Rachel Thomson on day one: three acts, the chorus and a coda

November 17, 2012 by emcgeeney 1 Comment

Just got home after two days intensive talking, thinking and listening at the first of the New frontiers in QLR seminar series. Right now I just have words and phrases swimming around in my mind and notebook, bumping up against each other. I am going to follow Melissa Nolas’s good advice to BLOG NOW, think later and record my key words and phrases for DAY 1 – in my own sweet way.

ACT I

Lois Weis: 1980’s de-indutrialisation was the tip of the iceberg’,  SERENDIPITY and HAPPENSTANCE, ‘who will do the follow-up’,  ‘ethnographic longitudinality – I didn’t even have the word…’for the moment’;  ‘I have all the stories… I knew them as children’ ‘deep in data’, SHOWING VS THEORISING/ UNDERSTANDING, seeing through resistance, from rebellion to social isolation and poverty. New class wars of the global middle class: ‘Dossiers, contriving and conniving’

Graham Crow: Legacy of closure, researcher’s  memories of original is not always right; the impossibility of annonymising place. ‘Total fantasy’? Unusual spaces/ Spaces of hope? David Harvey, local boys. Changes the JUMP OUT at you! ‘You can’t step into the same river twice’

Chorus: losing a ‘safe data set’; loss of meaning; embargos; permissions; damage; ‘what’s not here? Absences. It’s hard to access your former self. ‘Fat, spotty, it’s no wonder her husband left her’… ‘I was another person’. THE PAST IS NOT FINITE! The problem is: researcher generated data? Fixing fragments? ‘Interventions? Overcoming challenges. Fantasies of replication? What does WRITING AN ESSAY MEAN NOW? How do contemporary conditions of production shape our data and our practices?

ACT II

Jeanine Anderson: What do people care about – respect. Shifting theories and shifting context. TOURNAMENTS OF VALUE.  Green – nostalgia or aspiration. Projects of transcendence. Routes up and out, and routes down and out. Sex and corruption. Value contained, and trapped. A case study is necessary but not enough. Becoming somebody in life, cycles of value. ‘We all went through Shining Path together’.

Chorus: observing change and making change, evidence of value change. Interacting scales, cycles roller coasters, pendulums, clock works. WHERE DO CHANGING METHODS COME FROM. Increasing scepticism about the spoken word, performance, change in context.

Act III

Rob and Marlin: judging and being judged over time. ‘you can beat your wings all your life but in the end the wind decides where you go’. Change as experienced and narrated. – incidental/ consequential, rough/ smooth, fast/ slow, deliberate, anticipated/ forseen. Noun or verb, perpetual motion, inertia and natural selection’, pebbles in ponds and becoming unsettled by your neighbour. CORRUPTION AS A TEMPORAL PHENOMENA? Change as loss, risk and unintended.

Lucy Robinson: TEACHING LEAD RESEARCH; retro-discussion of 1980s; reusing reused data; the raw and the cooked – partially prepared ready-meals-fully-delivered takeaways; ‘peeling back’, decaditis; lists; ‘perforations between moments, events and experiences; Famine and BMWs; stamps, teabags and cloakroom tickets. Wordless; representing change – images and narratives

Chorus: accounting for passions and affect; always a cliff hanger- every time; reconstructing the past through the ever-changing present; cultural circuits, Anzac stories, WHAT GOES INTO THE ARCHIVE (permissions), report writing as a narrative form; beneath the radar; units of analysis; SHOWING IS DOING; canonical narratives

CODA: At what point does a number of cross sectional investigations become longitudinal. Is it when we focus on time and repetition, is it the number of returns, the length of time…. Or might it be found in the performations? Is there an elephant in the room?