At the ‘Flows, Doings, Edges III’ held in Oxford earlier this year, the last session of the day took the form of a flea market. In this market format, we shared stories/pictures/ideas etc which had come up in the course of our research, but which would not make it into our PhD’s. Showing these ‘overflows’ to others helped us to think about what would be included and excluded from our PhD’s, and why.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I found that the discussion which resulted around my overflow to be incredibly helpful – I am still thinking about it – and so I thought I would (re)share my overflow here. Perhaps others would like to do the same?
*************
Nanomedicine pinboards as an experimental participation technology…
Across 2008-2009 I speant a fair amount of time hanging out at interdisciplinary conferences where scientists (and a few social scientists) gathered to discuss their research in the field of nanomedicine (i.e. medical research which works with nano-sized materials). At each of these conferences I was asked to conduct a participatory exercise which involved the creation of a ‘nanomedicine pinboard’[1]
Conference participants were posed the question: ‘What would a collective map of nanomedicine look like?’ Then they were invited to come and visit the nanomedicine pinboard, and to place on it what was important in Nanomedicine for them. They could put up whatever they liked, arrange their contributions as they saw fit, and shift or alter other contributions which were already on the board. The idea was that over the course of a week a collective map of nanomedicine would emerge, grow and change.
What I ended up with was the many conversations which I had with conference participants whilst standing at the pinboard, and a result which looked like this:
Nanomedicine Pinboard (ESF Conference on Nanomedicine, San Feliu 2009)
It looks pretty messy… and many would say that as a research outcome this is an indesciperable result. I would not like to concede that this result is ultimately unworkable, but so far it has been a bit problematic. What I have found is that despite numerous attempts to write about this event/technology/result, I haven’t been able to decide how to deal with it in a meaningful way. And so I sidelined this material for a long time, and only pulled it out again to give it an airing as an overflow.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember all the useful comments that people made on this overflow (and so if you would like to re-tell me your thoughts here as a comment, it would be much appreciated!) however, what became apparent, was that I had not settled on one particular tension through which I could work an analysis. What was the process, or set of practices which I wanted to focus on here?
- It seemed that if I concentrated on the board itself, and talked about how it worked in the conference space to invite a reflection on, or performance of nanomedicine as a collective, then I would lose the specific content of the tags which were placed on the board
- If I concentrated on the tags, and what they said, then I would lose the conference space and the contextual work of this technology within that space
By talking this through, this focussing problem seemed to become less intractible. When I had just felt the problem of writing about the pinboard as a paradox which would require a necessary betrayal, this material became painful to write about and to think through productively. However, by making explicit (the now seemingly mundane and easy to see) contradiction between technology and content, I could either make a decision can be made about which way to go, and/or it becomes possible to speak of this situation as a methodological issue which researchers such as myself are often confronted with. What is the tension we are working with? If the tension is unfamiliar, is it considered problematic? And if so, do we craft a way to work with the problem, or do we discard the troublesome material (as I had done till this point) and leave and its interesting questions aside, out of our papers and theses?
Michaela
[1] A technology invented by John Law
