Launching a project about the learning lives of young university students (PID2019-108696RB-I00) from a post-qualitative perspective (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2019), encouraged us to pay more attention to the practices of power and agencies that are usually missed on research relationships. Specifically, about those voices of silence, sometimes inaudible, sometimes ignored, sometimes misunderstood, but always present (Mazzei, 2003). Types of voices that usually contain privileges; voices that hide or launder the positionings we take in our work. That which is tacit, what cannot or will not be said, or even the actions that lie behind the silence, constantly hide an exercise of resistance, even of power, or minor slips, or simply non-responsiveness (Stuedahl, 2010). Lafuente (2020) says that silence exists when there is a signal that we cannot, will not or have no desire to detect. However, all those types of silences demand that we stop to think about the information they give us and also about the affects they produce.
Silences are commonly present in the conversations that qualitative researchers take part in. Mazzei (2003) has thought about the different aspects that silences can adopt, such as polite silences, privileged silences, veiled silences, intentional silences, or even, unintelligible silences. Other authors, such as Le Breton (2016), explore the multiple dimensions of silence in relation to conversation, its politics, its disciplines or even the ways it expresses itself. Scott (2018), on the other hand, focuses on what cannot be identified, non-identity or what has fallen into silence through a sociology of absences.
Different research perspectives framed within the new materialisms, take into consideration the agency of silence, often in order to move away from the discursive determinism which tends to naturalize power relationships (Frost, 2011). The difficulty involved in putting words to what previously did not exist in language, to the voiceless, the silent, the unspeakable, the prelinguistic or that which simply cannot be described, is something about which the author Hirschauer (2007) made us aware. This kind of movements, which stem from different works (Morison & Macleod, 2014; Murray & Durrheim, 2019), pursue a break with the humanist stance of qualitative research that continues to not pay attention to the gaps, jumps or absences that become entangled in the realities being researched. As the author Mazzei (2003) suggests “one of the important requirements to listen to silence is to be attentive to the possible inhabitants of silence” (p. 367). It is from this perspective that "we are obliged to recognize that data has its ways of becoming intelligible for us” (MacLure, 2013, p. 660). Therefore, it is necessary to adopt an approach that allows us to reinterpret those absences or heterogeneous forms that the voice acquires through its contradictions, performativities and embodied and ideological forms.
It is a need that we have placed at the forefront of our agenda as researchers, even placing ourselves in a position of vulnerability, often in order to face situations of uncertainty in which we begin to question whether what we took for granted and true on other occasions needs to be reviewed at this time. However, we echo other works (Rogowska-Stangret & Cielemęcka, 2020) that far from considering it as a weakness, assume vulnerability as a device that allows challenging power relations and fragments of reality that normally go unnoticed. Vulnerability becomes strength as long as it allows us to collectively think about all those structures and forms of power that we generally ignore (Aberasturi-Apraiz et al., 2020). Even though it can be a source of discomfort, it also allows adopting positions of greater ethical depth in our studies.
