Case histories in qualitative longitudinal research – some thoughts

Rachel Thomson

Questions of scale

Qualitative longitudinal research can play around with our ideas of scale. A study can seem to be ‘small’, following 6 cases for example, yet at the same time can be ’big’, or perhaps a better word is ‘deep’ in collecting many instances of data for that case over an extended or just intensive period of time. Discussing this point Lyne Yates (2003) makes a case for QLR having a different kind of ‘warrant’ – or relationship with validity –moving us away from ideas of cases as being ‘representative’ in an abstract way –be that they are typical or that they may provide insight into a wider population through the operations of probability sampling. By following just cases over a period of 10 years (as we have in an ongoing study) we are able to understand relationships, sequences, consequences and antecedents in a concrete way- exploring the relationship between what we say and do, and between what we want and what we get – as researchers and as participants. More recently Liz Stanley has challenged the qualitative quantitative distinction on her work using collections of letters showing that in an era of digital data qualitative material and quantity and quantification are not mutually exclusive (Stanley 2015). Rather we might think of scale in terms of a zooming in and zooming out of perspective, and the potential to combine the affordances of the microscope and macroscope. Debates about scale within QLR parallel debates about scale within ‘big data’ and the kinds of digital tools that can be used to explore patterns, to zoom in for the close-up and to zoom out for the landscape or the map.

From cases to casing

QLR can be designed in different ways in order to reveal different kinds of cases. At the most basic level we might think of the case as a unit of analysis that we follow over time. So for example in our project Making Modern Mothers, the unit of analysis was women about to have their first baby. Yet cases are not stable, especially when pregnant and in this study we expanded our case to include significant others (especially grandmothers) and children when they were born. These children are now the focus of a follow-on project that explores digital childhoods, yet the backstory of the family is a vital part of the case and family members play a key part in narrating the case of the child who is the focus and who as we watch moves from being a ‘case’ of a child into a teenager and an adult. Analytically we can also think of the case in other ways, for example thinking about all of the urban families together and considering their affinities and their difference from the rural families. We might also think of the case of social class, or cutting the data set in the opposite direction, from the diachronic to the synchronic, considering how the families responded to a key external event such as the ‘credit crunch’ that turned into the extended period of austerity through which we continue to live. Rather than thinking of cases as stable and defined simply through existence we might follow Charles Ragin (1992) to think about practices of ‘casing’ in social enquiry, a flexible analytic practice that pays due respect to the complexity of the social realm and which in linking ideas and evidence had the potential for the testing and emergence of theory.

The case history and the archive

The ‘case’ itself is an object and genre with a history linked to practices of natural history, collecting, sorting and narrating and reflections. Butterflies were collected and displayed in a case long ago in a way that has parallels with the ways that doctors and lawyers began to conceptualise case histories and case law. A special issue ‘On the case’ of the journal Critical Inquiry helps us as social scientists understand our practices in historical and cultural context as well as helping us see the kinds of spillages that echoes that may travel between medical, legal, scientific and literary uses (Berlant 2007).There is no definitive way of constructing or telling a case, yet we may find ourselves being drawn into particular tropes taking up associated forms of authority. When telling the story of an individual over time it may be hard to escape the perspective of the doctor or the social worker who is able to see and describe underlying causes or pathologies. Perhaps we need to deliberately disrupt these well-worn narrative tendencies by reading materials against the grain, changing the direction of our analysis, or moving between individual and collective or conceptual cases self-consciously in order to find new perspectives.

In earlier work I suggested that we might make use of the notion of the archive more fully in our work learning from the critical work that has been done of reading the archive (Thomson 2007, McLeod & Thomson 2009, Thomson 2011). If we think of our data sets as archives, which can be organised into all sort of cases (individuals, institutional, geographical, temporal), we can also think about the kinds of stories that can be told from the archive, putting material together in a particular way will enable a particular history. Yet this is not definitive or exclusive. That material could be told in different ways by different analysts without taking away from the ‘validity’ of the material itself. Digital information systems allow individuals to build their own archives, copying and linking data from public collections and potentially making their own archives available to others. Sociological data sets are also made available to and interrogated by secondary analysts and there is a compelling case for social scientists to build on the lessons of historical and literary scholars about archival methodologies and epistemologies as well as understanding the new methodologies of the digital humanities. Having my data used by secondary analysts encourages me to believe that the potentials of this area are just beginning to be explored by sociologists – see for example http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/archive-project-sendoff/

An event

The more I think about the case, case studies and case histories, the more I feel that they lie on the emergent boundaries of new kinds of sociology – even though the case study is associated with the very birth of the discipline and the Chicago School. On October 6^th and 7^th my Australian colleague Professor Julie McLeod and I will be teaching a 2 day advance methods course for the NCRM, based in the Mass observation Archive at the University of Sussex . The course responds to the request for more focus on methods of analysing QLR data among the participants at our 2015 course ‘Affective methods: capturing everyday temporalities with QLR’. In this course we will be exploring what it might mean to make a case from data archives, both those we generate from primary research, those we find in archives, and those we construct from a range of heterogeneous sources. The course will explore methodologies of the boundaries of history and sociology and between scientific and humanities paradigms. Please join us. http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/training/show.php?article=6361

References

Berlant, L. (2007) ‘On the case’ Critical Inquiry: special issue 33 (4)

McLeod, J. & Thomson (2009) Researching Social Change: qualitative approaches, Sage.

