I know about apostrophe abuse and try not to perpetuate this violence.
However, it is comma neglect that disturbs me more.
Apparently, they are not as well loved as they once were. They are, apparently, fading from fashion.
Let's be clear on this; abuse by neglect is still abuse.
The following proves my point:
I just love the writing of Patti Lather as she cites Donna Haraway, and Serres
resonates well with my current quandaries.
Messing with reality: troubling a lineal approach by tangling myself up :)
Lather cites Serres in addressing a code of practice for messages-
"Easy to spot the problem, hard to supply the ethic!" (Serres 1995, p. 101)
His answer is a kind of presence and absence and presence again (Serres, 1995, p.104)
Circumspact, convoluted and sometimes seemingly perverse. A fragmented montage method of argument
cites Neitszche " my theory grows from my practice- oh, from a practice that is not by any means harmless or unproblematic (1967,p.340)
The work of methodology to negotiate the politics of knowing and being known. Method resituated as a way into the messy doings of science via risky practices remade in every situated enquiry
Working the ruins of a confident social science;
as the very ground from which new practices of research takes shape
This books works at cancelling distance between reader, writer and written about.
Ref
Lather, P. (1997). Creating a multilayered text: Women, AIDS, and Angels. In W. G. Tierney & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Representation and the text: re-framing the narrative voice (pp. 233-258). New York, NY: State Univeristy of New York Press.
I didnt have a language for it...
tongue tied
I ponder being textually tangled.
Reading around I knew i wasnt alone...
many feminist writers...
many other ways of approaching it...
and then there's a matter of deciding how much is enough vs how deep such oceans of exploration and thinking might be.
This late in my canditure i do not have the time to drown anew
As if one ever does.
(Reminds me of a powerful thesis i once read ...
power defined as the capacity to still unsettle 4 yrs later, it quoted a poem of not waving, drowning)
A prompt from Jane Davis http://bit.ly/eAfo9Z on twitters #Phdchat had me rereading
The thesis whiperer, and Inger's post names it for me, it's what happens with threshold concepts.
here's mine;
Voice.
Cant give it- disempowering.
Cant hear it and assume the story is captured...stories change.
Cant write it, it stabilizes something that is constantly in motion
So feeling like Im on a bear hunt: cant go over it, cant go under it, glossing it didnt work, ignoring it didnt either... the way is through it:
and for want of a better phrase i borrow from Patti Lather on both do-ing it and troubling it
So today was only a few words day instead of my goal of 333
And quite a few hundred or so words got binned...
but at least todays new words made sense of several thousand more that came before and after
:)
ref
Lather, P.(2001).Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography.Signs p.199-227
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175873
and commentary on
Troubling the Angels, working with women living with HIV/AIDS
The approach she talks of is similar to the discontinuous writing style i had already decided on via ANT and authors Latour, Mol, and Law.
Bother, cant make a table work here...cant share whats in my head when the actor i ask to carry it to others ... blogger ... turns it into scrambled eggs.
A translation too far.
Now I'm talking to myself
An iterative process.. engaging with the technology, the thoughts of others....the docs...
I need a space to put a pdf ... that others might link to...
could play on prezzie... but my fledgling prezzie skills would take me too long...
mmm...managed it there as not quite scrambled eggs...cant make a table that behaves...sizes and columns...
ah...deleted most...some wont go away but layering a pdf on top covers up my mess......see http://prezi.com/gebyyxino6og/cck11-meets-ant/
You can click on the prezzie below and zoom in
Please feel free to adapt further, make an attribution to me if you use it...
and invite me to come look...
Adapted from a table George Siemens has on learning theories in week 1 readings, but with an additional column expanding on connectivism to consider actor-network theory
I dont have the time to present it in a more engaging, enticing way, feel free... please feel free to become an actor in my network...or to make me one in yours :)
Im back to the phd
I set myself a goal of two chapters in two months.
333 words a day would have done it.
And all i had to do was describe the research method, and say what i have done.
Should have been a walk in the park.
But life gets in the way.
There was christmas, new year, taxi driving....
i had allowed 10 days of down time acrosss Dec/Jan. But its now the 11th of Jan and while one chapters done, the next is barely begun.
Finishing a chapter required some time for mulling it over, for reshaping a little, and for polishing...
And the new chapter, needed restarting a few times while i worked out a way of entering into it. And then there is an iterative process of too'ing and thro'ing with previous chapters to make its niche, and to ensure what is said is said but once, and well.
Actually this is a bit of a problem, feels repetitive to me.
And I am forever curious about what markers will think...I fear they may miss what's important while stuck in there own grooves of what they want to see.
They just might miss the bear moonwalking...
So I'm back to being in Barthes 'funhouse' and being my own funhouse architect, I really should have an idea where the door is.
But it has a life of its own, its taken mine :(
Nonetheless, i have found a way in to this chapter.
Im in it, Ive drawn a path for the reader to accompany me on tracing through everything i did up to this point.
I have scared myself when realizing my data is getting a bit old, being collected in 2007-2008...
And am beginning to think it might be time to turn off the internet, tweetdeck, facebook, emails...and bring on
'freedom'
Or alternately, writeordie for fixed time periods.
Its close...chs 1,2,3,4,5 are done, as is 7...
ch 6...what i actually did, now needs writing
Shouldnt be a difficult chapter
except
here's where i get to feel judged
did i do sensible stuff...yes it needed studying
did i do it sensibly?
mmmm....maybe i picked something bigger than i should have
Seth Godin's advice was overwhelm the small space.
Why oh why did i study change????
'Tis a bit late to decide studying what's in motion, 'the blur', is unwise now.
mmm but big things need questioning too...keep telling myself im just doing one aspect inside of the bigger stuff...and in an ANT study, scale becomes irrelevant- big little, near far...adding awareness of the myriad actors, and the movements between them, is the point...
In studying a new thing, there isnt a literature base, so it had to pull widely (dammit)
Another q though: will i be totally excommunicated from academia if others view what i have studied unethical...
no wonder my writing is feeling blocked
ethical stuff
in ANT there are multiple realities, i just need to be in the same one as the markers....
Or at least have markers who can appreciate that right and wrong, good and bad are subjective positions; and that sometimes adapting and tinkering inside of reasonable parameters might be more impt than being sanitised, sterilised out of existence.
Maybe this chapter is networking the thesis, the ethics committees, the organisation, the supervisor etc etcc??? The laptop the endnote, the delicious, etc etc, the research participants...the reader...the marker...
Can i be that overt about it...that playful?
or do i just pick up my boring and write it....as Heather would say
nope- this chapter is going to be fair dripping with the first person "I"
Here's some Foucault at his readable best...
"I cant help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life: it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind,, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes- all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I'd like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightening of possible storms."
Foucault 1994, p. 323.
