Presented at the <a href="https://icqi.org/">ICQI (International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry)</a>, May 2018 at University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Drawing on autobiographical narratives from my research process, I examine the necessity of messiness in becoming-researcher. Specifically, I argue that struggling and stumbling through conventional humanist qualitative inquiry allows new scholars to think their way through tensions, through various theoretical ideas and concepts. I believe we, as scholars, cannot know first; it is through this process of messy sense-making that the theoretical concepts collectively known as the “posts” (e.g., deconstruction, post-structuralism, post-qualitative, etc.) take shape. I explore how my own messy experience with conventional humanist qualitative inquiry allowed me to experience “post” philosophies and altered my way of being in the world.