Ragin, C. (1992) ‘”Casing” and the process of social inquiry’ in Ragin & Becker (eds) What is a case: exploring the foundations of social inquiry, Cambridge University Press.

Stanley, L. (2015) ‘Operationalizing a QLR project on social change and whiteness in South Africa, 1770s – 1970s” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 18:3, 251-65.

Thomson, R. (2007) ‘The qualitative longitudinal case history: practical, methodological and ethical reflections’Social Policy and Society, 6(4): 571-582.

Thomson, R. (2011) Unfolding lives. Youth, gender and change. Policy Press

Thomson, R., Hadfield, L., Kehily, M.J. and Sharpe, S. (2010) ‘Family fortunes: an intergenerational perspective on recession’ 21st Century Society 5 (2): 149-157

Thomson, R Thomson, R. (2014) Generational research: Between historical and sociological imaginations,International Journal of Social Research Methods, 17 (2) 147-156

Yates, L.(2003) ‘Interpretative claims and methodological warrant in small number qualitative longitudinal research’, International Journal of Social Research Methodology 6 (3): 223-32.

Children, time and methods

Over the last year CIRCY members have been part of a methodological innovation project exploring research methods that are both qualitative (working with meaning rather than numbers) and longitudinal (exploring processes over time). Research on childhood and youth has been one of the key fields in which qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) has thrived: including studies of child development as well as studies of the transition to adulthood such as the Inventing Adulthoods study.

Funded by the ESRC via the National Centre for Research Methods our project ‘New Frontiers in QLR’ staged five 2 day seminars/ workshops in collaboration with the Universities of Southampton, Cardiff, Manchester and London – culminating on an event at Sussex called the Child in Time where we explored QLR traditions in research (for example child development research), in film and television (for example the 7 Up series and the Michael Winterbotton film Everyday) and increasingly in social media where asynchronous communications and indelible traces create new kinds of temporalities. If you are interested in the Child in Time event you can watch the presentations online here.

We have been working hard to think through the lessons of our year of collaboration and debate. We now have two working papers on the NCRM website, one the report of the series  and the other a collection of writing by early career and PhD researchers who worked with us during the series. We are also hoping to develop an advanced training module on QLR so that we can share what we have learned with the wider research community. Last but not least, a special issue of the International Journal of Social Research Methods showcasing papers presented at (or inspired by) the series will be out in 2015.

QLR approaches are an important tool in our research at CIRCY and we are developing  and experimenting with them in three of our current projects: The ERC funded Connectors study; the NCRM funded Face 2 Face project and a planned study of the everyday lives of children and young people in care. By looking at lives in and through time we are able to see the world in new and revealing ways. In the Face to Face project we have been experimenting with methods such as ‘day-in-a-life’ micro ethnographies and  ‘favourite thing’ interviews as ways of capturing the different temporalities of lives over time. Working with media professionals Susi Arnott and Crispin Hughes we have created an interactive website that brings to life the value of using qualitative methods to research children’s lives in real time – check it out:

http://www.modernmothers.org/index.html

CIRCY is always interested to hear about other projects exploring children’s lives in time, so get in touch and tell us what you are doing.

Rachel Thomson

CIRCY Co-director

The ‘Death of Facebook’: A Cautionary Tale for Academic Bloggers

The ‘Death of Facebook’: A Cautionary Tale for Academic Bloggers

Liam Berriman

Over the holidays both the national and international media picked up on Daniel Miller’s (University College London) on-going research project into the impact of social networking sites, and in particular his fieldwork with 16-18 year olds in schools in an area north of London.

The Guardian, and other global media outlets (such as Sky News, Wired Magazine etc.), focused on Miller’s claim that Facebook is “dead and buried” to older teens, and that they are turning to alternative social media such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. The news outlets also identified the main cause of this shift as being linked to the influx of older generations of relatives (parents, grandparents etc.) onto Facebook, resulting in the social networking site losing its ‘cool’ edge.

The main source cited in the news reports was an article by Miller, published on The Conversation, where he shared some ‘initial findings’ from the research (a slightly different blog post also appeared on the project’s website). In this article, Miller questioned what the future of Facebook and other social media would be in 2014 and identified some key shifts that are changing the ways that young people are engaging with social media (such as a polymedia environment, increasingly messy social media networks made up of friends and relatives, shifting notions of privacy etc.)

