Methodologies of voice: Towards posthuman voice analytics

- Methodologies of voice: Towards posthuman voice analytics.
- Posthuman voice analytics.
- This paper rethinks the concept of voice in ways that resist normative humanist assumptions and explores the possibilities of an alternative posthuman ontologics of voice for qualitative praxis.
- I sketch the contours of a feminist posthuman phenomenology of voice in which the embodied, material, relational, and transcorporeal qualities of breathy bodies are foregrounded.
- Thinking with the fi gurations of ‘ breathy embodiment ’ and ‘ dif- fractive voices.
- ‘working with voices’ are also rarely interrogated, nor is what we mean by.
- This paper highlights and reflects on the implications of ‘working with voices’ as qualitative researchers.
- In order to explore these implications, the concept of ‘ voice ’ is rethought in ways that resist normative humanist assumptions (e.g.
- I sketch the contours of a feminist posthuman 2 phenomenology (see Neimanis, 2017) of voice in which the embodied, material, relational, posthuman, socio- political and transcorporeal qualities of breathy bodies are foregrounded.
- 3 Writing against the ‘romance of voice’ (Stephens, 2004), in which voice is.
- ‘voice’ as a stable essence that is unearthed or revealed by our analytic.
- Thinking with/through the fi gurations of ‘ breathy embodiment’ and ‘diffractive voices’, I introduce posthuman voice ana- lytics as a form of qualitative praxis that aims to engage the multivocal, disruptive, excessive, and resonant rhythms of sonorous vocality.
- As such, a shift towards feminist posthumanism has resulted in renewed engagements and conceptualizations of ‘ biology ’ and analysis of various human, animal, machine and elemental entanglements (see Braidotti, 2013.
- 3 It is important to acknowledge that not all ‘ voices ’ are breathy embodiments in the same way.
- Some materializations of voice are carried via sign language or assistive technologies and are not ‘breathy’ in exactly the same way as bodies that communicate via spoken, vocal language.
- The question of voice in qualitative inquiry.
- romance of voice ’ (Stephens, 2004) embedded in many strands of qualitative research.
- However, nuanced retheorizations of voice have not necessarily been forthcoming.
- Instead, the ‘turn to language’ inaugurated by poststructuralism, in large part precipitated a wholesale rejection of voice-centred research and a focus instead on discursive formations, rhetorics and relations of power.
- Alongside this rejection of voice has been a tendency (particularly in discourse analysis) to abstract language and discourse from embodied subjects, resulting in the analysis of dis- embodied texts, discourses and themes, even when such data originates from speaking bodies (Chadwick, 2017).
- The preoccupation with discourse and depersonalized texts in poststructuralist scholarship has been described by some as a form of ‘discourse determinism’ (Hekman, 2010), resulting in a broader sense of frustration with its denial of embodied experiences, fl eshy viscerality and agentic materiality.
- At the same time, the inau- guration of ‘new materialisms’ and posthumanisms has also, in some quarters, led to the dismissal of ‘voice’ and ‘the body’ as overly humanist and individualized concepts.
- We have thus seen a shift towards thinking about ‘ assemblages ’ and ‘ materiality ’ as broader posthuman phenomena (incorporating machines, biology, discourses, animal and plant bodies etcetera) and a move away from questions of ‘ voice ’ (and ‘ the body.
- Important work has however been done by scholars such as Jackson and Mazzei (2009), who have argued for the reconceptualization (rather than dismissal) of voice in posthuman and postqualitative approaches..
- As part of a broader rethinking of voice among scholars working with postqualitative and new materialist frameworks, Mazzei (2013) de- constructs assumptions that, “voice is produced by a unique, essentialist subject ” (p.
- assumptions and “ deconstruct the epistemological limits of voice ” (p.
- Assumptions of voice as a privileged site in which authentic selves, ex- periences and lives are revealed, is rejected by attempts to think otherwise with new materialist frameworks.
- Normative assumptions about the ontology of voice is also troubled.
