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“Our Most Lethal Enemy?”

2012; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 18; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/1077800412453019

1552-7565

Christopher Andrew Brkich, Tim Barko,

Management and Organizational Studies

In the Star Trek universe, the Borg are a race of cybernetic humanoids intent on assimilating all other sentient beings into a collective consciousness through the elimination of difference. Although it would be easy to reduce the Borg Collective to a symbolic cautionary tale for qualitative researchers, we would like to trouble and extend this analysis. For this special edition of Qualitative Inquiry, we adopt Gilles Deleuze’s theories of banality and of objective–subjective commensurability to pose challenges to simplicity in methodology and product, and apply these lenses to Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and film, to our own work as qualitative researchers, and to discussions of how the act of blurring the lines between fiction and philosophy through the trope of science fiction cinema can render complex academic writing more accessible and more enjoyable.