Following the overwhelming media attention given to his article, Miller took to Twitter and criticised the press for its skewed interpretation, stating that the idea Facebook is ‘dead’ was not his view but that of the teens he had spoken to. Instead he argued that his blog post, “was not so much about the decline of Facebook amongst schoolchildren as trying to understand what we can learn from [the perception that it is no longer cool]”. However, in the ‘Twittersphere’ Miller found himself further challenged as to whether his ethnographic findings were substantial enough to warrant the claims made in the blog post – Miller responded by reiterating argued that the article was only a discussion of ‘initial’ findings and was not a final report.

A few days later, Miller wrote a new blog post in which he discussed what it means for academic findings/blog posts to go viral. Of particular interest in this latter blog post are the justifications Miller gives for academics being able to report initial findings whilst research is still in progress. He states that the first published reports from the project are unlikely to emerge until 2016 – leaving a significant gap between the field research and the dissemination of results. Consequently, the project’s blog and other online platforms provide a more immediate means of sharing reflections and initial findings from the research.

This means of ‘instant’ dissemination places such initial thoughts and findings into an unpredictable public domain, in which they may be ignored, shared, scrutinised, sent viral, or even potentially plagiarised. Miller’s case is one of a number of growing cautionary tales for academics who wish to share research and initial findings that are still in process. It raises important questions with regards to how academics position themselves and their research within the public domain and how quickly we can (or should) attempt to respond to both the rapid and gradual shifts within society. Online media provides us with a means of potentially addressing a wider public that is (hopefully) comprised of more than just other academics. It also provides a means of reflecting, and sharing those reflections, in the present – helping us to formulate our thoughts and ideas at a particular moment. However, all of this comes with a set of risks. Though Miller’s case is largely an exceptional one, we need to be aware that placing our initial findings and reflections into the public domain has the potential to invite unexpected forms of attention and scrutiny.

 

This post is the first from our new project Face to face: tracing the real and the mediated in children’s cultural worlds. Funded by the National Centre for Research Methods this project aims to build on the insights generated from the New Frontiers in QLR network  and series of events that are recorded and discussed elsewhere on this blog. The aim of our new project is to develop methodological tools for researching the temporal rhythms of children’s everyday lives with a focus on the movement between face-to-face and on-line interactions. For more information about the project oplease contact Research Assistant Liam Berriman at L.J.Berriman@sussex.ac.uk

 

 

 

Sound effects

Sound effects

After the last of the New Frontiers in QLR events I have found myself pondering over sound and the particular affordances that sound has for our experience of time. My deliberations were provoked by Bruce Bennett’s presentation on time in the cinema and his observation that before the introduction of sound, film was much more experimental around time – using fast forward, slow motion, reversal, jump cutting, flashback etc. With the introduction of sound, film became much more tied down to the ‘real time’ of sound and speech. Sound is indexical, it anchors us into time and place. This was a bit of a light bulb moment for me – connecting together a series of understandings I have been accumulating and that I describe here.

As an empirical researcher I have often worked with sound recordings – taping and then digital recording conversations with participants. These recordings were most often transcribed and we would work with the transcribed  texts, rarely going back to original recordings and when doing so it was generally to check the accuracy of the transcription. Of course when we do return to these recordings we are also arrested by the immediacy of what we heard – capturing the background noises of the settings as well as the emotional tone of the conversation. When engaging in in-depth case studies we might work much more closely with the audio material. But such re-listenings could also be uncomfortable, revealing awkwardness and a level of personal detail that assured their place in the backstage of the research process – impossible to anonymise and for our ears only.

In 2005 I worked with colleagues at the Open University  to make an audio video resource from the Inventing Adulthoods study. Working closely with 5 case studies from the larger study, we invited young people to forgoe anonymity and to work with filmmakers to re-animate the data that we had generated together in the 10 years if their involvement with us. Initially this involved sifting through interview transcripts to find interesting extracts which the young people would be invited to listen to and reflect on. The film-makers were adamant that for dramatic reasons we should work with the original audio rather than transcriptions and encouraged us to returned to the original recordings to explore whether the quality was sufficiently good for us to work with. In most cases it was, and where it was not we found ways to make the speech sufficiently clear. Together we created short audio selections  from interviews with our 5 young people at different ages. These compilations were put onto CD and young people were filmed while listening to the extracts and then invited to speak directly to camera about what they heard. The first cut of the edited material was a revelation to us. Not only did the audio capture the embodied and situated detail of the interviews in wonderful way – revealing changing voices and accents over time and the sounds of school bells etc – but the juxtaposition of these sounds of the past with the ‘live’ responses of the young people was incredibly powerful and dramatic. I have spent some time thinking through how and why this was so. What follows here is an extract from a piece of writing that I did attempting to understand the ways in which the complex disarticulations of sound and vision worked in one of the case studies to powerful effect. Here I write about a participant ‘Leanne’ and how the film allows us to watch her at 23 listening to her younger self at 21. Like other sections of the DVD this begins with Leanne describing an object that represents that period in her life, before listening back to the audio from her younger self :

