Creative Geographies Event

Hi Everyone
A copy of the email sent to the Exnography, ugh... list on August 1st.
I'm experimenting with Wordpress for this blog as it seems tons more versatile and is easy to use... Please continue posting here as usual, though...
Thanks
Ian

---------------

Hi Everyone

Just a quick one.

We need to hold an Exnography meeting soon to discuss this: http://creativegeographies.wordpress.com/

Check it out. Behind the scenes work. It's all explained... Please read it and think how you might fit in. This is what we were discussing at the end of the last meeting. It's just taken off.... and will, we hope, be bloody great...

How are people fixed next Thursday? Let me know times of you can be in, and email comments and ideas if you can't make it. It's important that postgrads - in particular - get involved...

Happy to discuss this... Please use 'reply all' to this list.

Ta

Ian

in celebration of mindless ethnography

In response to the 'rigour' map below, and recent criticisms of academia, I feel there are some important elements that could be added to the map below (regarding the 'rigour' debate). The 'rigour' discussed and represented in the map seems to relate purely to academia, how our work is viewed by our peers, a limited and somewhat elite audience. Academia is currently being attacked for its distance from the world outside (the direct issues and problems encountered 'out there'), the relevance of it's (our) research and it's (our) outputs. In a department with an emphasis on critical geography this is surely something we should be addressing...if of course our research is to mean anything beyond academic brownie points (or becoming another business class activist).

Ethnographic and autoethnographic practice involves participant observation so it seems strange, and rather telling, that responsibility to participants, and indeed the issues being addressed through research, remained invisible and forgotten in our rigour map/discussion. Ironic, as this invisibility is something that recent ethnography and autoethnography has sought to confront, challenging (rather than perpetuating) the privileged role of researcher. As has been discussed in previous meetings, many of us feel that a responsibility to the issues we are in some small way attempting to address and to the people who are participating in the research (as research subjects and/or collaborators) should perhaps the be first site of any test of rigour; if research outputs remain hidden and/or meaningless to those we claim to speak with - either through the choice of outlet (subscription journals etc) or through impenetrable, jargon encrusted papers - how can there be any claim to rigour. Within critical geographic praxis creativity would seem to have an important role in producing work that is rigorous, exciting, and relevant to audiences far beyond the walls of academia.

Well, I guess what I am saying is perhaps we could make some space for 'responsibility' in our search for rigour. Rather than scrambling to regurgitate the latest 'right kind of theory' start thinking through our work.

But hey, I'm just a 'mindless ethnographer', apparently, so what would I know...moan,moan,moan...

spot the rigour

Our last Exnography, ugh meeting included a game of 'Spot the Rigour'. To be honest I arrived late so don't know how or why it started, and due to a terrible memory can't remember how it ended (or if there was a winner). It went a bit like this...

...as doodled by Debs...

We will try to meet a couple of times during the summer and hope to arrange a BIG meeting where Exnographers near and far (along with invited guests) can share ideas, words, creativity, and the odd sandwich.

A ref

Hi everyone,

Read this and thought of you/us/blog. It's fantastic! I think.
Does what it says on the tin and is lovely and easy-to-read.

Pillay, V. (2005): 'Narrative Style: the inseparability of self, style and text' Reflective Practice 6(4), Pp.539-549.

I imagine that someone in this group was already the one to forward the ref to me in the first place, but hey ho...
Enjoy...hope things are going well down there.
Bex
PS. If you can't get it, I'm sure I have a pdf somewhere, which I can happily attach to and e-mail or something: lemme know and I can e-mail the group with it if you like..?

more on creativity...

Dear all-

this is a post about intervention - or rather about the need to think about intervention and creative academic practices. I was reading a rather predictable but still good paper the other day based on a RGS round table discussion of Landscape , Mobility and Practice ( ref at end of post) which brought together an interesting group of people to talk about these issues including John Wylie, David Matless and Hayden Lorimer. Anyway to get to the point Tim Cresswell, also invovled in the panel, expressed admiration for writing in a 'poetic way', which he attributed to Caitlin, Hayden and John but said that he did not really know how to intervene in these 'nice stories'..... so anyway- interventions and how other academics can make them or not in response to such creative work, how creativity may itself constitute an intervention and what political/moral power/ impetus it may have or even lack seemed to me to be interesting brainstorming points in terms of our discussion on creative writing practices the other day. There was also some other interesting stuff about creativity as a response to changing sources and so on...

anyway: Merriman. P., et al. 'Landscape Mobility, Practice'. In Social and Cultural Geography, Vol 9. No. 2, March 2008.

any access probs I have the pdf

best
hatti

The lonely exnographer

Let me begin with a little story, a Once Upon a Time... Perhaps one might like to call this a cautionary tale. But that would be to embrace a slippery oxymoron of control, coupled with a freedom. Better to make this a fairytale, and give the reader an active role in deciding what to call it...

