postquant.org

01-15-25 update:

R script and simluated data for Principal Components Cartography (zip download)

08-14-24 update:

Responding to CRT and DEI Prohibitions with QuantCrit and Post Methods (pdf download | github)

08-03-24 update:

Post-Quantitative Methods for Critical Engagement with Secondary Data (pdf download | github)

Principal Components Cartography for Material Change (pdf download | github)

contact me (Christopher Irwin) at chris [at] postquant.org

Critical scholars have shown how quantitative inquiry can be dangerous for social justice work (Gillborn et al., 2018; Zuberi, 2001). Danger, however, need not imply incompatibility. Foucault asserted that “if everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983, pp. 231–232). Postquant is “something to do” with quantitative data, even when its driving questions and instruments reinscribe oppressive social structures. As the name implies, postquant draws the posts—poststructuralism and posthumanism—as frames to support transformation-oriented inquiry and action meant to overcome the dehumanizing oppressions of our contemporary moment. The methodological assumptions, aims, and practices of postquant are meant to provide a flexible and practical companion to other critical quantitative approaches (e.g., QuantCrit, criticalist quantitative, etc.) undertaken from diverse sociocultural perspectives (of race, patriarchy, coloniality, heteronormativity, etc.). Postquant inquiry begins with data as an entry point for mapping what we are currently in the process of becoming, such that we may exceed the present. Thus, the “post” in postquant refers to moving beyond the hierarchies of domination that constrain the possibilities of our present. Postquant aims to extend our capacity to refuse the violence of our present day as a “power to say no in the mode of ‘I would prefer not to’” (Braidotti, 2022, p. 239). Starting with the idea that we would “prefer not to” reinscribe systems of oppression, postquant is a means of exploring what we might choose to do instead.