The symbol Leanne chooses to represent herself at 21 is her daughter Chloe, the baby who ‘changed my daily life’, ‘she is number one’. Leanne acknowledges the mixed emotions associated with early parenthood, the loss of a social life, a sense of being left behind peers. The audio begins with the soldier, ‘we are not seeing each other any more’. Leanne at 21 sounds so different, her voice has changed in the intervening years. Leanne at 23 listens with a tense face. Her eyes are cast down. And then something extraordinary happens, we hear Chloe. I check to see her in the shot, in the next room or sitting on the floor. No, this is on sound track, Chloe at 18 months, back in the day when her mum was 21 and trying against the odds to be interviewed . Every time I watch this I have a powerful emotional reaction which I find hard to isolate or attribute. It makes me feel disoriented, uncertain of boundaries between now and then, and between me and her. The emotion involved seems to be encoded in the collision between content and form: what Leanne is talking about and the layered reflexive format that the film creates. The audio has Leanne explaining how she is repeating a family pattern, her mother became pregnant at 19 and went it alone, ‘Chloe comes first now’. Watching carefully I notice that Leanne in the present is looking much more relaxed than at the beginning of this shot. She is supporting her chin with her fist, her eyes are looking to the middle distance. When Chloe cries Leanne’s eyes wince. The voice on the audio is competing for space with a grizzling child. Leanne at 21 tries to tell the interviewer about her struggles to get out with her friends – the face of 23 year old Leanne scrunches in sympathy.

Reading this extract now I am realise how complicated a process it was for me moving from a research paradigm into a dramatic paradigm in which these data were recontextualised and in some important way ‘re-animated’ in the process. The use of sound was incredibly important in this – both in capturing an indexical record of the past that could be connected emotionally to the present, but also through the forms of time travel and connection allowed by this process of restaging – connecting different audiences and moments. Watching the DVD repeatedly drew me deeper into a process of studying Leanne’s responses to what she was hearing, worrying over the ethical implications of the method yet also fascinated with the potential of the method. It was only later, as a result of working more with audio-visual methods that I began to consider the extent to which what I was watching might be ‘composed’. Having not been present at the edit, I cannot be sure that there is synchronicity between the sounds and the images. When I see Leanne blushing, or cringing, I cannot be certain that this is a visual record of her response to the words that we appear to be hearing together.

In several recent projects I have worked with film-maker Susi Arnott, from whom I am learning a huge amount. One of Susi’s lessons concerned the classic TV documentary ‘The World at War’. For Susi this documentary marks the gold standard of a tradition – in that all of the sources (audio and visual) are historically authentic. There are no stock library sound effects or footage. If we hear a siren it will be from that particular ambulance. For Susi this means that the series is not simply a film, it is also a document that can be studied and drawn on by secondary analysts. It is in her words ‘data’. And seeking this kind of integrity is her rule of thumb for our collaboration. Susi and her partner Crispin Hughes had helped us to create a multi-media display of ‘data’ from our ESRC funded study ‘Making modern mothers’, animating visual and fieldnote  records of ‘a day in a life’ of 5 mothers. This was a project when we as researchers dispensed with digital recorders, deciding to rely on our senses and our capacity to render accounts through descriptive writing. Yet in helping us bring this material ‘to life’ for an audience, Susi had been frustrated at the absence of sound, compensating for this by layering sound effects beneath the recordings she made of us reading short extracts from our fieldnotes. She was however bothered by the lack of authenticity. In a follow-up day in the life of the children in the family we are now deliberately collecting sounds as part of our method, encouraged by Susi to think both of the background ‘atmos’  as well as the particular sound’ effects’ of phenomena that we are noticing in our notes and our photographs.

I feel like I have come a long way from my initial experiments with sound and vision – gaining a much more nuanced understanding of their different character and the ways in which they may be used together and apart. I continue to be fascinated by issues of authenticity that are in play in these combinations and how the idea of ‘data’ bounces around – freighted by associations with value and meaning. The account I have traced here is formed by a series of incomplete lessons that have alerted me to the movement of documents through different media and analytic frameworks. This includes transcribing sound into text for the purposes of analysis and then returning it to sound for the purpose of display. In returning a transcript into its original sound form we may retrieve meaning and context, yet we also need to understand the artfulness of the documentary genre. So far I have learned something about the value of sound as data/ document  in its own right. Oral historians have always understood the power and integrity of oral testimony – encouraging a very different approach to questions of confidentiality and sound quality. But sound is not only speech. Soundscapes can be collected – with relatively little ethical challenge – and may be valuable in conveying the particular and the ineffable.  I have also learned about the indexicality of sound – that if we want to respect a synchronicity between sound and action then we must work at real time. Anything else involves faking it, which is probably fine, as long as we know we are doing that. We can play around with sound in order to play around with time –enjoying dissonance and displacement. But if we want to create rich documents that are open to further exploration and meaning making, then we can make sure that our sources are as authentic as possible, however they are eventually composed.

