Using the Listening Guide to analyse stories of female entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia : a diffractive methodology

Mauthner, Natasha and Alkhaled, Sophie (2021) Using the Listening Guide to analyse stories of female entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia : a diffractive methodology. In: Handbook of Research Methods on Gender and Management :. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 295-311. ISBN 9781788977920

Abstract

This chapter explores emerging feminist posthumanist philosophies of science and their implications for methodological practice in the field of gender and management. Feminist posthumanist philosophies challenge humanist representationalist forms of inquiry, and their assumption that knowledge is produced by an intentional human subject and represents pre-existing entities. They propose instead a posthumanist per- formative understanding of knowledge practices in which the latter are seen as con- stitutive of their objects of study (Barad 2007). Our own purpose in this chapter is to investigate how a feminist posthumanist philosophy of science might articulate itself through the ‘diffractive’ methodology. Our chapter is organised as follows. First, we discuss feminist posthumanist philosophies of science and the ‘diffractive’ methodology that Barad, building on Haraway, proposes for their enactment. Second, we explore how this diffractive methodology reconfigures our philosophical understanding of research methods in the social sciences, and discuss Mauthner’s (2016) concept and practice of ‘diffrac- tive genealogies’ as a means of enacting posthumanist research. Third, we outline the Listening Guide method and how Alkhaled used it to analyse stories of 13 female entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia. Fourth, we present a diffractive genealogy of the Listening Guide. Fifth, we provide guiding questions for undertaking diffractive genealogies of research methods.