Thinking about “thinking like a brick”

Purpose The article is submitted at the invitation of the organisers of the Australian Association for Research in Education's Qualitative Research Methodologies Special Interest Group's series of online workshops on ‘Decentring the Human in Qualitative Research', to which I presented reflections on the origins and arguments of my 2016 essay in March 2024, for a Special Issue reflecting on how online workshops can develop collective and individual insights. Design/methodology/approach This article is a reflective self-analysis setting out a contextual account of how I came to write the essay ‘Thinking Like A Brick: Posthumanism and Building Materials’, which was published in 2016 in Carol A. Taylor and Christina Hughes' edited collection, Posthuman Research Practices in Education (Bennett 2016). Findings I situate my 2016 essay's positionality within the context of my own intellectual journey, as enabled by a confluence of a variety of strands of “new materialism” scholarship emerging to prominence in the early 2010s across a variety of social science disciplines. I identify in particular the impact of this upon my socio-legal research projects and my move from a pure social constructionist stance to a more holistic perspective, which sought to fully acknowledge the importance of thingly relations within human projects rather than to seek to embrace a fully posthuman positionality. Research limitations/implications Whilst firmly located within a humanistic mode, in which the evolution of lines of thought is accorded a primacy for interpreting a (human) chosen scenario, this article shows how (and why) a thingly attentiveness can be fostered and deployed within research which is primarily concerned with understanding the logics and practices of human projects. Practical implications My research projects concerned the intersection of a variety of situated knowledges as they strove to make sense of and apply to local situations both abstract legal codes and the affordances and resistances of “awkward objects” (such as trees, gravestones and quarry stone). As such, my reflections show how allowing a consideration of thingly relations can aid practical place management challenges, such as those relating to accident prevention. Social implications My reflections also show how people and their social relations cannot be sensibly erased from considerations of materiality in the social sciences. Originality/value The originality lies in my candid self-analysis of the circumstances of the generation of my 2016 essay, taking care to show the contingencies of how my arguments and approach developed iteratively. As such, it exemplifies John Law's, 2004 call for social researchers to show (rather than to hide) the “mess” of their research. Originality also lies in how the article shows the interaction between my published research across a variety of disciplines (law, geography, education) and how my intellectual journey in one domain came to subtly influence my approach in others.