Rachel Thomson. 13^th October 2013

The right place(s) at the right time(s)? Developing a “QLR sensibility” through the New Frontiers network

The right place(s) at the right time(s)? Developing a “QLR sensibility” through the New Frontiers network

Catherine Walker

How can one have a “QLR sensibility” when one has a limited amount of time to complete PhD research?

This was one of the opening questions put to us at the fifth of the NFQLR workshops for PhD students and Early Career Researchers. It is a question that continues to resonate with me as I enter my third year of PhD study, becoming aware of the potential analyses I could draw from the wealth of data I have generated so far, and have yet to generate – if I only have time…

Time can become an object of concern, fear even, for PhD students as its long shadow casts itself over our work. We could read forever and still not be content that we are ready to write up, and yet for many students funding necessarily limits the potential for this luxury. As time goes on, it seems to speed up, mercilessly – and we are swept along with it, trying to keep up.

In this context, these workshops have served, for me at least, as demarcated spaces over the last year to stop and reflect, where time obliged us for once and seemed to slow down with us, as we thought, responded and reflected together about what we had heard about QLR in the parallel conference series, and how QLR might fit into our own work. We began to see QLR not as a method, or set of methods, but as a sensibility, a mindset, an orientation, a foregrounding of temporality, an inspiration to remain alert to time and temporality in our research (all definitions used across the series). Or to quote my fellow participant Claude Jousselin paraphrasing Latour in his recent entry on this same blog, in this series time was “transformed from a matter of fact into a matter of concern”.

Seeing QLR as a sensibility rather than a set of methods opens up possibilities beyond what QLR might traditionally or typically be known for, that is, carrying out research with the same participants over time. For whilst not all research fits this criteria, all research takes place in time and over time. And yet in order to avoid QLR becoming a catch-all, so-broad-it-becomes-meaningless concept, I think it is helpful to think about ways of understanding time, and their implications for a research project and more broadly a research career. What follows are some of my own thoughts on this, based on the fifth and final workshop and conference in this series.

The conference, entitled “Child in time” opened with Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen’s opening paper (delivered on the day by Ann Phoenix) in which Harriet raised the point that the focus of the “new” social studies of childhood on childhood (James, Jenks and Prout, 1998) on childhood as present and situated could risk obscuring interpretations of the child as a being with a past and a future as well as a present, situated across as well as in time. Harriet’s paper displayed the potential of an attention to the different temporalities of the individual in her careful and insightful analysis of one girl, Astrid’s, participation in the classroom from first grade to high school.  Harriet’s analysis presented Astrid as evolving, sometimes unexpectedly, over time and avoided drawing conclusions of her life beyond the timeframe of the research, as if (to paraphrase the original rationale behind the Seven Up series) an individual’s life could be predicted by the first seven – or in Astrid’s case fifteen – years.

Just as individuals’ lives are situated on the continuum of time – in the midst of which, published research on these lives may temporarily come to parallel this continuum for a short time – so are theories and ideas. The fact that the “new” social studies of childhood is now not considered so “new” (at least in some national contexts) is testament to this. As Mary Jane Kehily commented in her response to Harriet’s paper, this approach to studying childhood is a product of its time, and may say more about approaches that preceded it than about the nature of children and childhood. As researchers see the limitations and potentialities of this approach, more “new” approaches will emerge from it – as Mary Jane put it “all research is a response to something that has gone before” – and yet for as long as researchers continue to make use of the approach, its coexistence alongside other “new” approaches and the rediscovery of “old” ones means it will not become obsolete.

Research projects, too, whilst time-defined in many ways (not least in terms of receiving funding), can also be seen to continue beyond their officially defined time period. An awareness of this answers to considerable extent the question of how we PhD researchers can develop the “QLR sensibility” in the course of three years, as we come to realise that PhD projects are not just stand-alone projects but, done in the context of a longer academic career, can be breeding grounds for ideas that may pre-exist and most certainly outlive the life course of the PhD project. As Rachel Thomson commented as we discussed our PhD research, “finishing a PhD is a fantasy – something changes but nothing is finished”. This feels somewhat comforting when considering that old shadow of time, limiting what is possible to meaningfully write about in the time I have on the PhD.

Networks and initiatives, finally, may also outlive the officially stated time they run for. And herein lies the promise of this network, and perhaps one of the reasons why visionaries like Rachel (and the NCRM for funding it) carve out segments of their hard-pressed time to devote to such networks. In the case of the New Frontiers network, the breeding ground of ideas has helped participants to see that, as the saying goes,  if we can’t beat time then we can join it, foregrounding time as an analytic in our thinking, our writing, our analysis, our on the ground research, our data management even.