Thus:

Once upon a time, in a land that was pleasantly warm and unpleasantly humid, it turned 1pm. A dwarf and a lynx (curious mix that) stared at each other across an shiny ocean, and realised that they could not communicate. To complicate this sorry state of affairs, Minnie Mouse tiptoed in (hoping for entertainment, one imagines, though it is hard to speak for the mind of such a seemingly-sweet, but rather tricky character). Finally, Mother Goose arrived, full of stories, if only one had asked her.

The lynx, preening, as lynx's are want to do, suggested a conversation of 20 minutes, no rules. Surely that was possible? However, the rather timid dwarf fled - to the sanctuary of next week, whereupon this tale might recommence.

The end.

Brace yourselves...it's a long-un!

Apologies for how long this is. Don't shoot me; I was just the secretary...

Well it was a first for Helen and I, (and Liz too) and after we’d (Helen and I) mosey’d in late (Helen had apparently run from Birmingham, me from the B&B up the road,), we joined Ian, Hatti, (no teapot) Liz, Debs, Kerry, Heather, Justin and Lynne for the next instalment of Exnog. I personally was quite excited. We don’t really do this in Brum. ‘Belonging’ is a wonderful thing/feeling! Thanks for having me!

So, armed with either one or several readings (see left), the main one being Laurel Richardson’s ‘Writing: A method of inquiry’, and several sheets of paper upon which were typed or written examples of ‘how we write’, we eventually got round to starting.

And so, in a kind of stream of consciousness, this is what we all talked about.

As is polite and indeed was needed, we did a little ice breaker to start with: who we are, where we come from, how we fit in, why we were there. It was nice: faces to names and all that. Then we had a kind of public shaming sesh: what we had(n’t) read for the meeting. Turns out that this wasn’t intended to shame us – it was maybe just me having flashbacks of guilty undergrad seminar days – it was more so that we knew who’d been able to get hold of what and if there was any point in trying to discuss the readings. Evidently, some of us weren’t on the e-mail list so hadn’t got all of the e-mails of each other’s writing, and that others had simply read what we could. Either way, most of us had read the Richardson paper, and at least glanced at what others had sent, so we were ok. We had something to talk about, then.

Pandora’s box got opened by one of us saying that it’s difficult to try and decide what to send, writing-wise, to ‘this kind of group’ and a discussion about what exactly we write, how we write it, and who we write it for suddenly ballooned into a very large discussion about audiences, the issue of the ‘I’, the first person and the politics thereof, who we write for and how, ‘fiction’/’truth’, misrepresentation, ways of working, (writing) conventions, ‘doing’ and including literature, collaboration, why we write (again) and where writing happens/why it all/if it matters about the ‘when’.
This particularly long list of topics, in practice, kind of flowed in a rather lovely, organic way, and it looped back and around on itself, albeit in slightly different contexts, covering different issues each time. Following the thread seemed to be the way things went, and as such, raised lots of lovely, juicy issues that I’ve tried to summarise below:

