Transmethodologies: A theoretical introduction and its application to the field of family transnationality

Abstract

This article introduces the concept and practice of transmethodologies (TMs) as a research frame that challenges the ways in which methodologies act as borders that create epistemological and ontological insides and outsides. TMs allow shifting the frame of inquiry from methodological borders, which impose disciplinary truths and hinder the permeability of knowledge across paradigms, to ontoepistemological boundaries in which knowledge making is performative and agentic. Based mostly on Deleuze, Barad and border and decolonial theories, this article describes the main theoretical prompts that form the bases of a transmethodological sensibility in qualitative inquiry: methodological performativity and agency, plan/e of immanence, differences and representations, nepantlas, ontoepistemological becomings, decolonial border thinking, rhizomes and (de)territorialization. To show the potential benefits that may derive from transcending dominant methodological borders of qualitative research, these concepts are applied to the case of family transnationality. For transnational families and those working with them, TMs open up new possibilities for knowledge and becoming by challenging set ontological and epistemological borders, moving the inquiry from representation to the critical analysis of the process in which practices, actors, and phenomena come into being as an ontoepistemological assemblage.