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

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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…!