We started by asking whether an audience/target readership dictates how we write or whether we just write how we want to, trusting that the content will convey what we need to say anyway? Fundamentally, the question of ‘does it matter/ when does it matter whether we’ve slipped in a few personal pronouns in the process?’ came to the surface rather quickly… Heather made a point about how in different ‘cultures’/institutions, audiences receive/read/react to the ‘I’ in different ways and we talked about the ways in which this could be countered if the need be: putting writing in the third person or writing the ‘I’ as a named person in a story.
This brought about the issue of subjectivity of/in writing, especially in the first person, and how the use of ‘I’ can sometimes be perceived as aggressive, too subjective, and possibly self-indulgent. So what about getting people to read stuff with a heavily featured ‘I’….?
Audience/readership issues started to emerge. How do you then go about including others in a personal narrative…? ‘Participation’ or collaboration seemed to rear its head: should participants (in research writing) have the right to reply, and if so, what kind of problems/issues could this cause? From this, came the issue of preparing the reader for what they are about to read: should they need this personal information prior to reading, so that they know what we as writers are about, our positionality…or not?
Enabling the ‘right to reply’ raised issues of politics and politicising knowledge. Ian mentioned certain problems he’d encountered during his PhD and then mentioned ways of allowing everyone to have ‘their say’ without necessarily compromising or sacrificing meaning and nuance. (We compared notes with Roger Sanjek at this point) A discussion on blacking out words within a text ensued and further added to the discussion of what kind of political statement that could make in and of itself.
Issues of fiction and truth then came to the fore as, it was suggested, certain devices used for anonymising people or people’s thoughts actually only succeed at a superficial reading: would the people being written about recognise themselves and others…possibly, probably!
Then a rather long discussion about ‘the fluidy of truth’ and misrepresentation ensued. It all got a bit abstract at one point, with the idea that no matter what we do, and whatever theoretical stance we take, we are always misrepresenting people, necessarily, as it is us writing the 80,000 words about other people anyway. Maybe. We returned to certain arguments, however, that writing is necessarily positioned/situated, fluid, and may be collaborative. In such cases we discussed that perhaps the ideas of best practice and ethics were the only way to go: that designing good research, that was well thought-through, thorough, and informed, was only what we could possibly hope to do and ‘produce’. Indeed opinionising and theorising ad hoc aren’t always enough to stress opinions, and as such, research should be informed by theory (and vice versa), not just blurted out/recited or ‘done’ without due consideration.
So how do we work then? What comes first? Should we write with a particular audience in mind, then adapt our writing, research (ie. the ‘doing’ of the research) to them, or should we write for ourselves first and foremost?
These questions kind of got answered and discussed in a round about and very mixed up way! It kind of centred around writing ‘conventions’ and whether they were set in stone for us to follow, or whether they were just rules to be ‘broken’. Discussion centered around making your own writing style work for you, to a certain extent for others, and importantly, making it work so that whichever ‘way’ is ‘chosen’, that it ultimately allows us to write through a bloody great big project/PhD/study/MSc thesis relatively ‘easily’ (haha!) and with the minimum amount of time wasted on fretting about writing it! ‘Just get on and write’ seemed a suitable catchphrase. (I’m frequently hearing that one. Damn those voices in my head!). Ultimately, though, it was kind of agreed that being true to yourself, allowing yourself to develop your own voice and style, seemed like a good thing. Doing what is ‘right’ for you and your project may or may not ‘dictate’ the way in which you write, but it may dictate the way in which research as a whole is conducted, which then ties back into writing being a process within and of itself. So then what comes first…the methodology or the way it’s written? Or is it both? An iterative process…? We returned to ‘convention’…
…and so to how to include literature. A relatively long discussion followed on how literature reviews get written: strategies, whether there is a certain convention or perceived way in which they ‘should' be written, etc, and we ended up with the following points. Firstly, it is possible to write ‘a literature review’ in our own ‘voice’, whether than include the all-debated ‘I’ or not. Secondly, there can be various ways and means of fitting literature into our writing, whether it be that reading comes first, followed by a ‘straight’ summing up, discussion, analysis; or whether it be more of a case of writing what we think, going away and reading and then fitting what we read into what we’ve written, where it’s appropriate. Or indeed whether it’s really an iterative process which combines the two or even all three. Liz sold a few of us on the virtues of ‘spew drafts’, which are a kind of brain dump of what we know, think, ponder…followed by a kind of interrogation of the literature/empirical stuff etc within it.