Harriet’s paper included a reference to the fact that in psychoanalysis, the encounters end when the patient realises that they could go on forever. Likewise, in this network we could be forever learning together and from one another (as beautifully demonstrated in Mary Robson’s cyclical development and learning model as presented at the conference, beginning and ending in curiosity). And this is why my fellow participant Claude is right to point out that this network is neither bounded nor completed. Despite this, the end of scheduled face-to-face meetings will mean that something will change for us participants. Yes, there will be possibilities to continue to work together, reflect together and perhaps even try one another’s ideas out. But over time we will reminisce and as we reminisce we will mythologise the network (as perhaps, three weeks on, I am doing here). And the network may or may not become something that comes to take on a life of its own in our own research careers.

When discussing the “ideal” way of conducting QLR training, we all fairly unanimously agreed that this had been the “ideal” way – learning together, over time and in different places to develop a QLR sensibility. Not all researchers will be so lucky, although other possibilities will arise (watch this space on the blog, I imagine).  But all of this does beg the question, why us? Was it a “fluke” or “serendipity” that we came to be involved in the network, as we discussed across the day workshop, or did we who had (and have) the chance to enjoy this network just happen to be in the right place(s) at the right time(s)?

Cinema, time and children

Cinema, time and children

Bruce Bennett

http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/blogs/bruce-bennett/cinema-time-and-children/

I was recently invited by the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth at the University of Sussex to speak at a symposium on qualitative longitudinal research methods in the study of child development. This interdisciplinary event, which was part of a programme of events funded by the National Centre for Research Methods, brought together anthropologists, literary theorists, sociologists and artists, but the focus of my paper was a discussion of cinema’s capacity to document and represent the passage of time.

This paper was prompted by the release of a recent film by the British director Michael Winterbottom, Everyday (2012), which was shot over five years and recounts the experiences of a family, over the same period, as they live with the fact that the father is in prison. The film belongs to a British tradition of socially committed film and television drama that is concerned with ‘ordinary’ lives and questions of social class, precarious labour, and the interaction of families with state institutional apparatuses such as the education and prison systems, but Winterbottom has also said of Everyday that, ‘The starting point was to try and deal with time passing in a story.’ While there are several examples of documentaries that were produced over extended periods of time, the most well known of which is The Seven Up television series (1964-2012), Everyday is possibly unique as a fiction film where the duration of the production period matches the duration of the narrative. The most striking and moving consequence of this experiment is that the film captures the visible ageing of the four young children in the family. In this respect, the film explores cinema’s central preoccupations with children and with time.

The child has a central significance in the history of cinema both as audience and as subject matter. For example, of the ten films shown at the very first commercial film screening by Auguste and Louis Lumière in Paris on December 28th, 1895, two were of infants – a baby being fed, and a toddler trying to catch goldfish from a fish bowl. As a medium, cinema begins – in its own infancy, perhaps – with the image of the child.

On the other hand, from the early 1900s onwards, discussion by reformists, politicians, journalists and academics about the cultural and psychological effects of film viewing upon audiences have centred upon the sentimental, rhetorical figure of the susceptible, sensitive child as a way of measuring the effects of the medium upon audiences. Thinking about the child and child development has offered us a means of conceptualizing the progressive effects of cultural and technological change. For instance, anxieties about the intangible social effects of new entertainment and communications media (and calls for legislation and regulation) are almost always articulated in relation to their damaging, corrupting effect upon children – stretching back from mobile phones, the Internet, though home video and video nasties, television, transistor radios, jukeboxes and record players, to popular theatre. The child is used in such discourses as an uncritical, un-ironic thermometer registering changes in the cultural and technological environment and so has also been instrumental in the formation of public policy.

Cinema’s fascination with the child is multiple then. The child in cinema is a symbolically loaded, semantically flexible figure. The child stands as an affective figure for the domestic and the intimate, or as a plastic symbol of innocence, vulnerability, potentiality and unrealized futures, corruption, mortality, uncanny threat in different narrative contexts¹. Thinking about the figure of the child in cinema invites us to think about the complexity and historical contingency of our conception of childhood, how the child is mobilized to limit access to visual culture, and, more broadly, how ‘the masses’ are always depicted in child-like terms, in need of protection through political representation and top-down governance. As film historian Tom Gunning observes of the ‘Nickel boom’, the explosion of film theatres across the US after 1905, ‘Moving pictures were […] rife with anxieties for the genteel representatives of American culture, including the issues of a working class audience and the sexual awareness of children’ (Gunning 1991: 152).

In another sense, the child’s centrality to cinema can be understood in relation to cinema’s capacity to record and represent the passage of time. The child is one of the ways in which cinematic time is made visible. Indeed for film theorist Michel Chion, time is a central component of the medium, arguing that with the widespread commercialisation of sound-film technology in the mid-late 1920s cinema is transformed from a ‘cinematographic’ medium – written with movement – to a chronographic medium – ‘written in time as well as in movement’ (Chion 1994: 16-17). Whereas a silent film can be projected at different speeds (and silent comedies were often sped up when projected²) or even in reverse-motion, if synchronous sound-film is run at the wrong speed or in reverse its meaning and effect changes radically. Sound film is thus locked into particular temporality (with all sound-film projectors set to run at 24 frames per second). However, for Chion, what sound cinema does that other media can’t is make the passage of time visible since what a film does is manipulate time.