- We need to develop methodologies and phenomenologies of voice that depart from the recognition that voices are, “stubbornly, insistently, unabashedly bodily - it is the voice of the this one, this throat of fl esh ” (Kottman, 2005: xxii) and engage the analytic implications of the embodied materiality of voices.
- Breathy embodiments: towards a posthuman phenomenology of voice.
- Given that ‘working with voices’ is integral to qualitative research and inquiry, alternative conceptualizations and fi gurations of voice are needed that counter (western) logocentricm and its disavowals of bodies and our fluid interminglings with the material world and each other..
- We are capable of voice because of our status as bodies.
- Through the fi guration of ‘ breathy embodiments.
- A posthuman phenomenology of voice does not depart from the perspective of the individual, human subject neatly self-contained in its own skin, but thinks the lived embodiment of ‘ voicing bodies ’ as fl eshy, more-than-human, and transcorporeal.
- bounded human bodies, opening up the potential for rethinking ‘ voice ’ as a moving, transcorporeal process rather than a ‘thing’, essence or property of an individual self.
- Our voices are living movements and relational exchanges involving the entangle- ment of all these energies and elements: physiological vibrations and vi- talizations, geomaterial air currents (life-giving and/also toxic), plant, algae, industrial and bacterial breath, affective energies, ideological and semiotic relations of power and embodied, geophysical and sociomaterial histories – all intermingling into a kind of “ patina of experienced life ” (Cavarero, 2005:1).
- As such, anti-blackness can manifest as a kind of thick, oppressive, hostile, suffocating fleshy-affective ‘atmo- sphere ’ (what Christina Sharpe (2016) refers to as ‘ the weather.
- or as a visceral and embodied sense of ‘ breathlessness ’ associated with the lived experience of being black in white-dominated and racist societies (see Sharpe, 2016.
- A posthuman phenomenology of ‘breathy embodiment’ recognizes all of these fl ows, atmospheres and interminglings as part of our lived ex- periences.
- we are literally ‘ made up ’ as processes of ‘ becoming-with ’ (Haraway, 2016) all these energies, elements and relations of power.
- Our voices are vital materializations of ‘ breathy embodiments.
- Rethinking ‘ voice ’ as part of an invigorated qualitative praxis means departing from the recognition that our sonorous soundings are deeply fleshy and relational phenonema.
- Thinking voices with/through the fi guration of ‘ breathy embodiment ’ acknowledges the entanglements of our speaking and communicating bodies with other bodies (plants, fac- tories, motor vehicles, algae, forests, oceans, bacteria) as well as the vi- olent and toxic socioaffective atmospherics of oppressive power relations (Neimanis, 2019.
- So what does a posthuman phenomenology of voice, refracted through the figuration of ‘breathy embodiments’, mean for qualitative praxis? How does an alternative conceptualization of breathy and speaking bodies as transcorporeal, entangled with other bodies and the material, more-than-human world, and as resonant with ideological and semiotic-discursive currents, socioaffective atmospherics and psycho- fl eshy energies, trouble assumptions on which (humanist and logocen- tric) qualitative research is based? What does it mean that the voices that we listen to, ‘collect’, try to capture and analyze as qualitative re- searchers, are bodily fl ows of moving (more-than-human) breath, fl eshy vibrations, affective intensities and sediments, contextual, geomaterial and psychofleshy histories and ideological, material-semiotic re- verberations? Fundamentally, it means that we cannot proceed with qualitative research in ‘ the old ways ’ (see Maclure, 2013), in which voices were/are assumed to be carriers of symbolic language, discourse, narratives, themes or transparent individualist experience, and the embodied materiality of language and speaking bodies is ignored, dis- missed and rendered irrelevant.
- development of a posthuman analytics of voice.
- In the next section, I think voices with new materialist concept of ‘ diffraction.
- exploring what the figuration of ‘diffractive voices’ offers as a way of reimaging working with voices as qualitative researchers..
- Originally introduced by Donna Haraway (1992) as an ‘optical device ’ to think an alternative ontology of relational differences beyond categorization, othering and appropriation, diffraction is conceptualized as the mapping of patterns of difference or ‘interferences’ rather than the repetition of “ re fl ecting images ” (p.