And so ended the first hour. One of our midst left and so punctuated the discussion bringing it back to looking at what some of us had written. Ian started with his, Heather, and Kerry’s one-page collaborative collaboration that Dan Raven-Ellison had asked them to do. They said that the exercise was more a practice in collaboration and we discussed the various ways of writing collaboratively. These got summarised in a few ways: as far as ‘doing’ a PhD goes, it was suggested that by nature of there being more than one person probably, possibly, creating the stuff of content, the very nature of a PhD is collaborative anyway. In this way, collaboration is much about the co-construction of what’s going to be ‘written up’, albeit written by one author. Unless…you take a wholly collaborative approach and ask your participants to write something for you…Lynne mentioned Graham Rowles’ PhD in the 1979, where he had asked his five elderly participants to write something if they wished. Ian also chipped in, adding that he had given his PhD to his family, asked them to comment, and then as he ran out of time, and thus lost the time to ‘edit’, he simply left their notes/comments on the text, as footnotes. I mentioned that I was cacking myself about giving my writing to my participants for comments, clarifications, whatever, but that it’s really important to the whole process and to me, that they should be ‘represented’ in their own words (if they wish) because ultimately the writing is the one thing that what will be going out to be read: the right to reply thing and its potential problems came up again. Other forms of collaborative writing practices were also outlined: when there are multiple authors, ask each to write ‘x’ number of words, and then stick it all together with some clever editing or even take the writings of ‘x’ people and then copy and paste them in together, maybe one paragraph from one essay then another from another and so on.
So then could we say that writing was like jazz: geography as jazz…?! Ellis and Bochner came along (figuratively, obv!). Complete with (figurative, obv!) dogs (plural). Apparently, their students did some kind of collaborative play for them, charting their research histories and that led us, somehow, onto the discussion about what writing is for: its purpose and whether it was really ‘the end’ of a process or not.
Certainly autoethnography was hailed as a form of therapy, catharsis, maybe. In another Richardson paper, she discusses how writing helped her with her memory. This was agreed by the group as not only being something of cathartic value for the writer but also sometimes for the reader too, who can maybe be helped by finding similitude in the narrative.
So then why do we write? We discussed the fact that writing is often outdated when it finally comes to be published, and certainly for Helen, who is carrying out action-orientated research, by the time she publishes her PhD, things will have moved on, up, out or in another direction. We got a bit glum…what was the point, then? We discussed how writing is a part of a larger process, again, not the ‘end result’ or indeed a summing up of the process. Writing is thus a method, charts a process and possibly sets up further research. It can also be dynamic, in the sense that there seems no point in writing for it just to end up on a shelf gathering dust. Guerilla tactics of writing distribution followed: why not simply print out multiple copies of books, PhDs and give them to people to read? Someone, somewhere may pick it up, like it, contact you…and so it snowballs, grows and either remains as is or becomes organic and runs.

And so the meeting finished. Sort of. There was yet another group identity discussion in which we decided that we were a bit more than a writing group. In fact, we were a bit of everything: writing, reading, support group about writing!! We liked the idea of reading each others’ stuff, that of the academics we suggest, so we decided to keep the common reading, our writing and the other paper suggestions that people could read if they wanted.

At this point Debs said: “hold me to what I said at the beginning won’t you?”. So I am….Debs, you’re doing the next blog writeup. You’re held to it…!

Meeting date request from Brum

Hi everyone,
Sorry for my silence until now...hello!
Just wondering when the next meeting has been scheduled for? Only reason I ask is that Helen and I (and possibly Emily) are both/all down in Exeter the week starting 28th April until either Thursday or Friday (I'm down Monday eve, Helen, and maybe Emily, I think is/are down Wednesday). Not sure whether you'd planned the Exnog meeting for the week before, but if you've not and you'd like to (cos we would), how would that Wednesday (30th) do for a meet? Then we can both/all come along and join in the fun.
Just an idea...
Hope all's well: I believe some of you are jetsetting at the moment. Lucky yous. Safe trips there and back and hope to see you all on the 30th.
Becky

Live broadcasting?

Hi folks,

Things seem to be growing and progressing here, which is great.

Last night I got involved in a meeting from the comfort of my own home. The meeting was held in Birmingham City Centre and broadcast live using Bambuser. I was able to contribute to the meeting using a chat facility, a bit like msn/google chat/twitter etc. There were quite a few people listening in and getting involved with the meeting virtually.
The meeting wasn't really for me. My partner was at the meeting and it was all far too geeky and technical for me but I was really interested in the concept live broadcasting and the uses is may have for this group - especially for Helen, Becky and me.
Please let me know if you are interested (email is the best way to contact me hello@emilyquinton.com) and I'll get more information for you. Apparently there are some other broadcasting options that might be better for us to use...but they would essentially do the same thing.

Speak soon!

New readings posted

Right then.... a reminder to those who were there at the end and a vivid description for those who were not... As people were packing up, this is roughly what happened...

[full references are down there on the left. Please email if you can't get hold of the papers]

I suggested that we really should have a proper look at Laurel Richardson's paper next time we meet... The end is particularly good, especially if we want to take up this 'writing group' idea... I'm hoping to read a bit more about writing groups before we meet... Anyone been in one..? Tell us more, here and/or there... Please, if you read just one thing, make it this...

