Failing ethnographies as post-qualitative possibilities: reflections from critical posthumanities and critical disability studies

Recent moves from qualitative to post-qualitative inquiry can be traced back to various developments and methodological quandaries. Posthuman philosophy and methodology is one origin story of the move to post-qualitative inquiry. This broad approach contests the humanist impulse at the heart of qualitative inquiry and demands imaginative forms of post-qualitative inquiry, theory and research that engage with the more-than-human realities and nuances of everyday life. What might it mean to hold post-qualitative sympathies and tackle a foundational methodology of qualitative inquiry (ethnography) from a quintessentially posthuman position (disability)? With reference to an ongoing ESRC funded project – Humanising Healthcare – we provide two writings about the possibilities and challenges of failing ethnography. Through reference to critical posthumanities and critical disability studies theory, we attend to broken, patchwork, kintsugi and crip ethnographies that, we argue, allow us to sit in the liminal space between qualitative/post-qualitative research and human/posthuman theory.