Qualitative Inquiry, Ahead of Print.
In French, décollage refers to acts of ungluing, unpeeling, or dissolving an image. As an artform, images are torn off, or left to disintegrate, revealing the arbitrariness of the materials that have built society, while also bearing witness to time, impermanence, decay, and waste. In another sense of the word, décollage means to take off, to ascend. Working across both senses, this article considers how revolutionary artforms, such as décollage, can assist qualitative researchers who use artful inquiry “to stay with the trouble of damaged worlds”, rather than eschew this responsibility. Drawing from the strategies used by French décollagists of the mid-20th century and engaging in her own explorations with décollage, the author examines the provocations an embodied double(d) movement of rescue and rupture offers inquiry practices attending to the always-already materializing in the interstices of modernity’s ruins.