Heather also recommended a paper by Carolyn Ellis that she really liked. So that's listed too.

And following on from the discussion about the afterlives of our work, who reads what so what can/should we say about whom, aaargh - an old chestnut - I've added a third paper, by Roger Sanjek, in which he describes his attempts to shape readings of his (1998) ethnography The future of us all: race and politics in New York City.

more on installation...

Wow Emma, thanks for the full report, having had to duck out it was good to get caught up.
I was really interested to read about the conversation about writing as installation that had stemed from Richards comment on the problems with writing about installation art. This is obviously something close to my own heart having tried to give a seminar paper about the installation art expereince. What i was trying to open up room for in that account of installation art was the suggestion that installation art as a medium centralises the expereince of the viewer - ie it is in part this expereince that produces the work- the work is incompete without this element. In contrast to the accounts of representational practice ( ie landscape art /writing what ever) this sort of understanding of the art experience develops the viewer ( and/or reader if we are to consider Ian's suggestion of writing as installation) as always already ( to use that hidously overused phrase (sorry!!)) a part of the work. Thus there is never one complete interpretation/expereince, in fact the work does not exist until it is experienced. Given these medium conditions - which are so integral to installation art - there is no sense in which anyone who was writing about installation art ( and any art object or art history since Duchamp) would really desire to produce anything other than a partial account of installation practice, the problem obviously comes when there is an expection of somehow a complete account, or when the writing is such that it develops the rhetroic of a complete and authoriatian account. The ethics of this move mean that the expereince of the work is one in which responsiblity for its interpretation lies as much with the viewer (or reader ) as with the artist ( or the writer ) ( lets get rid of that intentionalist fallacy ! ). Anyway- sorry for the blurb but i was really annoyed to have missed this bit of the discussion as this intersection of ethnogprahy and art is prescily where my interests lie and i had been thinking quite a bit about the way in which this conception of installation practice works with so many of these problems of representation (which is really obviously really given the history of the medium) and actually without the content of the work risks becoming just another rant on the mis-understandings of certain 'ideas' of practices other/ in addition to representation...

Anyway- sorry to be so all over the place and random, if anyone wants to talk about this more please let me know, i have found nothing as yet ( apart from my own witterings) on writing installation expereinces, but more generally on writing the art expereince with a particual post structualist bent see James Elkins book 'Our beautiful dry and distant texts'. Thanks for reading hatti

Notes from meeting number three

The third meeting, the first one I’ve been to so far. This time the group included myself, Heather, Richard, Justin, Ian, Hatti, a green teapot, Kerry, Debs, Huw, Lynne and a bit later on David. We had mostly read some of the readings – Susanne Gannon’s paper, Laurel Richardson’s book chapter, or shorter paper – though none of the readings had been read by everyone. Anyway, we began altogether and here is my impression of some of what came out, in no particular order …

We were, through the readings, mainly talking about writing and the concerns surrounding how we write about the other, how or can we represent an out-there, returning to the politics of writing and for what and who we are writing anyway? Maybe we’ve turned, or are turning, into a writing group?

May be that’s what much of it is about anyway? The struggle to write. To make sense of and choose a position within the endless circle we find ourselves in when writing about the other, or the ‘out-there’, which is also always a writing of self, which is also always a writing of other, or ‘out-there’. We cannot pull apart the self and other or the in-here and the out-there, and we can only ever partially write it.

Writing is then always a translation or mediation, it is another reality. Richard told us of writing about viewing an artist’s installation and the impossibility of representing what it was he saw, may be, Ian suggested, the writing should be understood as another installation, an installation of an installation.

Writing creates the out-there and other through ourselves. What we write cannot say ‘the out-there is like THIS’ but only this is what I understand it to be. And as Susanne Gannon highlights in her paper, the I understanding and the me-stories need also to be unsettled with the uncertainties and multiplicities of the I and me. But then will we not just end up in a mess, lost in a fragmentary writing? Do we risk losing coherence, authority or politics in what we communicate?

Hatti suggested a paper that talks about how to write the mess – not John Law, something else – I think she’s mentioned it earlier in this blog.

We’ve returned again to the politics of it all – how different regimes constrain our writing and the choices we make to work within them or outside of them, perhaps challenging them to shift their boundaries. Who are these people we’re writing for anyway and how are they involved in our work in the first place?

