are those considered most onto-epistemologically authentic. From here, we have become intentional about questioning embedded assumptions of our ontology, to reveal biases and hierarchies, that were otherwise hidden (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 1988).

Complexity of relations

Physical spaces contain boundaries and capacities. These enable and constrain the ways in which people interact in physical terms (the privacy of the room or the proximity of people in it, for example) but also psychological (the socially appropriate use of a room). In our fourth convention, we specifically refer to the complexity of relations within spaces. Here the arising ontological implication is one grounded in the complexity and unpredictability of perceptions, social systems and knowledge production.

Our diverse research studies demonstrated how the online process could envelop, within the research process, human (for instance other people, family members, pets), material (for instance people’s homes, their personal offices, their personal belongings objects) and technological (for instance audio, video, broadband) aspects in a multiplicity of ways that add to the complexity of the system observed and co-constructed by the researcher(s), participants and unexpected others (James & Busher, 2009; Salmons, 2021).

In other ways, the digital process could work to constrain its components. The emergent effects of entities’ capacities occur within an open system, in which components of the assemblage may occupy multiple assemblages and move between them (DeLanda, 2006; Fox & Alldred, 2016). The self-organising complexity of adaptive social systems suggests great challenges in controlling them (DeLanda, 2006). And yet we observed our participants’ and our own attempts to control, situate and even stage perceptions of reality using the particularities of the digital process. At the same time, we observed how, within the digital process, material and embodied forms could influence and intrude in unexpected ways in the complex, open system to influence, propel and open up discursive themes that might otherwise have remained invisible within the research process (Salmons, 2021).

Overall, the ontological implication of the ‘complexity of relations’ for us, therefore, was that the presence of an online environment only adds to the complexity and unpredictability of perceptions of reality, social systems and associated knowledge production. Whilst the question of whether there is a mind-independent reality lies at the very heart of ontology (DeLanda, 2006), we found that the complexity of relations added by digital technology, only complicated responses to questions such as these. We found relations in a digital world could cause us to reconsider how ‘real’ the entities created by digital technology were, as technological artefacts only have meaning through social life (Suchman, 2006).). The digital portrayal, for instance, of a personal belonging could be at odds with its material counterpart such as in one case, where a near empty bottle of olive oil was mistaken for wine. It was the perception of the digital rendering that had immensely more ‘real’ effects on the interview encounter, for instance, where slurred words were initially equated with alcohol consumption instead of stemming from painful surfacing emotions. In another instance, the interviewer’s space appeared gloomier and unlit through the camera lens which imposed a slightly more dulled energy and tone in the interview, and in turn made the interviewer’s physical space feel duller too. From such instances, we ultimately conclude that an increased ‘complexity of relations’ is present, and continually fostered, by the online qualitative research environment.

Temporality

Finally, there is the fifth convention of temporality. The passage of time relates to our work because temporality inhabits and invades all worlds, whether social, virtual or physical. Temporality in our projects meant that phenomena such as identity are not seen as fixed and stable but ever-changing and becoming. In keeping with new-materialism and assemblage analysis in particular (Feely, 2020), we avoid ascribing beings with fixed identities. Instead, we consider the entities in our research process in terms of their context-dependent capacities to affect and be affected (DeLanda, 2006; Fox & Alldred, 2016). Since any entities’ capacity will change as it enters in and out of relations with other entities (DeLanda, 2006), we became interested in and sensitised to the ways in which the digital research process could change capacities. Indeed, we are interested in the ways in which the assemblage of multiple physical, technological, emotional and discursive forces come together in the digital research process. This includes how they interact together as a whole, with ontological and epistemic implications.

In the study regarding professional competency around the established risk of maltreatment for children with disabilities (Flynn, 2020), the virtual platform could not be disentangled from the performativity of the interviewees in their given interview time. Nor could the presentation of the participant in their interview be deemed fully indicative of their presentation at any time. Rather, it was the interviewee’s context-dependent capacity to affect and be affected that was visible, such as a participant who used their audio dial to increase the volume of their speech, affording a new sense of potency to their message. In those moments, the participant continued to be a non-static, unfixed entity of becoming and enacting, subject to the passing of time in the interview, in the very particular space of a Microsoft Teams digital platform.

In closing our fifth and final convention, we therefore draw conclusions about the role of time. Most specifically, it has become ontologically apparent that time lies at the very crux of the context-dependency of qualitative findings. As time changes, so too must everything else, from materiality to culture to discourse. Through critical group theorising, we came to know acts of agency as having butterfly effects that were powerfully temporal (Coole & Frost, 2010). The impacts could spread causally across the time and space of the online/material qualitative interview environment. Within this, the behaviour of time was technologically mediated, such as how digital platforms might slow down, skip or speed up interview moments at the behest of Wi-Fi coverage, among other influences. We conclude that time must be central in our ontological considerations as a cross-cutting, instrumental and causal factor within qualitative internet-based research. The overall ontological implication is that the context-dependency of qualitative findings remains deeply and inevitably temporal.

