The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift from face-to-face to online qualitative research, reshaping social interaction and meaning-making. Digital tools are often seen as neutral, yet from a new materialist perspective, they actively participate in producing knowledge and power dynamics.

This presentation proposes a materiality-sensitive methodology grounded in Karen Barad's agential realism and Alfred Lorenzer's depth-hermeneutic method. Drawing on Barad’s concept of intra-action, the online interview setting is an entangled phenomenon where humans and non-humans—participants, technologies, spatial-temporal conditions, etc.—co-constitute meanings, boundaries, and identities. Thereby, Barad's notion of ethical response-ability guides attention to what comes to matter or is excluded, emphasizing justice as entangled with material-discursive practices. Lorenzer's method complements this by uncovering latent, affective layers beyond language, focusing on embodied, material interactions and memory-traces that shape power relations.

As a work in progress from the "Competence Management of Older Workers in Digitized Learning Environments" project, affiliated with the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), this contribution reflects on the political implications of qualitative research. It challenges ageist stereotypes about old(er) workers in the context of digital workplace learning by viewing them as emergent, negotiated effects of intra-actions, and reclaims theory as a form of political engagement—emphasizing qualitative research as a site of resistance and transformation in "dark times".

The presentation invites feedback on advancing materiality-sensitive methodologies to critically explore the role of entangled digitality in co-producing knowledge, power relations, and potentially exclusionary (ageist) stereotypes within digitally mediated (work and research) contexts.