We talked often of writing for academic audiences, but some of us are also writing for policy makers and other audiences. Our work is often caught up in powerful relationships – the funder and fundee, the host and guest. How is it affecting what we do and write? How does it situate our ethics? How similar are the relationships we are each in and are these replicated for those people who may be our ‘hosts’?

I’ve scribbled a lot of questions. We each may have quite different answers and ways of doing. We each take particular positions, adopt particular and partial I’s or me’s. No position is right or better. Our positions are not static or singular we may shift around through our texts, we may be in the foreground and in the background – both and neither. Wait a minute you bunch of hypocrites – didn’t you say last time that it’s better to be consistent or something like that? I don’t know I wasn’t even there.

Sometimes it’s worth just writing – just starting and letting the writing form itself – go for it – write – write yourself an email – then once it’s out there it can be played around with and justified, if justification is necessary.

So what next …
Heather suggests reading Heartful Autoethnography by Caroline Ellis – she will add a link

Maybe we should also read something about different audiences – linking back to the politics of ethnography – let’s look at the blog that Huw has already suggested dealing with how anthropological work is being misused by government and military

Ian suggests we all try to read that Richardson book chapter, then we can really talk through some of her ideas on writing.

And don’t we need to have something real to talk about – some of our own writing? Yes, we have agreed to share 2 pages of our own existing, or made to measure text before we next meet (like Heather has already done) – writing which might raise some of the issues that have come up so far, something to talk through - of course in a constructive and supportive way – that goes without saying we hope.

We meet next in just over a month – Wednesday 30th April 3-5pm.

Hope this has done the trick.

See you all soon
Emma

interesting eg of theory/ethnog mix

Hi guys,

Carol Rambo Ronai, Sketching With Derrida: An Ethnography of a Researcher/Erotic Dancer Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 3, 405-420 (1998)

i came across this a while ago- following up derrida rather than ethnography, but it was referenced in the gannon article so i found it again and it is worth a read- esp, for thinking through those theory/ethnog mixes that we were talking about...

i am interested in following up the way in which certain descriptive tags are given to these kinds of account and what they then imply- here we have 'sketch'- which presumes a certain type of artistic practice, this forms a fascintating pair with the incredibly laboured and gestural images ( such pracitce has art historical precident for being interpreteaed as cathertic self exploration) which accompany the text in Veils the cixious /derrida book gannon talks about) and also other articles on ethnogrpahy i have found ( i can ref if anyone else wants to follow this up ) which discuss 'messy' texts- ( this is NOT john law for those who were in the contemp. debates reading group) - less intersting for me than the use of the artistic vocab but still seems to open up some good questions.

sorry for the witter- see some of you later- i wonder if we could eventually get these sessions video linked to the Birmingham contingent?

alos i can photocopy the article if anyone who is interested does not have access.

hatti

Laurel Richardson paper

For those interested in writing-stories this paper may also be of interest, it is shorter than the aforementioned chapter - Laurel Richardson (2001) 'Getting personal: writing stories' Qualitative Studies in Education 14/1, 33-38.

Kerry

Other readings

Thanks to Kerry for the report.

In the middle of our meeting I remember a discussion about writing ethnography evocatively - the importance of plot, characterisation, etc. - and suggesting that we could read something about this for next time.

So, I've added another reading for our next meeting to the list down there on the left, by Laurel Richardson, which does just this. There seem to be a few copies of different editions of the Handbook of Qualitative Research in Exeter's library, but I should be able to root out my photocopy to lend out to those who can't get to them.

I also remember us agreeing that we didn't all necessarily have to read everything for next time, so please try to do either/or or both. Please also blog in or email references for any of the other readings you bring, mention or think we should read.

The Exploded Paper...a report on meeting 2

In theory the second meeting of the Exnography, ugh group should have focussed on ‘the politics of ethnographic research’. Those of us who attended the initial meeting (except Ian) were/are fairly new to ethnographic research, and all seem to be struggling with the [im]possibilities of how and where to start doing and thinking and writing. We welcomed the idea of a supportive group environment in which to read and discuss, write, share ideas, issues, and problems. We also welcomed the idea of engaging with ethnographic work and issues of ethnographic research within our own discipline*. The politics of ethnographic research seemed a good place to start…in theory.
Here is an attempt to summarize the second meeting…

Some of us who attended the first meeting came back for more – Heather, Kerry, Ian and Richard, and we were joined by Helen, Debs, Lynne, Justin, Harriet, Hattie and Leila, and following the birth of the blog we have also been joined by friends afar, Becky, Emily, Helen, Emma, Mark.…yes, Exnography, ugh is…Expanding (ugh, sorry I couldn’t help myself, it’s just so Extraordinarily Exciting). Most of us had read ‘You want to be careful you don't end up like Ian. He's all over the place': autobiography in/of an expanded field (the director's cut)’ by Ian Cook (he knows a thing or two about ethnography). There’s a link to the Ian’s paper somewhere over there, on the left hand side of page.

