Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Deconstruction... & Construction

Now, what just happened then? 

Can I map the connects which guided the contours of a blog post  (A Doll's house) I just wrote?

Process
Without too much data-mining effort, I shall attempt to trace the steps backwards.

I was just looking at data from our autoethnography spreadsheet.

I headed tab-left (tab-left of this blog) to a link for an article by Ellis et al that Maha had given in her blog post which I just opened tab-left. It's contents immediately connected with me.

Process
The methodology of autoethnography as described by these authors gives me answers to what I was trying to drum out with my frustration with  'science-bound'.

I see no reason in participating in research which simply calques discourses to reinforce an unsustainable (education) system.

I have been trying to draw a picture of what I mean over a number of years.

Are we talking about conservation or preservation?
(not sure those are the pertinent terms - never mind I shall check later). Are we as teachers enabling learners to express what is inside them outwards or are we trying to keep a check on them to mould them to a common core?

In the case of language learning, are we teaching forms of a dead language, or fostering desire to communicate within foreign language communities as actors moving from the periphery towards a centre (their centre)?

I am digressing a little.

I had looked earlier at Keith Hamon's coding in our autoethnography file.

I had already been aware of him being interested in prepositions.

At first I took no notice. I didn't really take it in.

It is often like that, it was the same process with Kevin Hodgson's poetry remix activity 'Steal my Poem'.
It was the same process with Terry Elliot's Zeega's which I loved.
It takes time for whatever attractors to connect, to connect to create, to question, to play.

I tweeted a quotation I remembered, from a moment years ago, when this sense stuff started flooding out.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” ― Marcel Proust

(I often thought before it was/had to be nonsense particulary as I was surprised at its speed and its unfortunate habit of forcing itself out in the middle of the night uncalled for. Bloody nuisance I agree!)

Damn I lost internet connection.

I tweeted to Keith and we tweeted back and forwards
very interested in your preposition study- that would fit in with work on time/space worked on before and then forgot about
  1. help me tie the prep study into desire. I suspect it works. I'll have a post soon.
  2. that connects intimacy spaces, death, all sorts. That's exciting.
  3. "Ask not what's inside your head, but what your head's inside of"

I had already noted a draft post yesterday entitled 'Map in space' which may or not come to something. I had already found the image of Noman's land which would be the trigger.

I have been thinking about landscape, spaces, time, perspective.

I had found the following image on a Pinterest board of Vannessa Vaile with a quotation from one of two books I salvaged from my uncle's house following his death.
I should add that often images act as trigger, or scenes, they become alive for an instant. 

Something happened, happens and I can not stop it. The image of the doll's house came back to me. It is an image of confinement, of conservation, of anxiety. It is an image which came to me when engaged in psychoanalysis. It is a key image for me. It is a key image for how I felt at school, at home, at work, and about certain academics. I am their object, a potential toy in their games.

As the picture came back, it connected to quotations of Ibsen (A Doll's house). I like quotations, they fast forward my reflection. I have been collecting them since the time IT all started flooding out. I had been thinking of how to include theatre in my writing - I love theatre. Ibsen was a good start. I have never seen an Ibsen play. I shall now.

From Ibsen I connected very quickly to an image which has stayed with me from what I now remember to be one of my favourite films ever: Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. Here is a taster (note I am coming back to add this after I had first published this post.)


That will do here. 
Thank you to you for reminding me of this film.

I am not a toy. I am a very busy man.

I toy with images, with spaces, with words, with sounds, and they come out here and elsewhere.

I keep a bank of images on pinterest, they help guide me in Rhizo14 - RhizoKaleidoscope is the biggest - it is here. The images help me connect, help me create.

This rhizomatic learning course is working for me, because I am finding sparking nodes, who stimulate me, the space is only defined by the map which is constantly drawing itself.

Outcomes
I have little to do with this post.

It wants to be written.

I guess IT is

DESIRE.

I am nothing, without connections...
I am nothing worth much if I follow their instruction manuals.
It came out this way.

Methodological Footnote
The "crisis of confidence" inspired by postmodernism in the 1980s introduced new and abundant opportunities to reform social science and reconceive the objectives and forms of social science inquiry. Scholars became increasingly troubled by social science's ontological, epistemological, and axiological limitations (ELLIS & BOCHNER, 2000). In particular, scholars began illustrating how the "facts" and "truths" scientists "found" were inextricably tied to the vocabularies and paradigms the scientists used to represent them (KUHN, 1996; RORTY, 1982); they recognized the impossibility of and lack of desire for master, universal narratives (DE CERTEAU, 1984; LYOTARD, 1984); they understood new relationships between authors, audiences, and texts (BARTHES, 1977; DERRIDA, 1978; RADWAY, 1984); and they realized that stories were complex, constitutive, meaningful phenomena that taught morals and ethics, introduced unique ways of thinking and feeling, and helped people make sense of themselves and others (ADAMS, 2008; BOCHNER, 2001, 2002; Fisher, 1984). Furthermore, there was an increasing need to resist colonialist, sterile research impulses of authoritatively entering a culture, exploiting cultural members, and then recklessly leaving to write about the culture for monetary and/or professional gain, while disregarding relational ties to cultural members (CONQUERGOOD, 1991; ELLIS, 2007; RIEDMANN, 1993). [2]
Gradually, scholars across a wide spectrum of disciplines began to consider what social sciences would become if they were closer to literature than to physics, if they proffered stories rather than theories, and if they were self-consciously value-centered rather than pretending to be value free (BOCHNER, 1994). Many of these scholars turned to autoethnography because they were seeking a positive response to critiques of canonical ideas about what research is and how research should be done. In particular, they wanted to concentrate on ways of producing meaningful, accessible, and evocative research grounded in personal experience, research that would sensitize readers to issues of identity politics, to experiences shrouded in silence, and to forms of representation that deepen our capacity to empathize with people who are different from us (ELLIS & BOCHNER, 2000). Autoethnographers recognize the innumerable ways personal experience influences the research process. For instance, a researcher decides who, what, when, where, and how to research, decisions necessarily tied to institutional requirements (e.g., Institutional Review Boards), resources (e.g., funding), and personal circumstance (e.g., a researcher studying cancer because of personal experience with cancer). A researcher may also change names and places for protection (FINE, 1993), compress years of research into a single text, and construct a study in a pre-determined way (e.g., using an introduction, literature review, methods section, findings, and conclusion; TULLIS OWEN, McRAE, ADAMS & VITALE, 2009). Even though some researchers still assume that research can be done from a neutral, impersonal, and objective stance (ATKINSON, 1997; BUZARD, 2003; DELAMONT, 2009), most now recognize that such an assumption is not tenable (BOCHNER, 2002; DENZIN & LINCOLN, 2000; RORTY, 1982). Consequently, autoethnography is one of the approaches that acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher's influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don't exist. [3]







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