- And how might diffraction, as a critical apparatus, open lines of thinking towards a posthuman qualitative analytics of voice? Reconceptualizing voice in ways that reimagine and resist humanist, masculinist and indi- vidualist conceptualizations of voice as a stable, essential and self-contained ‘thing’, requires an alternative ‘onto-logics’ (see Neimanis, 2017) of bodies, relations and worlds.
- To this end, I think with/through the idea of ‘diffractive voices’ as a way of refiguring methodologies of voice..
- Thinking voice as diffractive disrupts assumptions that voices are static things that ‘ belong ’ to self-contained, individual selves and works to advance the conceptualization of voice as a disruptive, differ- entiated process or movement.
- Significantly, the figuration of ‘diffractive voices ’ also opens room for a methodology of voice built on a posthuman and embodied phenomenology (Neimanis, 2017).
- is useful to think of these ‘ disruptions ’ as material-semiotic interferences..
- As we speak and generate utterances and make signs, our voices reverberate, echo, vibrate and resonate with intermingling bodily-affective, material, semiotic, situational, ideological and more-than-human elements, waves and energies (as part of ‘breathy embodiments.
- A posthuman analytics of voice traces or maps these diffractive patterns, disruptions and resonances.
- The goal is not to uncover ‘the truth’ or.
- In Althusser's conceptualization, interpellation refers to the process whereby subjects recognize themselves and are positioned (as particular kinds of selves) in relation to ideologies via discursive and sociomaterial acts of ‘hailing’ (Van der Tuin, 2014).
- Affective bodies, ideologies and sociomaterialities can be thought as ‘ diffractive voices ’ which challenge and counter semiotic order, univocality and homoge- neity.
- In the next section, I outline the contours of ‘ post- human voice analytics.
- a methodology of voice in which the embodied, diffractive and relational dimensions of voices are foregrounded..
- Towards posthuman voice analytics.
- In this section, I reimagine a qualitative praxis of ‘ working with voi- ces’ grounded in a posthuman phenomenology of voice (i.e.
- ‘posthuman voice analytics.
- While this approach builds on earlier methodologies of voice such as the listening guide, also known as the voice-centred rela- tional method (see Gilligan et al., 2003), and various other forms of multivocal and dialogical analysis (Davies et al., 1997.
- posthuman voice analytics.
- In particular, the use of ‘ I-poems.
- 4 an analytic device proposed as part of the listening guide methodological approach, provides a way of identifying and tracing the multiple and potentially contradictory ‘ I-voices ’ within acts of telling.
- Engaging in an auditory process of ‘embodied listening ’ (Chadwick, in press) works well as an analytic tool in conjunction with the visual methodology of reading and extracting.
- Furthermore, choosing to foreground and engage analytically with audio-recordings as a form of ‘ data.
- The third ingredient of posthuman voice analytics is an engagement with the interruptive aspects of voice/s.
- As outlined earlier, ‘diffractive voices’ are transcorporeal processes in which a raft of currents, energies, fl ows and atmospheres become vitalized/materialized.
- These are then pulled out of the transcript and placed onto separate lines so that they form a kind of ‘ poem ’ or stream of consciousness tracing or documentation of the ways in which the narrator uses and talks about the ‘ I ’ voice.
- These ‘ I poems ’ are used to identify different ‘ voices ’ within the story being told.
- A posthuman analytics of voice is interested in exploring, tracing, and attending to these inter- ruptive voices.
- As such, it is the wild and excessive aspects of voice, “the voice that escapes our easy classification and that does not make easy sense – the voice in the crack ” (Mazzei that becomes analyt- ically most interesting..
- The fourth core ingredient of a posthuman voice analytics is attention to the dialogical aspects of voices.
- As theorized by Bahktin (1981), voices are never singular phenomena but involve sets of “ dialogic relations ” (p..
- Interviews and other researcher-solicited encounters must be recognized, analyzed and represented as dialogical events in which tellings (stories, accounts and voices) emerge as co-productions in processes of ‘becoming-with’ (Haraway, 2016)..