The expanded group opened these themes out (and then some), Ian’s paper led to a discussion about the expanded field...boundaries, borders, negotiation, masturbatory processes, rural others/selves, urban explorations, Bill Bunge, gangsters, evocation, institutions, classic monographs, irrational behavior…and much more. Explosive stuff…and we didn’t even touch on the Baxi Bermuda. We didn't get to talk about panic, though some of us wanted to.

So, negotiation was a key issue for many in the group, juggling real and perceived responsibilities to research participants, collaborators, funding bodies, supervisors, examiners etc. We discussed field boundaries and academic border control…how could we best negotiate the spaces between ‘institution’ and ‘out there’, work through our responsibility to others and to the integrity of our own work. It was felt that in cases where critical ethnographic research was necessary to fulfill commitments to research partners autoethnography was a method through which wider experiences could be tackled.

Within the academy, the politics of ethnographic research was still an issue, many of us felt that the traditional research model of ‘thinking – doing – writing’ was problematic (if not impossible) for our ethnographic projects. Spending a large amount of time immersed in theory prior to immersion in the field may be counter-productive, confusing, and often a waste of time. Other members of the group felt that a thick theoretical framework was important. A difference between being theoretically informed and theoretically framed – I guess!? In light of this discussion/debate some members of the group felt that it was important to read some classic monographs, others felt that more recent works were more useful...

So onward we go…we have another paper to read, Susanne Gannon (2006) The (Im)Possibilities of Writing the Self-Writing: French Poststructural Theory and Autoethnography. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 6/4. Those who wish to do so can bring selected readings that may be useful to our explorations, classic monographs not compulsory.

Lesson...in theory nothing goes to plan.

Please join-in, in either room 358 12 March 2pm or virtually in whatever room you choose.

* Human Geography…for those of you who may have accidentally strayed into this blog.

free online methods stuff

Hi guys,

FYI- SAGE are giving free online access until the end of March to many of their methods journals including some we at Exeter appear not to have - worth a look esp. Qualitative Inquiry which seems to have a range of ethnography stuff in it.

( thanks to Ian for mentioning this in a reading group several weeks ago )

Happy reading

Hatti

Hello from Birmingham

I just thought I should say a quick "hello" and introduce myself. I'm afraid that I'm in the middle of re-working a chapter of my thesis (topically...all about the methodology) and juggling a few other things, all of which is keeping me rather busy this week but I promise I will come back here in the near future to participate and blog about all things ethnographic.

So, a quick introduction. My name is Emily and I'm a PhD student at Birmingham. Ian is one of my supervisors and Jon Sadler (an ecologist) is my other. This year I am writing up my thesis and am aiming to finish in October/November time. My work is on ornamental plant hunting (and when the Uni server is back up I'll post the link to my website!).

As well as writing up my thesis I also run my own photography business Emily Quinton Photography. This may seem unconnected with this blog but if you take a look at the blog on my website you will see that I am also busy connecting my photography with my academic work and will be taking an exhibition to this year's RGS/IBG.

I look forward to meeting you all (virtually and hopefully in Exeter/Birmingham too) soon and to seeing where this blog takes us.

Gang Leader for a Day

Couldn't come along to the meeting yesterday (endless lecture writing these past weeks), but just had to share this with you: a book by Sudhir Venkatesh called Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Crosses the Line. Published last month. In the same vein as the reading for Contemporary Debates on illegal organ donorship, this is a naive south Asian man who walks into the projects in Chicago with a questionnaire asking the inhabitants: "What does it feel like to be young, poor and black?". He then gets taken hostage overnight, and then becomes a confidante to the leader, and understands the social structures and strange economics of crack gangs in the projects. Absolutely riveting. And from that naive start he is now Professor of Sociology at Columbia. 