Film-makers do this very effectively in a variety of ways, compressing or dilating it through narrative structures and editing strategies that project us backwards and forwards through time, isolating and emphasizing particularly significant moments. Cinema is a mechanism of time-travel, and one of the key components of this mechanism is the cut from one shot to another, which effects an instantaneous transition from one moment in time to another. It is therefore no surprise that films about time-travel proliferate throughout the history of the medium from the early comic fantasy A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Flynn, 1921) onwards and so, although marketed as a feel-good comedy, we might understand Richard Curtis’ latest film, About Time (2013), with its progressively complex narrative, as a sentimental reflection upon cinema’s capacity to move us emotionally by moving us temporally.

As the title suggests, time is the key theme of Curtis’ film and, as with Winterbottom’s film, this is explored through a narrative about family relations. Upon learning that the men in his family have the ability to travel backwards through time, the protagonist uses this power (like a film-maker) to manipulate time as he returns repeatedly from the present to the past, replaying awkward or embarrassing encounters, such as a first meeting with his girlfriends’ parents, trying out different lines and timings in order to steer events in a different direction. The film exploits the comic potential of this intriguing fantasy, but ultimately, the film is a rather melancholy reflection upon loss and the irreversibility of time. A number of people were in tears at the end of the screening in the local cinema, and the film’s conclusion was that what is important is being, intensely, in the moment.

The paradoxes of the time travel film demonstrate in a very direct way that one of the most powerfully affecting properties of narrative cinema is that, by moving us back and forth through time, films can return us to the present, inviting us to look at it anew.

References

• Michel Chion (1994) Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Columbia University Press: New York
• Tom Gunning (1991) ‘From Obscene films to High-Class Drama’ in D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press

Footnotes

¹See, for example, my 2008 essay on children and cinematic technology, ‘Children and robots, technophobia and cinephilia’, in Bruce Bennett, Marc Furstenau, Adrian Mackenzie (eds.), Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices. London and New York; Palgrave, pp. 168-182

²See, for example, this Buster Keaton short, ‘Cops‘ (Keaton,Cline, 1922)

• Image © Pavel Losevsky | Dreamstime.com

Network in time

Network in time

Claude Jousselin

The last of the doctoral network which was also the first of the 2 days seminar on QLR entitled Child in time was as enjoyable as all the previous ones. But of course being the last it had a different feel to it; feeding back on our respective papers highlighted how far we had gone in understanding and adapting longitudinal orientations to our on-going work. It also led to conversations about the network itself and in the same way that we were attempting not to reify “QLR”, it became clear that this network was neither bounded nor completed. I was struck by the heterogeneity of the network’s participants, both in regards to the disciplines represented as it is by the countries, and languages. And of course not all members of the network were present in that Brighton session, participants would be following the tweets and blogs back home (some whilst recovering from indispositions). So you don’t have to be present (in the present) to be in the network, you don’t have to be studying the same topic, nor do you have to be a doctoral student (Bravo to those recently completed Theses!).  What make this a network?  I think it takes work and practice, in time:

Meeting in changing places, (Southampton, Cardiff, Manchester, Birkbeck, Brighton) with changing focus (disciplinary traditions, research relationships, scope of QLR etc.) was a fruitful practice; It has felt like wandering and meandering at a pace that allowed exploration to assemble and adjoin, not quite with the nonchalance or dandyness of  Benjamin’s flaneur, but with the same  attention to details that strolling can provide.

The fact that the network spaces were also virtual, helped provide continuity; thoughts and pictures, summaries and extrapolations could be shared with all members, those that had been there and those that will be; we could go back before moving forward.

And linking the concrete places and the virtual spaces is a multiple experience of time, coeval when in the seminars and concurrent when blogging/tweeting. Maybe there are more than one arrow of time and not all going in the same direction?

But I want to push the meaning of network a notch towards the Latourian notion that it is more than a descriptive term for connections. Latour amongst his many revised definition of Actor-Network Theory suggests that network is as much a description of the connection between things/beings, as it is a mode of inquiry, a way of listing and registering all “the unexpected beings necessary for any entity to exist (2011: 799).”

So at this point there should be a list of all those that have worked behind and on the scene to make this network happens, Ester, Lucy, Fiona, Julie(s), Rachel, ( please add your name).

This redefinition of network also points to the fact if a network is nothing but actors, an actor is nothing but a network. Each of us have brought myriads of connections to the seminars, some more visible than others, enriching our explorations.  In this reversibility, we can also see an experience of time that is more than linear. When did the network begin if not after it was started? Not that I want to be trapped between the egg and the chicken…

So how should the network perdure?  Our thoughts that QLR was a sensitivity and mind-set, an orientation and inspiration to remain alert to the temporal in research will need translating into particular actions and I look forward to further work on working papers, possible  journal special issue, doctoral training module , further conferences, more blogging  and coeval socialising (down the pub) would be great too.