- The concept of a ‘ research-assemblage ’ is a critical feature of new materialist research praxis and refers to the ways in which researcher/s, research instruments and technologies, recruitment stra- tegies, interview schedules and questions, sociomaterial settings, theo- retical approaches, research questions and ethics protocols, function as agentic and dialogical capacities that shape participants' responses, stories and voices in particular directions.
- The fifth aspect of posthuman voice analytics is attunement to the generative politics of listening.
- Several feminist, anti-racist and post- colonial writers have engaged the problematics of ‘ speaking for others ’ (Alcoff, 1991), exploring the colonizing and oppressive effects of.
- While tellings and voices are conceptualized within a posthuman phenomenology as rela- tional co-productions and processes of ‘becoming-with’, as researchers we have responsibilities in terms of how we make knowledge, epistemic connections and research stories as part of broader processes of epistemic.
- Posthuman voice analytics is grounded in a dialogical and relational praxis of ‘speaking with’ rather than ‘speaking for’ or ‘about’.
- At the same time, it is also clear that we cannot go about working with voices in ‘the old ways’ (Maclure, 2013) and enacting interpretive violence in/through the disembodiment, depersonalization and decontextualization of embodied voices..
- a series of dialogical exchanges between myself and a research partici- pant known as Jamila (a pseudonym), as a narrative poem, and explore the ways in posthuman voice analytics might work to engage voices as multivocal, process-oriented, interruptive and dialogical and foreground the representational politics of ‘ working with voices.
- Posthuman voice analytics: Jamila's birth story.
- Come, come to the doctor’.
- She knows (via her earlier birth ex- periences) that the relational, somatic and socioaffective atmosphere, or what Sharpe (2016) would refer to as ‘ the weather.
- Instead she speaks (and generates voice) as a dynamic response to a multiple set of ‘ emergent relations ’ (Tuana .
- lack of eye contact, deadened use of speech, silences, curt responses - all of these elements would need to be unpacked and engaged as part of a voice-centred approach..
- I have argued that the methodological implications of ‘working with voices ’ as qualitative researchers requires more explicit theoretical and ethical discussion.
- In efforts to engage these implications, I offered a rethinking of voice after posthumanism, exploring the ways that a post- human phenomenology might offer opportunities to reconceptualize voices in alternative ways, countering the humanist ‘romance with voice’.
- I argued that a posthuman phenomenology of voice thought in/through the fi guration of ‘ breathy embodiments ’ enables a conceptualization of voice as a transcorporeal, unpredictable and rela- tional process or movement.
- As a way of reimagining how we might work with these fl ows and currents as qualitative researchers, I explored the concept of ‘ diffractive voices ’ as an opening towards an alternative onto-logics of voice (Neimanis, 2013).
- Thinking diffraction as a process in which sociomaterial, ideological and psycho fl eshy in- terferences constantly subvert or interrupt the homogenity or singularity of voice, opened a way of forging a methodology of voice in which these interruptive currents or interpellations are thought as part of the entan- gled, relational and heterogeneous onto-materiality of voices..
- Building on the posthuman phenomenology of voice developed earlier in the paper, I outlined the contours of an alternative methodol- ogy of voice, what I have called.
- posthuman framework of voice (against logocentric humanism) conceptualized in the paper and offer a way of re-orienting qualitative analysts to an alternative ‘onto-logics’ of voice as diffractive, moving, heterogeneous, dialogical and situated.
- It is not a definitive, fixed ‘method’ or finalized set of ana- lytics but is offered here as a set of methodological notes that might open the lines towards a posthuman analytics of voice that is able to engage and trace the transcorporeal, more-than-human, relational, diffractive and sociopolitical logics of voice.
- More work is needed to engage the ethical and representational politics of voice and representation.
- As qualitative re- searchers, we need to constantly work to interrogate the ethical, repre- sentational, methodological and sociopolitical implications of ‘ working with voices’.
- This paper has begun the work of offering an alternative posthuman methodology of voice

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