Research journal
Vaillant, G.E. (1993). The Wisdom of the Ego. Harvard University Press.
“Social scientists tend to study what they can measure rather than what really interests them. In this way, they sometimes resemble the proverbial drunk who searched for his car keys, not where he had lost them, but under the street lamp where the light was better.” ch 5
Article about Forbes who started the collection of pigments and colors at Harvard:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/treasures-from-the-color-archive
“To experience the power of great painting and the romance of the original art work, as Ruskin passionately argued, the viewer must be able to recover, even to imaginatively reënact, the artist’s moment of creation.” (para. 14)
Losing your native tongue unmoors you not only from your own early life but from the entire culture that shaped you. You lose access to the books, films, stories, and songs that articulate the values and norms that you’ve absorbed. You lose the embrace of an entire community or nation for whom your family’s odd quirks are not quirks all. You lose your context.
An unexpected source of my profound source Mozilla Firefox suggested article and link to Quarts
A story about Claude Shannon
https://qz.com/1365059/a-universal-way-to-solve-problems-from-a-mathematical-genius/
”
Shannon’s reasoning, however, was that it isn’t until you eliminate the inessential from the problem you are working on that you can see the core that will guide you to an answer.
In fact, often, when you get to such a core, you may not even recognize the problem anymore, which illustrates how important it is to get the bigger picture right before you go chasing after the details. Otherwise, you start by pointing yourself in the wrong direction.
Details are important and useful. Many details are actually disproportionately important and useful relative to their representation. But there are equally as many details that are useless.
If you don’t find the core of a problem, you start off with all of the wrong details, which is then going to encourage you to add many more of the wrong kinds of details until you’re stuck.
Starting by pruning away at what is unimportant is how you discipline yourself to see behind the fog created by the inessential. That’s when you’ll find the foundation you are looking for.
Finding the true form of the problem is almost as important as the answer that comes after.”
What is interesting, is that Mozilla Firefox’s algorithm suggested this article based on my clicking in the past week (I typically do not do this due to lack of time and resist the urge to click Firefoxes suggestions because they are distractions. Yet, yesterday, I ended up reading an article about slow walkers and turned into a simulation for Dr. Richards. Today, I found this and several others. Should I be concerned that my journey as a researcher is not being overseen by a string of code (a very sophisticated, research-based code, but code nevertheless?). Should I perceive my thought development is unauthentic? Or is it merely technology-aided?
This ability of code to predict my interests to such a degree that I canNOT resist the urge to click the link contrary to my conscious decision, makes me think of how easily I can be connected to other readers and seekers of truth, and ultimately, it makes me feel unspecial, unoriginal, blah. Here I am contemplating the importance of thinking environments, creativity, human experience; I am reveling in own humanity, and boom! Here is the reality of human (my own) predictability fed to a machine as a formula and processed as suggestions that (most upsetting part) WORK!
Leavy, P. (2014). Method meets art, second edition: Arts-based research practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.comCreated from usf on 2018-08-27 09:02:12.
“Narrative researchers attempt to avoid the objectification of research participants and aim to preserve the complexity of human experience (Josselson, 2006). The turn to narrative can be attributed to a confluence of other factors as well. Stefinee Pinnegar and J. Gary Daynes (2007) note four converging phenomena with respect to the turn to narrative inquiry: (1) the relationship of the researched and researcher, (2) the move from numbers to words as data, (3) a shift from the general to the particular, and (4) the emergence of new epistemologies.” p. 42
Just thinking:
So far, qualitative researchers effectively defended the importance of their subjectivity and solidified their presence in own studies. Similarly, we stretched the boundaries of what counts as data by turning to narratives, music, drawings, even fiction, and other forms of artistic expression. How, then, do we define research? What makes a difference between the work of a “proper” social scientist and a journalist? Why are some pieces beelined into academic databases and others exist in digital spaces of the world wide web?
Is it the degree that makes researcher a researcher? The formal training? Does one have to have a degree in teaching to be a teacher? Does one have to go through chef training to bring superior culinary experiences and then discuss their methods and undergirding cultural experiences? Is “research” a term either deliberately sustained or occurred as a by-product of neoliberal worldview?
“Here I am following Henri Bergson, who suggests that the best problem is the one that opens up an intuitive process, not the one that already carries within itself its fix. A solvable problem was never really a problem, Bergson reminds us. Only when a question is in line with the creation of a problem is it truly operational. Most academic questions are of the solvable, unproblematic sort. What the undercommons seeks are real problems, problems intuited and crafted in the inquiry.”
“The challenge, as Bergson underscores, involves crafting the conditions not to solve problems, or to resolve questions, but to illuminate regions of thought through which problems- without- solutions can be intuited.” p. 10
ISBN 10: 0–203–64260–0 (eBook)
Routledge, 2006. Edited by Jean Khalfa
Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa
“The caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason is the origin; the grip in which reason holds non-reason to extract its truth as madness, fault or sickness derives from that, and much further off.” p. XXVIII
Preface to the 1961 edition.