I couldn’t help paraphrasing Mr Latour as this seem to speak of my experience of the QLR series so far:  whenever our network is deployed, time is transformed [  ] from a matter of fact into a matter of concern. (The original can be found in Latour “ Networks, Societies , Spheres “. 2011: 799)

Claude

Art, research and sociology’s promiscuity

Being there?

Being there?

Rachel Thomson

Lots of you weren’t there. We were oversubscribed but on the day many didn’t show for all sorts of good and ordinary reasons. Which was fine, even good, as the room felt full-enough and the space was occupied.

But it’s a shame for you, because being there meant that you experienced something, live, in the moment, in the room. This always matters, but in this case it was something that we were aware of in a heightened way. By engaging with the practice traditions of psycho-analysis and performance, we sensitised ourselves to the unfolding present in a new way: an awareness of ‘what is happening now?’ as a question that can be asked again and again about layers of evidence, representations and documents that may be re-animated in successive moments.

Soon, or certainly by now, there will be a film posted online, so that you can see and hear a record of the day. It’s a bit out of focus I understand. I like that.

So what happened? Well atmospheres certainly changed as speakers demanded different things from us. Jenifer Wakelyn was a seasoned time traveller, connecting us analytically to her year-long observation of an infant, through reflective note taking and the affective digestion offered by an analytic group. Richard Layzell held us in the here and now, showing what a pause can do and how space and time can be played with. People shared their experiments: Valerie Walkerdine was acting out in a new way; Belinda Mandelbaum moved us with movie. The seasoned performers explained what we the social scientist had been missing: a tradition of ‘social practice’, performative methods that make things happen.

We got a bit stuck on ‘data’, as the long shadow of positivism passed over the room. But regrouped with the idea of the archive within which we all wanted to play. ‘Being there’ can happen more than once, and evidence might embodied and lived. Richard Layzell reminded us that ‘lives have changed in room 541 of Birkbeck college’. Thanks to the care and curation of Lisa Baraitser and Simon Bayly, that happened one more time….

Chance as research strategy

Chance as research strategy

Claude Jousselin

The figures that were mentioned in the seminar, the diplomat, the mischievous joker, I will continue to think with but for this blog, rather than resolution or disruption I want to bring up the role of chance in research. I’d like to thank Simon for his Game Design experimentation on Friday afternoon. Even though I was not able to complete it, it triggered some productive thoughts, thoughtful moments and a good time while doing it. Simon’s idea of providing a deterministic structure with conditions, tasks and time limitations takes me directly to the OULIPO collective ( Ouvroir de literature potential, ) founded by Queneau; he combined setting constraints with playfulness, creating potentials for randomness to experiment with in writing poetry and prose. Georges Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi (Life: a user’s manual) being my favourite example. What I take from his work, and relevant to this blog, is that we are engaged continually in a dance between accepting and rejecting chance, moving between rules and disorder, both feeding each other.

Can research design as practiced by researchers have this quality? I suspect it can, if a framework is provided that can facilitate situations for events (life) to take place, and guidance is provided towards integrating the anxiety that can ensue into a methodological strength. (Devereux).  Of course institutional expectations (funding institutions, Research Ethical Committees) also need careful handing so as not overwhelm and stifle any sense of experimentation whilst ticking the boxes; a tall order.

Back to Simon’s game design;  I left the Birkbeck building to go on my scripted walk, I kept in mind something Lisa said that morning,  suggesting that researcher may be inspired by the psychoanalytic practice of observation as staying open for as long as possible and see what happens. This I would attempt while also following the instructions given by Simon, to take picture(s), to capture element(s) that would explain my interests in what I saw in the walk; to get a stranger to tell me a story of a different walk they took and have a picture taken by a third party of that stranger with me as if we were best friends.

At about three quarters of the way round my mapped walk, I saw Tavistock Square Gardens across the road and noticed that there was some kind of small event taking place inside; a well known and reputable Whisky producer (that I will force to remain anonymous) was holding a tasting event.

I like whisky.

As I was trying a 12 years old single malt I noticed that some people were gathering and observing something hidden from me , I got closer and was taken in an instant 40 years back to my uncle’s working shed. Moise was a cooper making barrels in Brittany for the local cider producers, a process that involved choosing the tree, felling it, preparing the wood and producing the barrel; his shed was full of wood chips and very strange looking tools, smelling of wood dust, sometimes peaceful, sometimes full of the noise of hammers and saws and I can still

Robert has just finished his demonstration and while he answers questions I get to try a 25 years single malt and when the small crowd disperses I get to chat with him, about his work, my uncle, his 5 generation barrel making family business, my uncle’s shed, his favourite walk from his house to the distillery where he works, my uncle’s tools being donated to a museum after his death, Robert’s favourite whisky, my favourite whisky.

I nearly missed my train to Bristol where I am scheduled to interview, observe and where data awaits.