Here is the New York Times review of the book. So riveting it kept me up til 4am. And a strange entry into the 'mainstream' for ethnography: on the one hand we are complicit in voyeurism, on the other hand we have a complete first-person point of view of the trials and tribulations of qualitative 'hanging out', where the gang leader himself takes one look at the proffered questionnaire and says "Sh*t. That's not how you find out that information - you have to hang out with the people, get to know them..." 

Post from Emma

Hello

I am away at the moment, but wanted to join in on this group. And I've just finished reading Ian's chapter - that's quite a chapter... it made me think a lot, which is the point, it also made me laugh along the way, which makes a nice change.

And so perhaps to share a few things - the first is about the struggle of writing research. I am in the midst of a struggle with my thesis writing. It's a frustration with what writing seems to be doing to what I encountered and collected (if those are the right words). How it seems to be simplifying the complexity which is what I had wanted to reveal, but feel only partly able to. How to get around that?

The other thing is about Ian's comment on identity politics and stating exactly where you're coming from. I think I tried to avoid doing this in Cambodia. Not with the group I was doing my research with (we tried to talk about this a lot), but in our relationships with people in the provinces and villages we worked in. We said as a research team that we should attempt to not judge what anyone said, but just listen and try to understand their positions - and we told this to the different people we talked to and spent time with. We thought that by almost hiding our positions people would be less threatened and find it easier to talk 'openly' - looking back that perhaps wasn't the best approach to take? Because of course you cannot avoid being positioned by others, even if you don't do it yourself. And as we listened and observed we not suprisingly encountered contradictions: like the village chief telling us what he thought people in our 'position' would like to know, while we saw his sons doing the opposite and met him later on doing the opposite too. And what do we do with those contradictions, should I expose them as juicy bits of 'data', or keep them silent?

Ok that's enough.

Looking forward to hearing about the meeting.

Bye - Emma

Joining the group

Luckily I already had a Gmail account, so joining this blog community took seconds - would just like to share that with you, as you can be up and posting very quickly indeed. Good stuff.

For those without a Gmail account, let me encourage you in this area as well. Yes, they spy on you, yes they target advertisements at you, yes they're cleverer than you and earn far more money than you. But... I have *never* had any spam in the 1.5 years I've had the account. Now that's pretty impressive.

Look forward to Meeting no. 2

Politics of research - anthropology debates

Hi all

As our theme for the next session is on the politics of research (and as I mentioned it last time), some of you may be interested in checking out an on-going debate on the way research into counter-insurgency is funded in the UK and elsewhere. This is currently a hot topic in anthropology (check out the debates on http://blog.theasa.org/ ) and has just popped up on the Critical Geography Forum, so may be about to start in Geography.

Huw.

Joining as an author

Everyone who expressed an interest in becoming part of this group has been invited to become an author of this blog. These invitations don't seem to have been delivered, though. Apologies.

An alternative way in is to go to https://www.blogger.com/i.g?inviteID=3977163568252612580&blogID=2203797684186730698 and follow the instructions.

Let me know how it goes.

Meeting 2.

The room is booked. 3-5pm, Wednesday 27th February, room 358 in Amory.

Report on meeting, 13th February 2008.

Five of us met today - Hugh, Kerry, Heather, Richard and Ian - to discuss why we were interested in getting together to discuss (our) ethnographic work, how we'd like the group to work, and when we'd like to meet. Many others expressed an interest in becoming involved, but couldn't make the meeting.

Why the group?
We talked a lot about this. We all had different reasons. Most of us felt we were doing 'ethnographic' work that we didn't really get the opportunity to discuss and work through with others. So, we agreed that this would probably end up being part reading group, and part support group for those involved. We also hoped that this could become a place for us to try some of our ethnographic writing on a sympathetic audience when the time was right.

How will it work?
The organisation will evolve, but we thought that we should start with two hour sessions which, roughly speaking, would be divided into one hour discussing a reading, and one hour moving things on through introducing other related readings, experiences, ideas, etc... In practice and over time, everything will no doubt get thoroughly mixed up. We thought that this blog would be a good idea to enable discussions to continue between meetings, if and when people had anything else to say, and/or others unable to come to the meetings to contribute to the discussions.

When / where?
3-5pm every other Wednesday for the foreseeable future. Our next meeting is on 27 February. I will book a room and post it here.

Reading for next time.
The politics of PhD research seemed like an issue that we should tackle first. I suggested that we read a paper about my PhD which discusses these issues. It's available online at http://www.gees.bham.ac.uk/downloads/gesdraftpapers/iancook-directorscut.htm