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i

DIFFRACTIVE ETHNOGRAPHY

Across intellectual disciplines, the ontological turn is restructuring how we think

about our relationships with the natural world. Influenced by the seemingly
disparate realms of indigenous philosophy and quantum physics, the turn invites
us to think about intra-​actions and assemblages of human and nonhuman entities.
This raises epistemological questions about how we know about the world,
and spotlights some of the problems with how we currently do conventional
social science research. Diffractive Ethnography invites social scientists to consider
alternate methodologies that account for the complexity of human behavior
situated in larger environmental contexts.
For both novice and experienced researchers, this thought-​provoking book
opens new ways of thinking about methodology and raises questions about the
ethical and justice orientations of our work.

Jessica Smartt Gullion, PhD, is Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas

Woman’s University, where she teaches courses in research methods and medical
and environmental sociology. Her research focuses on qualitative methodology as
a tool for social justice.
ii
iii

DIFFRACTIVE
ETHNOGRAPHY
Social Sciences and the
Ontological Turn

Jessica Smartt Gullion

iv

First published 2018

by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Jessica Smartt Gullion to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by
her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Gullion, Jessica Smartt, 1972– author.
Title: Diffractive ethnography : social sciences and the ontological turn /
Jessica Smartt Gullion.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017057444 | ISBN 9781138486621 (hbk) |
ISBN 9781138486638 (pbk) | ISBN 9781351044998 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethnology–Research–Methodology. |
Social sciences–Research–Methodology. | Human ecology. | Ontology.
Classification: LCC GN345.G85 2018 | DDC 305.80072/3–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057444
ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​48662-​1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​48663-​8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​351-​04499-​8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Out of House Publishing
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v

This book is dedicated to all of the scholars trying to advance

knowledge in these neoliberal times.
vi
vi

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements x

Introduction 1
An Overview of the Text 4

PART I
Engaging the Ontological Turn 9

1 A Turn from What? 11

2 An Overview of Vibrant Materialism 18

3 Paradigm Changes 29

PART II
Methodological Contradictions in Social Science
Inquiry 33

4 Objectivity in Research 35
The McDonaldization of Society 39
Quantification 40
Falsification 42
Objectivity and Truth 44
vi

viii Contents

5 Instruments of Measurement 46
Questionnaires 47
The Ontology of Instrumentation 52

6 Beyond Cause and Effect 56

The General Linear Model 57
Probabilities 58
Spurious Relationships 61
Noise 62
Nonlinearity and Complexity 63
Quantum Mechanics and the Death Knell of Causality 64

7 Zombie Categories 68
Against Binaries 70

8 Data 73

9 The Crisis of Representation 78

Voice 78
Language 82
vi
Colonization 83

10 Reflexivity and Its Discontents 85

PART III
Diffractive Ethnography 93

11 A Brief Overview of Ethnography 95

Qualitative 4.0 98

12 Thinking with Theory 101

13 Assemblages and Entanglements 105

Deleuze and Guattari 105
Latour 108
Barad 111

14 Diffraction 115
Physics and Sociology 117
Quantum Philosophy 119
 ix

Contents ix

Acts of Diffraction 122

Nature/​Culture Theorizing 124

15 The Liveliness of Matter 127

Agency 128
Performativity 131
How Forests Think 132
Liquidity 135
Below 142
Electric 143

PART IV
Becoming 147

16 Healing the Nature/​Culture Divide 149

Natural Resources 149
Reimagining the Public 151

17 The Ethics of Entanglements 155

vi

References 161
Index 168
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newgenprepdf

