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