Qualitative Inquiry, Ahead of Print.
This article is a tangle of threads made possible by theoretical and practical snags in my work with qualitative inquiry technology. One snag pulls at the term “technology” and its etymology to think about technology as a creative system used in the production of knowledge. That snag leads to a study of early anthropological work and technology to better understand the history that feeds into qualitative inquiry. And another snag considers who and what is involved in the making of technological tools used in research. These unraveling snags entangle together to consider technology as an open-ended system consisting of a variety of tools used to create political, cultural, and social realities. Such thinking offers a space to contemplate how technological advances have shaped qualitative inquiry’s past, present, and future. The forceful snags studied in this article begin to ask the question, “Can we think of qualitative inquiry without technology?”