Dwelling With Wildflowers: Qualitative Inquiry as Life-Living and Life-Giving

Abstract

In this short piece, I reconsider qualitative inquiry based on my chance encounter with a buttonhole flower. This encounter offered me an opportunity to explore not only my relationship with vegetal life, but also how dwelling with wildflowers allows one to reconceptualize qualitative inquiry as a practice of life-living and live-giving that emerges from a logic of conviviality. Practicing qualitative inquiry as life-living and life-giving serves as a means to unmoor our practices of inquiry from the abstraction of re-presentation and the predicative logic on which this is based, and to offer instead a conceptualization of inquiry as a process of dwelling with/in the world, and in this togetherness, experience (the potential of) life.