Guest editorial: Decentring the human in qualitative research: Exploring the field by creating online communities

In recent years, qualitative researchers in education have increasingly been drawn to posthuman, new materialist and multispecies orientations that unsettle the human as the central unit of analysis. These approaches invite us to consider how agency, ethics and responsibility are distributed across more-than-human assemblages of bodies, technologies, materials, discourses and environments. In doing so, they pose difficult and generative questions for educational research: What happens to our understandings of learning, subjectivity and justice when the human is no longer the unquestioned protagonist of our inquiries? How might decentring the human reconfigure qualitative methodologies, ethics and practices in educational contexts?This special issue titled “Decentring the human in qualitative research: Exploring the field by creating online communities” emerges from an ongoing effort to grapple with these questions in a collective, dialogic way. Rather than offering a definitive account of what it means to decentre the human, the contributions assembled here trace multiple, situated experiments in doing so across educational research and practice.The special issue was catalysed by the “Decentring the Human in Qualitative Research Methodologies” online seminar series hosted by the Qualitative Research Methodologies Special Interest Group of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE). Convened by Associate Professor Sheena Elwick (Charles Sturt University, Albury/Wodonga) and Dr Keith Heggart (University of Technology Sydney), the series comprised seven one-hour seminars delivered via Zoom. Each seminar was recorded and made available via the AARE website for those who could not attend or who wanted to revisit the seminars. A link to access the seminar series and associated resources is provided at the end of this introduction.The seminar series was inspired by Kuby and Bozalek (2023) webinar series, which sought to cultivate an international online learning community around post-philosophies and the “doing of inquiry”. We aimed to create a similarly open and reflexive space. Our intention was not to position a small group of experts as transmitters of specialised knowledge to passive recipients. Instead, we treated the seminars as a social learning project in which knowledge about decentring the human would be co-produced, contested and reworked through ongoing dialogue.To that end, the online seminar series foregrounded accessibility and participation. It was free to attend, open to scholars at all stages of their careers – including doctoral candidates and early career researchers – and deliberately structured to invite questions, uncertainty and in-process thinking. We welcomed participants wherever they were in their journey towards understanding decentring the human, and emphasised the ethical importance of diversity and dialogic respect in our shared explorations.A guiding prompt shaped the seminar series and underpins this special issue: What are the challenges and opportunities of decentring the human in qualitative research methodologies employed in educational research?Guest speakers were invited to respond to this prompt in ways that were grounded in their own projects and commitments. Across the series, several recurring lines of inquiry emerged, which also structure the concerns of this issue.First, we asked contributors to articulate what decentring the human meant to them. Rather than assuming a single, stable definition, we were interested in how this move is differently conceptualised across theoretical traditions and empirical sites. For some, decentring the human involves foregrounding non-human actors – such as technologies, animals, or material environments – as co-constitutive of educational phenomena. For others, it entails troubling humanist assumptions about autonomous subjects and instead tracing relational, affective and more-than-human entanglements.Second, we asked what decentring the human looks like in practice. How is this work done methodologically in qualitative research? Contributors discussed, for example, how methods such as ethnography, narrative inquiry and participatory and arts-based approaches might be reconfigured when researchers attend more carefully to material-discursive assemblages and more-than-human agencies.Third, we foregrounded ethical questions. If the human is no longer privileged, what are the ethical consequences for educational research – particularly research involving children and those who work with them? How might decentring the human reshape our understandings of responsibility, vulnerability and care? What new risks and obligations emerge when we trace the complex entanglements of humans, non-humans, infrastructures and institutions in educational settings?Finally, we invited reflection on the implications of decentring the human across different dimensions of educational practice and governance, including:These prompts cut across the contributions gathered in this issue, which together show that decentring the human is not a single move but an ongoing, situated practice of methodological, ethical and political reorientation.A distinctive feature of the seminar series was the inclusion of debriefing sessions held online in the week following each seminar. These one-hour sessions offered participants space to return to the seminar themes, discuss suggested readings, and share emergent questions and tensions.Methodologically, these debriefings functioned as collaborative sense-making labs. Using tools such as a Google shared writing document, participants experimented with ways of thinking and working together that mirrored the more-than-human concerns of the series – for example, attending to the affordances and constraints of digital platforms and the affective atmospheres of online gatherings. The debriefings were not recorded, allowing for exploratory, unfinished and sometimes vulnerable conversations that were especially valuable for early career researchers and higher degree students.The special issue extends this collective inquiry. While the articles necessarily fix particular configurations of ideas in written form, they should be read as traces within a wider, ongoing process of dialogue. In this sense, the special issue takes up Kuby and Bozalek (2023) invitation to see webinars, online sessions and subsequent publications as interconnected practices through which post philosophies and decentring moves are continually re-done.In this special issue you will find the following articles written by seminar presenters, participants, and others. Taken together, the articles show that decentring the human in qualitative educational research is neither straightforward nor universally agreed upon. It is a contested, experimental and often uncomfortable project. Yet it is precisely in this complexity – where methodological innovation meets ethical uncertainty – that new possibilities for thinking and doing educational research emerge. We hope that the articles that follow will not only inform readers about decentring the human, but will also provoke further experimentation, conversation and collaboration in their own research practices.We are grateful for the support of Susie Knight from AARE for her wonderful technical skills and help with finalising the weblinks and recordings that you will find on the following page: Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Decentring the human in qualitative research methodologies seminar series webpage: https://www.aare.edu.au/sigs/qualitative-research-methodologies/decentring-the-human-in-qualitative-research-methodologies-seminar-series/