Po-ethic Thresholding: A Methodological Practice for Attending to Movement and Affect Carried by Language

This paper introduces po-ethic thresholding , a process-relational methodological approach for attending to transitional dimensions of experience carried by language. The practice was developed in response to encountering subtle yet affectively resonant aspects of preservice teachers’ speech and writing about their experiences with wonder. While qualitative inquiry methods such as thematic analysis involve selecting representative participant quotations to illustrate themes, such approaches may not fully attend to transitive dimensions of experience, including movement, affective charge, and incipient potential. Rather than selecting one or two excerpts to represent themes, po-ethic thresholding entails gathering and arranging multiple resonant linguistic fragments into assemblages intended to function as affective thresholds for readers. These compositions aim to amplify the movement and expressive force of participants’ utterances while remaining responsive to the possibilities they carry. This approach offers researchers a way of engaging more fully with affective, dynamic, ephemeral, and otherwise challenging-to-categorize aspects of experience.