Diffractive Debriefing: A Different Approach to Participant Debriefing

In this article, I consider diffractive approaches to participant debriefing. In other words, I consider how the feminist relational materialist philosopher Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction can be utilised as an innovative approach to participant debriefing. I start this article by explaining how feminist relational materialist philosophers have troubled the philosophical assumptions underpinning traditional approaches to participant debriefing. I then consider how feminist relational materialism has contributed to post-qualitative approaches to research which involve utilising philosophical concepts as methods. Adopting a post-qualitative approach, I go on to present Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction as a participant debriefing method that involves participants, researchers and non-humans contributing to research projects becoming different. As part of this, I consider diffractive debriefing in the context of a research project with 21 school pupils in the Southwest of England that involved young people telling stories about menstruation in their everyday lives. In doing so, I describe the diffractive debriefing workshops that were part of such a project. I then draw on such workshops to describe three general principles that I followed when developing a diffractive approach to participant debriefing. The general principles I discuss are: (1) Researchers should avoid instructing participants about what happened in a research project (2) Diffractive debriefing should not finalise what a research project can become and (3) Diffractive debriefing involves an approach to ethics that foregrounds response-ability. I finish the article by considering how diffractive debriefing could be part of research projects beyond my research project which focused on young people and their menstruation stories.