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sometimes someone hands you a book that transforms your thinking. Lindsay
Robertson did that for me when she told me to read Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter.
Lindsay, you started me down this path of inquiry, for which I am so grateful.
I am blessed to be surrounded by feminist women. A portion of this manu-
script was written in Maine during a writing retreat with Patricia Leavy and
Sandra Faulkner.You are both constant springs of support and inspiration. Much
love and lobster to you both. My Deans and friends Abigail Tilton and Claire
Sahlin supported and mentored me on being an administrator while trying to
write this manuscript. Speaking of feminist women, conversations with Susan
Harper helped me to flush out some of my ideas, particularly about the violence
of eating and the lived experience of squirrels. I would also like to thank Patti
Hamilton for mentoring me in nonlinear dynamics in graduate school. Kakali
Bhattacharya challenged me to delve deeper into issues of Western appropriation
of indigenous knowledge and colonization, which made this a better book.
Mitch Allen and Left Coast Press supported and believed in this project in the
initial stages. Thank you also to Hannah Shakespeare and everyone at Routledge
who assisted with the development, production, and distribution of this book.
I am indebted to my colleagues at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry,
and to instrumental conversations at ICQI meetings. I received the Chancellor’s
Research Fellowship at Texas Woman’s University, where I first developed the ideas
for this work. I also appreciate Donna Scott-​Tilley and Office of Research and
Sponsored Programs at TWU for travel funds that allowed me to present portions of
this work with colleagues around the globe, and obtain valuable feedback.
Erin Ellis and Jessica Spears Williams read passages, kept me sane, and made me
laugh on a near daily basis. Life is better with good friends.
Always, always, thank you to Greg, Renn, and Rory.You are my love, my light.
1

INTRODUCTION

In 2012, I began an ethnography exploring the natural gas (fracking) contro-

versies in the Barnett Shale, a geological area beneath the populated Dallas-​Fort
Worth Metroplex (Gullion 2015). I focused on the environmental activists in
the narrative—​how they came to activism and how they navigated the political,
regulatory, and developmental components of natural gas extraction in their quest
for environmental justice. I took a social constructionist approach, operating from
the premise that such activism is socially constructed through discursive practice.
I turned my analytic gaze primarily onto textual artifacts—​interview and meeting
transcripts, social media chatter, news articles, posters and fliers, blogs, scientific
reports, and so on—​evidence of this discursive practice. I wrote about the iterative
processes community members engage in to create and shape a social construc-
tion, about activities in the core and periphery of that construct, about epistemic
privilege, and about the spiraling of collective knowledge-​making.
Yet during the course of the project, I became increasingly troubled by what
I perceived to be the missing voice in that discourse—​the silence of matter. For,
as absurd as it may sound to some, key players did not (could not?) speak—​
voices of the land, the gas, the minerals, the soil, the creatures—​all of the material,
other-​than-​human actants in this story. The agency of matter was missing from
my understanding of the discursive practice of this phenomenon. I increasingly
wondered how thinking with matter in this assemblage might influence both the
discursive practice and the material effects. I had approached the project with
a fairly conventional, humanist orientation. How might that change (or would
it) if I were to think with matter as actant as well as with discursive practice?
Particularly when thinking about the environmental impact and pollution effects?
I am not alone posing these types of questions. Recent theorizing in what has
been called the non-​human or ontological turn—​a philosophical orientation in
2

