Thursday, January 06, 2011

are we there yet?

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.

Never knew Foucault had such a motivational streak. Many thanks, again, to Kamler and Thomson for citing him.
And I note his approach is congruent with that of Latour: the genre of writing needs life breathed through it.

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