Author: Anna

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Eddie and clothes

I tried my first round of wardrobe interviews with Becky over 7 months ago.

I also interviewed Eddie (2 interviews), though his explanations into his wardrobe were less dramatic and revealing. I gained some insights, though. Then I put these on hold and let everything compost. Slow Ontology style.

It has been months, but Wardrobe interviews have not gone away too far. They are always somewhere nearby… I cannot put my finger on what it is that is trying to come out yet, but I find myself primed to the topic. For example, I met a resource officer from Danny’s school at the movie theater and she was unrecognizable–talkative, smiling, friendly, connected–I took note that maybe her uniform made her perform her “resource officer” identity because out of her uniform, she was almost a different person! I really want to speak with a couple of officers about life, work, purpose, laws, education…

Today husband showed me an old (taken 4 years ago) video from our trip to Russia. Little Ed was 10, Danny just turned two. In the video, they are running around at night on the Red Square–all lit, beautiful, sparkly, historically and personally significant landmark, and yet, Eddie’s first comment was “I loved that Old Navy sweatshirt! I wonder what happened to it…” A few seconds later  he made a comment about his green sneakers “I ran those to the ground later in the year!” Clearly, clothes were an important piece, even a space in time processed and labeled in his mind as a “childhood memory.” His “childhood” identity in that video was a reference point for his now, how he perceives himself in the present.

I really want to dog into this deeper.

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Mirka’s validity and aporia

The credibility of research or findings might have more to
do with choices researchers make rather than established and
documented procedures. p.606

even the most rigorous implementation or direct application of textbook analysis approaches does not guarantee increased value of research, trustworthy conclusions, representativeness, or validity. Mechanical application of analytical steps and decontextualized implementation of analysis processes might still avoid the question
of responsibility and decision making, even though situatedness and complexity of analysis processes ask researchers to decide when, how, and why to begin and conclude analysis or other interactions with the data. p.607

“The decision to conclude data analysis is, therefore, always arbitrary and uncertain. There exists no exact way to know or illustrate when analytical processes are finished, saturated, and explanatory of the entire data set. Similarly, it is impossible to say when new themes, linguistic elements, discourses, or insights will no longer emerge or cannot be further identified. At the same time, there exists urgency to report the findings, publish, and write summary reports to funding
agencies. It is with uncertainty that researchers decide analysis does not need to be continued or no more analytical insights might emerge at the moment. This decision becomes even more challenging if researchers continue to interact with data and study participants after systematic or “official” data collection has ended.” p.607

 

Koro-Ljunberg (2010).  Validity, Responsibility, and Aporia. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(60). DOI: 10.1177/107780041037

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Resource Officer Study

A year ago, after the tragic school shooting at Parkland, schools here, in Hernando County, had sheriff deputies posted every day. I was worried, thinking there is intelligence that our county is next. Soon, the sight of a sheriff car and a uniformed officer (a young woman) meeting us parents at Chocachatti every morning and afternoon became the new norm. I remember coming to talk to her about the parking on the lawn situation and the draconian tardy policy. We chatted. She seemed nice, but very much “servant of the law” like with her professional demeanor and formal speech.

A couple of months ago, I received an email from GCA informing us that they almost closed because they could not afford to pay for a resource officer mandated by the new law. The problem was resolved, they said, and this is how I met the incredibly friendly deputy who always smiled a huge smile, seemed to know each kid’s name after a month, and recently even helped my son with a math assignment (not that he needed help, she said she was “just bored”).

I became curious: how do school shootings, new laws, and friendly smiles shape our schools? What do children think when they see a uniformed, armored and armed sheriff deputy every day? What do teachers think? And what of the shooter drills that also, alas, became a regular activity in all area schools? How is our education being impacted? And who are they, resource officers who call my son “Batman” because he used to have a Batman backpack last year, and help my other son with academics?