2 Introduction

which things have the same ontological weight that humans hold—​posits both
the decentering of the human and a reevaluation of the agencies of matter. In
this turn, there is no division between the discursive and the material—​both are
equally important for us to understand, but to understand as material discursive
assemblages, rather than as separate realms of inquiry.
In his introduction of the idea of a nonhuman turn in Western philosophy,
Grusin (2015:xi) writes that “practitioners of the nonhuman turn find problem-
atic the emphasis of constructivism on the social or cultural constructions of
the human subject because, taken to its logical extreme, it strips the world of
any ontological or agential status.” This is what I was feeling as I completed that
ethnography.
I wrote this book to help myself and others to begin to conceive how we
might do social sciences in a way that includes matter and material affects. There
are some things that this book does not do. It is not a critique of the ontological
turn. I do not compare philosophies, or delve into differences between them.
While this book is grounded in a particular emergent field, my focus is not on the
details of that body of work, but rather on the implications it holds for how we
might do social science research differently.
It is also not a how-​to manual. Such texts are rampant in humanistic social
science methodology, cookbooks of sorts that delineate steps for conducting
research. I don’t wish to imply such things are negative—​indeed, such texts are 2
useful for helping to answer certain pragmatic questions. For example, if one
wants to know the prevalence of cancer in a population, there are methods for
counting cases. If one wants to know how people feel about a particular product
or campaign, or the numbers of people who owe money in student loans, there
are straightforward, tested ways to do this. This book does not present those ways.
Such studies are not philosophically deep, but they do provide us with informa-
tion that we might need to answer a particular, matter-​of-​fact question (despite
underlying philosophical problems). I am concerned that over time, social science
research methodology has become largely fetishized and dogmatic.
Gane (2011) writes about the tendency for social scientists to declare alle-
giance to a type of methodology (typically this would be qualitative or quan-
titative) and to allow the method to dictate their science, rather than allowing
research questions to dictate their method. He argues that this tendency has led to
a “crisis of methodological invention” (p. 152) and to the reification of abstracted
empiricism. Rather than adapting to situational contexts, method has become
standardized and inflexible. Gane draws on critiques posited by Mills in his 1959
book, The Sociological Imagination, and demonstrates not only how these critiques
are still valid, but also how sociologists failed to heed Mills’s warnings and have an
even bigger problem today—​lack of innovation is leading to the declining rele-
vance of sociology.
Abstracted empiricism,“which makes an a priori methodological commitment
in advance of whatever it seeks to study, can only frame and deal with empirical
3

Introduction 3

problems in narrow and repetitive ways,” Gane (2011:154) writes. Method becomes
ritual, and thin studies are the result.
Rather, the information in this book is intended to help social scientists
imagine what our research might entail in the ontological turn. How we might
conduct philosophically thick studies. To think beyond the pedestrian and create
new knowledge. To engage complex systems and entanglements in an ethical
manner. To begin to address the crises of the Anthropocene.
I wish to provoke an engaged and impassioned social science that works
with both the discursive and the material. Data, evidence—​research itself—​are
embroiled in meaning and in epistemic privilege (Gullion 2015). They are also
material, intertwined in materialism, consideration of which is often missing from
social science research. Social scientists are by definition scientists of society, yet
social behavior is not outside of material assemblages. In this book I invite readers
to consider what a social science that deprivileges the human might look like. Is
such a thing possible? What might be gained by such a shift in thinking?
In this book, I account my own thinking as both a sociologist and meth-
odologist about some of the implications of this philosophical orientation on
social science inquiry. While I find reading theorists of the ontological turn fas-
cinating, as a methodologist, I wanted to figure out how to do social science that is
informed by this ontological shift. How I, and other ethnographers like me, could
2
think with the nonhuman turn, and explore how it might impact the sort of work
that we do, and the conclusions that we draw.
As a sociologist, I’ve been trained to set my gaze on human social interactions.
But what about the rest of the world, in which these interactions occur? Is all of
reality socially constructed (through language), or does a reality exist outside of
humans, a realty with its own ontologies and epistemologies? Are humans the
only entities with agency? Does agency require language?
While on the surface this may read like an intriguing thought problem—​a
delicious bite of mind candy—​this conversation is imperative to the greater good.
We as global citizens are witnessing the unfolding of very real, human-​created
environmental problems, problems generated because humans did not consider
material discursive intra-​actions in their science (Barad 2007). How do we begin
to think with the environment (and its innumerable inhabitants) to solve envir-
onmental problems in mutually beneficial ways?
To assist me in this project, I looked to ethnographies that engage matter—​
particularly matter in the so-​called natural environment—​as actants, as vibrant
materialities, theoretically grounded without being theoretically constrained. These
are not the only ethnographic works that engage the ontological turn, and readers
are encouraged to seek out others. Because of my own background and research
interests in health and the environment, research in these areas drew my attention,
influenced my thinking, and are used as exemplars in this project.
Human mastery over the earthly domain is fantasy, as evidenced through
natural and technological disasters. Positioning the human as superior in our
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