#Abandonment is his (a leper’s) salvation, and exclusion offers an unusual form of communion.” p.6. –They were to live away from everyone, to observe life and worship but to never partake; yet, they were not separssred from the grad e of God like the leper who died on a rich man`s doorstep and was taken to heaven.
“Once leprosy had gone, and the figure of the leper was no more than a
distant memory, these structures still remained. The game of exclusion
would be played again, often in these same places, in an oddly similar
fashion two or three centuries later. The role of the leper was to be played
by the poor and by the vagrant, by prisoners and by the ‘alienated’, and
the sort of salvation at stake for both parties in this game of exclusion
is the matter of this study. The forms this exclusion took would continue,
in a radically different culture and with a new meaning, but remaining
essentially the major form of a rigorous division, at the same time social
exclusion and spiritual reintegration.” p.6
Venerial disease took over leprosy:
” despite their longstanding right to stay in these segregated areas, there were too few of them to make their voices heard, and the venereal, more or less everywhere, had soon taken their place” p.7
“Locked in the ship from which he could not escape, the madman was handed over to the thousand armed river, to the sea where all paths cross, and the great uncertainty that surrounds all things. A prisoner in the midst of the ultimate freedom, on the most open road of all, chained solidly to the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence, the prisoner of the passage. It is not known where he will land, and when he lands, he knows not whence he came. His truth and his home are the barren wasteland between two lands that can never be his own.” p. 11
“the link between water and madness is deeply rooted in the dream of the Western man.” p. 11
“a long series of ‘follies’ which as in the past stigmatised vices or faults but blamed them not on pride, a lack of charity or the neglect of Christian virtues but on a great unreason which could be blamed on no one in particular but which dragged everyone along in its wake in a sort of tacit agreement. The denouncing of madness became a general form of moral critique. In farces and soties, the character of the Fool, Idiot or Simpleton took on an ever-greater importance. He was no longer familiar and ridiculous, but exterior to the action, and took centre stage as the harbinger of truth, playing the complementary, inverse role of the figure of the fool in tales and satires. If madness drags everyone into a blindness where all bearings are lost, then the madman by contrast brings everyone back to their own truth. ” p.13
Culture in the middle ages: “Madness and the figure of the madman take on a new importance for the ambiguousness of their role: they are both threat and derision, the vertiginous unreason of the world, and the shallow ridiculousness of men.” p. 12, 13
“Madness too made an appearance in the academic arena, becoming a self-reflexive object of discourse. Madness was denounced and defended, and proclaimed to be nearer to happiness and truth than reason itself.” p. 13
Here, I see a parallel with autism. Persons with autism are ascribed special mental powers, and some discourses result in a challenge to what normality is.
Beautifully put logic
Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells. The death’s head showed itself to be a vessel already empty, for madness was the being-already-there of death.53 Death’s conquered presence, sketched out in these everyday signs, showed not only that its reign had already begun, but also that its prize was a meagre one. Death unmasked the mask of life, and nothing more: to show the skull beneath the skin it had no need to remove beauty or truth, but merely to remove the plaster of the tawdry clothes. The carnival mask and the cadaver share the same fixed smile. But the laugh of madness is an anticipation of the rictus grin of death, and the fool, that harbinger of the macabre, draws death’s sting.” p. 14, 15
“The substitution of the theme of madness for that of death is not the
sign of a rupture, but rather of a new twist within the same preoccupation.
It is still the nothingness of existence that is at stake, but this nothingness
is no longer experienced as an end exterior to being, a threat and a
conclusion: it is felt from within, as a continuous and unchanging form of
life. Whereas previously the madness of men had been their incapacity to
see that the end of life was always near, and it had therefore been necessary
to call them back to the path of wisdom by means of the spectacle of
death, now wisdom meant denouncing folly wherever it was to be found,
and teaching men that they were already no more than the legions of the
dead, and that if the end of life was approaching, it was merely a reminder
that a universal madness would soon unite with death.” p. 15
“It was no longer the end of time and the end of the world that would demonstrate that it was madness not to have worried about such things. Rather, the rise of madness, its insidious, creeping presence showed that the final catastrophe was always near: the madness of men brought it nigh and made it a foregone conclusion.” p. 15
Although it was still the case that the vocation of the Image was essentially to say, and its role was to transmit something that was consubstantial with language, the time had nonetheless come when it no longer said exactly the same thing. By its own means painting was beginning the long process of experimentation that would take it ever further from language, regardless of the superficial identity of a theme. Language and figure still illustrate the same fable of madness in the moral world, but they are beginning to take different directions, indicating, through a crack that was still barely perceptible, the great divide that was yet to come in the Western experience of madness.”
