On the 3rd of October 2008 around 25 postgrads from all over the UK (and beyond) came together at the Open University in Milton Keynes for a one day postgraduate workshop:
*Flows, Doings, Edges II- anatomies of a relational research process*
Invited speakers were Jamie Lorimer (Kings College), Beth Greenhough (Queen Mary), John Law (Lancaster), Steve Hinchliffe (Open) and Nick Bingham (Open).
The workshop was organised by:
Lucila Newell, Open University ( l.newell @ open.ac.uk )
Michaela Spencer, Lancaster University ( m.spencer @ lancaster.ac.uk )
Uli Beisel, Open University ( u.beisel @ open.ac.u)
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Below are some first impressions from the workshop, more videos and reflections to come soon…
During the morning we split up in groups to discuss different themes:
- Practices
- Matter/human – non-human
- Language/writing
- Multiplicity and difference
1) Practices:
In this section, we hope to extend the discussion we had at our workshop on researching practices.
During our workshop, we discussed in groups the challenges we faced when dealing with practices.
Some of these are shown in the posters we created with clusters of post-its. We reproduce some of these below.
Please join us in the discussion of these challenges, add new ones, or add tips or things that helped you deal with some of these issues!!
Post-its: Challenges facing the study of practices
HOW?
- Talking and doing as both being practices, doing different things.
- Being everywhere: which methods?
§ How to account for our own practices
§ Problems with documenting/recording
- Ethical issues
- Problems of access
- Skills (or lack of) to do this kind of work
- What research practice can capture what I want to find out?
- Sense-making: how to capture the meanings of what happens?
- How do you access historical practices? Learn to read in a different way – imagination leap
- Intervention: for instance by filming – the thing is it to focus on it, in this case, focus the camera on your filming for instance
- Knowledge practices vs other practices – how does the theory travel?
- How do we attend data? Especially regarding the non-human? Representational/phenomenological trap
- Document process of learning and the nebulous process it involves
WHAT?
- Who/what defines the practical?
- What is practice?
- Interfering with practice as researchers
- Relating practices
- Problems with describability
- Are all practices theoretical? Are all theories practical?
- Different sites? Spaces and practices relations
- What are practices good for?
- What do practices include? (intentions, words, do/say division?)
- Limits of practice: where/when does something stop being practice?
- How to account for layers of practices?
- Accessibility
- What happens when you are not there?
- Linguistic practice (in relation to question of representation)
- Practice and agency: making it real – what is moving, what is driving something? Not as independent actors
- Body/practice
- Historical/remembered practices
- Affect
- Connection with discourse (or lack of it)
- Reality
- Banality
- Politics
- Non-Human: looking at practices – it needs a style of writing? Bringing richness of description, speak with the material
After this discussion, we thought of questions we would like to ask the speakers, but that are really open questions too, about practices. Here they are:
Questions
- What are the methodological consequences of practices having (fluid) boundaries?
- stop
- Could you give us examples of how you negotiate movements between research questions and research practice?
- How do you deal with accessing: a) the past? B) multiple spaces?
- How do you attend to boring/banal practices?
2) Matter/human – non-human
In this section, we hope to extend the discussion we had at our workshop on researching matter/human-nonhuman.
During our workshop, we discussed in groups the challenges we faced when dealing with matter/human-nonhuman.
Some of these are shown in the posters we created with clusters of post-its. We reproduce some of these below.
Please join us in the discussion of these challenges, add new ones, or add tips or things that helped you deal with some of these issues!
Post-its: Challenges facing the study of matter/human-nonhuman relations:
- Relationality: as proximity; as celebrated (against essence, fixed positions). but: distance, passivity, disrupting relations overlooked
- affective discourse
- difference in repetition
- materiality as more than representational, eg. fleeting, affective momentary encounter and agency. BUT also continuity, solid constitution, practices/objects also remain, stay same
- problem – non relational: objects/materiality which refuses or does not relate – why should everything be relational? (eg. consumption studies & commodity chain, fair trade, souvenirs)
- thinking about relationships between horses, humans and equipment such as saddles and bridles – how do I write about these relationships without artificially separating out each entity?
- sensual interaction with materials/creative agency of object?
- experimenting method with matter as productive not only produced
- does thinking not only lie in the brain but also in the kinetic. so what when we are interacting with an object we ‘think’?
- do interactions with objects/matter trigger different things/thinking than interactions just through language or visuals?
- would it make a difference how we interacted with our environment if we thought of matter as active, lively and not just ‘inert’?
- how to adequately express feelings and emotions within writing practices?
- how do I adequately account for the agency of horses within my thesis – do I have the right to speak for them?
- keeping research situated not taking analysis of the non human matter away from its context.
- seeing yourself and your environment as matter…how would that e/affect on other things/actions?
- how do you write the matter into your work? (delanda, clark, barad)
- how do some materials speak about others?
- how do I begin to analyse my diverse sources of data and bring it all together?
- destructive relationships with/around nonhumans (haraway)
- social/cultural (relation with) materiality
- many differing corporeal roles of nun/human (climbing technology). difficult to write about the complexity
- how do/can things make us think differently? why should we be thinking differently?
- how to study and describe ‘socio-materiality’ while artefacts go through various stages of existence? e.g. an organisation has a problem with a particular routine: humans discuss this matter of concern; artefacts are developed,emerge gradually; difficulty of delimiting digital artefacts; difficulty to follow the circulation of some flows and some objects all the way
- how to account for human subjectivity through an object oriented approach without falling into humanist categories?
- how to generalize from specific artefacts to talking about a class of artefacts (eg. from website to technology as such?)
- how not to represent/speak for the non-human? or how to do it better? ethics
- how to write the nonhuman, how to know the nonhuman without being anthropomorphic. or is anthropomorphism not that bad? epistemology-composing
- can you and how do you know the non-human?method/epistemology
- non-human living; non-human NON living: do they imply methods? languages? ethics
- complexity / method / writing / what we leave out / mess
Questions:
- in researching the nonhuman: how do things make us think differently? What does thinking relationally achieve?
- Can you/how can you know the nonhuman? Can you/ how to (if) speak for the nonhuman?languages
- Differencing the nonhuman: living, not living. Implications for method/ethics?
- How to acount for difference and mess. What to leave out and how not to repeat yourself?
- Language, plasticene, sensuous….
3) Language/writing (no notes available at present)
4) Multiplicity and Difference (no notes available at present)