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Butler “Undoing Gender”

The Hegelian tradition links desire with recognition, claiming that
desire is always a desire for recognition and that it is only through the
experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted as socially
viable beings. That view has its allure and its truth, but it also misses
a couple of important points. The terms by which we are recognized
as human are socially articulated and changeable. And sometimes the
very terms that confer “humanness” on some individuals are those that
deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status,
producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human. p. 2

” I may feel that without some recognizability I cannot live. But I may also feel that the terms by which I am recognized make life unlivable. This is the juncture from which critique emerges, where critique is understood as an
interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained in order to open
up the possibility of different modes of living; in other words, not to
celebrate difference as such but to establish more inclusive conditions
for sheltering and maintaining life that resists models of assimilation.” p. 3

 

“The human is understood differentially depending on its race, the legibility of that race, its morphology, the recognizability of that morphology, its sex, the perceptual verifiability of that sex, its ethnicity, the categorical understanding of that ethnicity. Certain humans are recognized as less than human, and that
form of qualified recognition does not lead to a viable life. Certain humans are not recognized as human at all, and that leads to yet another order of unlivable life. If part of what desire wants is to gain recognition, then gender, insofar as it is animated by desire, will want recognition as well.” p. 2
My comment: it gets recognition!

 

“If I am someone who cannot be without doing, then the conditions of my doing are, in part, the conditions of my existence. If my doing is dependent on what is done to me or, rather, the ways in which I am done by norms, then the possibility of my persistence as an “I” depends upon my being able to do
something with what is done with me.” p 3

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Foucault “Masked Philosopher” Interview 1984

The masked Philosopher Foucault Kritzman 1988

“Our attention tends to be arrested by the activities of faces that come and go, emerge and disappear.
Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard. With the potential reader, the surface of contact was unrippled. The effects of the book might land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of. A name makes reading too easy.” p. 323, 324

“Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to through of familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.” p. 328

“I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means; the desire is there; the people capable of doing such work exist. So what is our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate. We mustn’t adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop “bad” information from invading and stifling the “good.” We must rather increase the possibility for movement backwards and forwards. This would not lead, as people often fear, to uniformity and leveling down, but, on the contrary, to the simultaneous existence and differentiation of these various networks.” p. 328

“…what we are suffering from is not a void, but inadequate means for thinking about everything that is happening. There is an overabundance of things to be known: fundamental, terrible, wonderful, funny, insignificant, and crucial at the same time. And there is an enormous curiosity, a need, a desire to know.” p. 327

“Books, universities, learned journals are also information media” p. 329

“The problem is to know how to exploit the differences [between teaching and popularization, see two paragraphs above], whether we ought to set up a reserve, a “cultural park,” for delicate species of scholars threatened by the rapacious inroads of mass information, while the rest of the space would be a huge market for shoddy products.” p. 329

“The right to knowledge must not be reserved to a particular age-group or to certain categories of people, but that one must be able to exercise it constantly and in many different ways.” p. 329

“What is philosophy if a way of reflecting, not so much on what is true and what is false, as on our relationship to truth?” p. 330

Philosophy in activity: “the movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules–that is philosophy. The displacement and transformation of frameworks of thinking, the changing of received values and all the work that has been done to think otherwise, to do something else, to become other than what one is–that, too is philosophy.

(…) it should also be added that [philosophy] is a way of interrogating ourselves: if this is the relationship that we have with truth, how must we behave?” p. 330

“Those who, for once in their lives, have found a new tone, a new way of looking, a new way of doing, those people, I believe, will never feel the need to lament that the world is error, that history is filled with people of no consequence, and that it is time for others to keep quiet so that at last the sound of their disapproval may be heard…” p. 330

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Coming to Postqual

I consider myself fortunate: unlike numerous other researchers, I had the privilege of taking a “formal” Postqualitative Inquiry course. Those who dabble in postqual came to it on their own.

I am also fortunate because I am a mother of three, a wife, an immigrant, and also a graduate student. Research questions are around me. I never lack ideas for research. Those that make to the surface and are fortunate enough to stand out, make to the next level where they compete with one another, evolve, and ideally, find their way to the pages of my research journal. More often then not, they fizzle out by the time the long pickup line at my son’s school is over. I noticed many of my ideas do not get completely forgotten. They echo and come back to the surface of consciousness in no particular order or pattern and remind me of multiplicities.

At some point, I decided to assemble a few short thought experiments and musings into a book. I envisioned the assemblage as a primer for students new to Postqual.  Of course the idea of a primer reinforces the  method,  a method of instruction in this case, and method, of course, is at odds with the very idea of postqualitative inquiry.  Nevertheless, I did it because I recalled my own struggles with breaking away from the logic behind the more conventional research methods.

