Post-qualitative inquiry and the new materialist turn: implications for sport, health and physical culture research

TLDR

Post‑qualitative inquiry departs from humanist qualitative traditions by foregrounding material‑discursive entanglements of human and non‑human bodies, affects, objects, and practices, thereby shifting focus to relational questions about what bodies can do and how matter acts. The article investigates how post‑qualitative inquiry, new materialism, and post‑humanist theories challenge and reshape research in sport, health, and physical culture. The author argues that engaging with post‑qualitative inquiry reorients onto‑epistemological assumptions and theory‑method approaches in sport, health, and physical culture scholarship.

Abstract

In this article, I examine the 'turn to' post-qualitative inquiry (PQI), new materialism and post-humanist theories to consider the challenges of, and implications for, doing research in sport, health and physical culture. The term 'post-qualitative inquiry' indicates a decisive departure from the ethico-onto-epistemological assumptions that have informed the humanist interpretive tradition of qualitative research. Moving beyond a theory/method divide, PQI draws its methodological inspiration from critical post-humanist debates concerned with how 'matter' is thought and constituted through entanglements of human and non-human bodies, affects, objects and practices. Such a shift reorients thinking around relational questions about the material-discursive forces co-implicated in what bodies can 'do' and how matter 'acts', rather than a concern with what 'is' a body or the agentic meaning of experience. I discuss how these new styles of thought reorient our onto-epistemological assumptions and theory–method approaches through engagement with PQI within (and beyond) sport, health and physical culture scholarship.