Concluding discussion

Thus far, we have set out key considerations from the five conventions of our new-materialist bricolage. It is arguably now conclusive that the process of conducting qualitative research online, is one ontologically and epistemologically different to the face-to-face encounter (Salmons, 2021), thereby leading us to orient ourselves toward a bespoke new-materialist rationality. What remains to be accomplished before finalising this exposition, however, is reflection on the overall meaning of ideas and observations we have shared, for qualitative internet-based research. This prompts a line of questioning around how new-materialist ontology might reconceptualise what internet-based research is, could be and arguably should be, in a rapidly evolving world.

Appreciating that ethics and bioethics are a key focus of new-materialism (Coole & Frost, 2010; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012), we ultimately conclude that internet-based research entails unique ethical issues and responsibilities (Salmons, 2021). These are simultaneous and potentially competing across two distinct fora concurrently occupied by participants. Within this, we assert that particular attention must be given to material reality. Our participants were immersed simultaneously in the material world (for instance, sitting at a kitchen table) and in the socio-technical immaterial space of the interview (for instance, Microsoft Teams platform). We accordingly learned that our bioethical duty of care extended to both, and simultaneously, their corporeal and virtual presence. Participants that were embodied in intimate spaces like a bedroom, or socially treacherous milieu like a public bus, could put forth a discarnate persona, that is substantially and digitally unfaithful to those material contexts.

Yet the social, ethical and relational impacts of their material worlds cannot be partitioned from their online interview performativity (Salmons, 2021). The new-material irony is, for us, that every time we try to connect with and get closer to those material realities, we immediately are distanced again from the material and carnal world and re-immersed in the immaterial realm of thought and reflection (Coole & Frost, 2010). The overall ontological implication for qualitative online research, therefore, from a new-materialist stance, is that good ethical awareness requires a concerted effort to gain closeness to the material contexts that participants occupy. This acts as a counterbalance to the inevitable pull of immaterial spaces, within human ontological life.

Conclusion

The purpose of this paper was to present a bespoke new-materialist bricolage and to apply this ontological innovation as an intervention for existing ontological debates. As a starting point, an over-view of new-materialism was presented drawing on the work of Coole and Frost (2010). Following this, the mandate of the Pivot Project research consortium as an interpretative CofP was introduced. It was imperative to explain the meaning of bricolage and present our bespoke intervention as new-materialist bricoleurs, which entailed five conventions: (1) space and place, (2) permeable boundaries, (3) material-semiotic considerations (4) complexity of relations, and (5) temporality. It would now seem that new-materialist ontology can radically reconceptualise internet-based research in ways that account for ethical, socio-political (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008), methodological and practical dimensions (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). We contend that internet-based research ought not to be designed and understood superficially. Rather, the myriad methodological, epistemological and ontological issues within virtual research spaces (Salmons, 2021), warrant a rich and fulsome approach to conceptualising research. Further conclusive is how internet-based research unfolds in a rapidly evolving world. With so much rapid technological advancement underway, the evolution of internet-based research must keep apace of changes, rather than become outpaced, irrelevant or at worst, miscomprehended.

In looking to the future, we suggest that there is a continued need to reflect upon the location of internet-mediated research and to reflexively consider how the researcher’s positionality does and does not contribute to epistemic and ontological realities in the research. One way to undertake this work, are CofPs, as analytic endeavours arising from social and relational exchanges (Wenger, 1998).

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Notes on contributors

Susan Flynn

Susan Flynn is Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin. Her work has, and continues to, focus upon child and family services. Within this, the particular focus is on disability, child protection, and welfare, and social work and social care.

Louise Caffrey

Louise Caffrey is Asst Professor at the School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin. Much of Dr Caffrey’s research takes a critical lens on organisations.

Kate Antosik-Parsons

Kate Antosik-Parsons is Post Doctoral Researcher at the School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin, and she is an art historian and a visual artist whose research and artwork is concerned with gender, sexuality, embodiment, and memory.

Sinead Whiting

Sinead Whiting is Asst Professor and Practice Education Coordinator in the School of Social Work and Social Policy in Trinity College Dublin. Her PhD research investigates the lived experience of re-negotiating permanence for young adults who grew up in permanent, long-term foster care in Ireland.

Julie Byrne

Julie Byrne is Asst Professor at the School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin. Her research interests are online learning and education, digital technologies in human services, maintaining competence in the professional career and leadership and management of human service organisations.

Catherine Conlon

Catherine Conlon is Asst Professor in the School of Social Work and Social Policy in Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on the social politics of reproduction and sexuality which has generated high impact publications including lead authored articles in Gender & Society and Qualitative Research.