I first engaged with postqual in Qualitative Inquiry II class, a year before postqualitative. The word “postqualitative” was never uttered; yet, the course was built around Jackson and Mazzei’s “Thinking With Theory in Qualitative Research.” We went through the chapters sequentially, one by one–Derrida, Spivak, Foucault, Butler, Deleuze, Barad… I thoroughly enjoyed the readings and my professor Dr. Richards, who let me experiment with the format of our weekly class assignment. I dusted off my husband’s huge, long-forgotten set of Prizmacolor pencils and sketched; I put together collages that documented my thought. I had no trouble with the concept of “plugging in” and the theory. In the same class, I experimented with autoethnography and wrote several short excerpts about mother my autistic daughter. I wrestled with painful issues–who I am as a mother and what does it mean to be a good one. I thought about normality and how my daughter and we as a family perceive it. I have made amazing discoveries and deconstructed personal ideas about research and researchers. Somewhere toward the end, I talked to Jenni who pointed out in passing that poststructuralist thought seeks to decenter the human. This struck me like lightning in the clear sky–the entire semester I labored under the thought that qualitative research is all about humanity. How then, do poststructuralist theories fit in my conclusions? I obviously did it all wrong, but somehow, it did not feel like a disaster. That summer, I wrote a lot in my researcher/journal blog and read half of Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization.” In the fall, I took Arts Based Research class and struggled with the very concept of research, particularly, with its purpose. I wondered what counts as data and how can art possibly pass for research. Then I started reading Manning’s The Minor Gesture and came across

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Assemblage

“In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture.
All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage.
A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable.” pp 3, 4

“A Thousand Plateaus”
Trans. Massumi 1987, ISBN 0-8166-1401-6

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Rhizome

“The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available— always n – 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n – 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.

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Politics, Neoliberal academy, and, and, and

I have been trying to stay away from politics, but it is a difficult thing to do–they sip through interactions with others. I hate it because it demands of me a political stance, and I resist it because I know the world is much more complicated than that. I could care less where I stand–I have become wary of choosing packs and having to conform to the conventions, expectations, and rules that come with its membership. I tried belonging–grew up as a Soviet, then later, I was a Christian; enough said–I do not like memberships.

…I am not a troublemaker, I am simply curious. And now, way beyond my passionate twenties, I no longer want to change the world–I just want to make it better, help everyone co-exist, find ways for everyone to get along and thrive somehow. Yet, Trump’s election broke me–I became so emotionally invested that the night Trump won, I felt dead. Specifically, what died was the part that believed in human’s virtue, respected opposing points of view. In its wake, I felt disgust, disbelief, disappointment with other fellow humans, and anger.  With time, the pain had subsided, but not the disgust, nor the constant awareness of my ethically problematic position as a Russian national and a permanent resident of the United States. Once again, I feel like I am forced to choose camps, and I refuse to do it.

When I became aware of the term “neoliberal academy” about a year ago, I knew in which camp I belong. My enculturation into the academic persona was easy–I am easily persuaded and sensitive to the affective power of the written word, and academic literature is no exception. When I read, I always search for the protagonists, the antagonists, for stances, philosophies, messages, and so forth; I like to know where I step next.

Neoliberal is bad. The principle of parsimony is impotent. Complexity and ambiguity are the answer. If I had a bow, I’d slap it on this neat package and put it on display to enjoy it.

Today, I question the evilness of neoliberal. What would my world, my time look like without the efficiency, the productivity of the neoliberal paradigm? Would I be able to reconcile my yearning for a simpler life on a small farm with my desire to be a part of bustling city life, the modern conveniences and comforts afforded by financial security? How do I work out the gravitational pull of adventure and cultural explorations through food and long-distance travel while I worry about the pollution I create when I fly or drive, or enjoy imported foods? I am as much a product of the environment as the producer of the environment. I am a phenomenon, and so is the neoliberal order, and the ecologies, and the species, and all the things, concepts, and events that I hate, love, or constantly interrogate in order to decide whether I should hate or love them.

I am entangled with politics and world orders, but I do not need to hate them, love them, or devote my life to changing or preserving them–I want to live in the moment, becoming with the world around me as it becomes with me. I do not want to be anxious about my employability after graduation–I want to stay curious and see where it takes us as a family.