Simon at South America Bidsta has an interesting post on the relationship between the positioned individual and the ethnographic research they produce, noting drily that in “any other science, you might just call this ‘being transparent about one’s methods’”.
The post contains the challenge to reproduce the researcher’s exercise: to “write down ten things about ourselves–personal, political, demographic, academic or philosophical, that give an idea of who we are and where we come from, and that could influence how we carry out our research”. This challenge catches my attention for a number of reasons at present. The main one of these is that I am involved in a group research project at work to which I am not contributing in the way I anticipated I would be able to contribute. Tasks which I complete with ease in literary and cultural studies I find myself almost paralysed by in educational research. Furthermore, a misconceived sense of responsibility towards my research partners also seems to retard the pace of my work. (This is not to say that a sense of responsibility is in itself a bad idea, but rather that there’s something about the way in which I’m experiencing it that’s askew.)
So I’m up for completing Simon’s exercise with the slant that it’s a good time to reflect a little on how my own positioning as a researcher is affecting my contribution to this research project: I’m completing tasks quite different from those I thought I would when the project began.
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There are various names, are there not, for the act of running your name(s) through a Google search: vanity googling, auto-googling, and so on. I do this from time to time, looking in particularly for any citations of my work and also, of course, the possibility that someone has started a hate-blog about me (some strange part of my mind remains ever fourteen; one can never be too vigilant).
A little while ago I came across this article, written for a 2001 issue of a periodical then newly online. My contribution was extracted from the first chapter of my then-recently-submitted thesis, and its publication a chance to share a part of a trawling of my field that I thought would likely never see the light of day elsewhere, on account of its length.
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The week just passed was enrolment week, when campus is rapidly shaken awake from its summer torpor. Even though the week’s events don’t in theory have a direct impact on my daily responsibilities, it’s been hard not to feel by proxy the stress of my colleagues. A particular kind of brittle cheer seeps through the floors and walls and imbues us all; our attention spans are a little shorter and our laughter a little louder and triggered by not much at all.
For the first time in my working life at preparatory programmes I am not facing a semester mad with contact hours, thanks both to some fairly assertive negotiating at my last development and review meeting and to the serendipity of a small research project coming under our auspices about now. For one day a week, I am being paid to do research, even if is literature reviews in a field not directly my own. I did not think I would ever achieve such a balance of first-semester hours, especially as colleagues around me add up their own personal tally and cry out aloud at the number.
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With a lighter teaching load this intake I have the opportunity, in terms of time at least, to do some [hushed tones] primary research, that ephemeral pastime whose presence connects to my working life much in the same way that reading under the blankets with a torch in the dark, aged nine or ten, does to everyday daylight reading.
I am, perhaps unsurprisingly, revisiting some of the close readings I made of Robin Hyde’s fiction, almost twelve years ago now. Through this, I happened on the below-quoted which I share with you, since it made me so laugh: [click to continue…]
Maria is back from her annual stretch in China and I shall see her next week. She is now a three-book academic, no mean feat in her field and at her young age (well, she’s older than me, but still). As if tweaked by her presence, one suburb over, my unconscious has started conjuring for me dreams so vivid I don’t know they’re illusions. In these dreams, I am in China: Beijing, Xian, Xuzhou, following my texts.
The China research project I have tentatively initiated will be slow to bear fruit, and rightly so, but things would speed up a little if I could get myself to Beijing for two or three weeks in the northern autumn. For it to progress through its middle stages, I need more language, reading skills and on-the-ground experience than I at present have. I can save the fare in that time but will need to find funding to cover my on-the-ground costs. To trying to find this I am both looking and not looking forward.
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