“But if knowledge is important for madness, it is not because madness might hold some vital secrets: on the contrary, it is the punishment for useless, unregulated knowledge. If it is the truth about knowledge, then all it reveals is
that knowledge is derisory, and that rather than addressing the great book
of experience, learning has become lost in the dust of books and in sterile
discussions, knowledge made mad by an excess of false science.” p. 22
“madness here is not linked to the world and its subterranean forms, but rather to man and his frailties, his dreams and illusions. The dark cosmic forces at work in madness that are so apparent in the work of Bosch are absent in Erasmus. Madness no longer lies in wait for man at every crossroads; rather, it slips into him, or is in fact a subtle relationship that man has with himself” p. 23
An interesting quote from a study performed with people with Intellectual Disabilities:
“Faith viewed herself as a helper and a protector of individuals with disability, while at the same time distancing herself from relating to them as a person with a disability. It is evident that Faith’s personal identity was not wrapped up in having Down syndrome. This struggle with identity seemed to be a culmination of parental and family expectations, the particular opportunities she had had in her life, and other community influences that recognized her as a high functioning young adult.
Faith struggled with her sense of belonging. She seemed driven by a determination to prove to the world that she was just like everybody else, worthy to stand in comparison to any of her typically developing work colleagues. Her struggles with her own identity may, in some respects, have hindered her own ability to feel a sense of belonging. In not identifying with her disability, she denied the reality she encountered, making it difficult to cope.”
Grimmet, K (2018). Using Photo-Elicitation to Break the Silence. In M. L. Boucher, Ed. Participant Empowerment Through Photo-elicitation in Ethnographic Education Research New Perspectives and Approaches, Springer, p. 79.
Page 80:
It is important to balance belonging. I am not advocating for total inclusion nor
am I saying that there should be no segregated activities. For example, as a teacher, we have segregated awards that only teachers can win. People like to be with those with whom we share common likes, dislikes, hobbies, gifts, and talents. I believe there needs to be a balance of opportunities in which individuals with disability can belong to and find meaning and worth as members or participants. When we only provide opportunities within segregated environments (i.e. Special Olympics, Book Club), I question if those segregated groups represent individuals and opportunities within the participant’s spheres of influence. A person’s spheres of influence are an
example of Bronfenbrenner and Morris’s (2006) framework which demonstrates how multiple systems (spheres) interact with one another (influence), thus playing a vital role in the development of the individual. Are these segregated environments representative of the communities and people who directly and indirectly interact and impact their everyday lives, their spheres of influence?
Quality of Life Is Fluid
“as people grow, the QoL changes. As we age, we have continuous opportunities to develop skills and try new adventures—all of which
provide personal and career development and occasions for developing
self-determination. Maybe our skills lead us to more money, which can change the places we live, the food we eat, the continued opportunities we may have. This fluid or dynamic nature is evident as one’s employment status, financial security, or health may waiver at any point in life, resulting in a positive or negative shift in one’s personal QoL.
Life is ever changing, in a permanent state of transition, and thereby one’s QoL
if fluid, modifying and adjusting according to the ups and downs, the new and the old, and other variations life throws our way.” p. 83
Parent’s Guilt:
“Carter’s mother, Jeanette felt responsible for Carter’s disability and this colored all her decisions about how to provide for Carter’s long-term wellbeing. For example, she felt that Carter was unable to take part in the study without her being responsible for taking the photos on his behalf. Jeanette’s apparent sense of guilt extended beyond Carter’s disability; she reported frequent worries about whether she paid enough attention to her other two children. Jeanette remembers how stressed she became trying to “keep up with [all of Carter’s homework]. [I felt like [I] ignored our other two kids.” Throughout the study, Jeanette remained preoccupied by guilt she placed upon herself for his disability and struggled with the additional responsibilities that come with having a child with a disability.” p.84
“She is so high functioning in many ways…that people begin to assume she is [high functioning] in every situation. She could be taken advantage of so easily.” p. 86
“any person’s Quality of life (QoL) cannot be judged by outsiders. It is personal. The quality of experiences and the quantity of opportunities individuals have to develop independence and self-determination, to be socially included, and to address their physical well-being all impact QoL. QoL is a messy concoction of elements (material, physical, emotional well-being, self-determination, interpersonal relations, personal development, social inclusion, and rights) that work together to create positive life-long outcomes for individuals with disability. As researchers, we may be able to identify components or develop a framework that contributes to QoL, but we cannot assign a given value to any of the identified component(s) nor suggest what QoL should or should not represent.” p. 87
“The discrepancy between Carter’s independence at home versus at work and out in the community is notable.” p. 87
“sometimes we may need to judge more wisely when to hang on and when to let go of our loved ones with a disability. Our perceived protection over their lives could be the one thing that hinders them the most.” p. 88