Disequilibrium, Disorder, Discord at a Video Game Design Camp: Welling the Chaos in Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Whereas the colloquial notion of chaos as disorder, chance, and anarchy is laden with negative connotations in educational contexts—that is, chaos inhibits rather than promotes—the author attempts to rehabilitate chaos by drawing on a process philosophical view that emphasizes chaos’s generative potential. To develop this line of inquiry, the author offers a genealogical account of chaos across the work of Erin Manning before discussing its implications for qualitative inquiry in education. The text then picks up speed through an anarchival experiment with the Giga-Games Camp (pseudonym), a video game design camp for adolescents. Through this work, the author suggests that worlds cohere and are expressed through chaos, not in spite of it, and that qualitative researchers might therefore seek the virtue in chaos, especially in such chaotic times as our own.