Orientating to assembling: qualitative inquiry for more-than-human worlds

A qualitative inquiry that can be active in relation to nonhuman and emergent forms of life requires methods in addition to those which articulate individual voices and experiences. This presentation describes one experiment with destabilising the sovereign human subject – a characteristic feature of qualitative methods – during each stage of an empirical research project exploring how people experience taking antidepressants. The key strategy I used was to experiment with imbuing Deleuze’s concept of the assembling of collective bodies into the research processes across the span of the project. From the experiment, seven orientations towards qualitative inquiry emerged. I will discuss the political and ethical implications of ‘orientating to assembling’ in qualitative research processes. ‘Orientating to assembling’ throughout the concrete practices composing qualitative research projects is suggested as a contribution to a qualitative inquiry adequate to engaging with more-than-human worlds.