My problem with, and (visual) response to (some) implementation science.

I am currently contemplating alternatives to traditional models of implementation (i.e. putting plans, or 'evidence' into action) using visual methods, and this is a very early note for my thinking.

This post has two parts:

• Part 1: My context and problems with some implementation science. 
• Part 2: My early speculative thinking about how visual methods may improve things.

PART 1 - context and (possible) problems with implementation science.

Context

As I’ve noted elsewhere in this blog, and on my Twitter feed, I am an educator-researcher in English higher education, with a background in arts based community work and policy, practice and management roles in local government children’s services. If the label means anything to you, I might call myself a visual ethnographer, that is, I’m interesting in working with visual/material methods to ask questions about how things get done. That’s one of the reasons why I am passionate about using visual methods to promote meaningful engagement with people, help them bring their contribution to activity, and to materialise and mobilise knowledge in health, education and care systems. 

I one of my roles, I enjoy being an implementation lead for work with children and young people within an applied health research collaborative in the North East of England. In this role, I have the pleasure of working with a variety of colleagues who are researching with different sorts of communities. This fascinates me, particularly because I have a ‘hybrid’ professional identity (artist-ethnographer and educator with interests in inequality, inclusion and children and topics such as professional practice, policy, and public administration) meaning I like to perspective shift, or consider different ways we can consider phenomena.

Q. What's the problem with implementation science? (if anything)

I work in some diverse communities of practice, including in local government and in applied health research. All are concerned with implementation, or putting plans into action. Particularly in the latter, health research, the discipline of implementation science is influential. Bauer et al. define implementation science as:

"the scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other EBPs into routine practice, and, hence, to improve the quality and effectiveness of health services" (Bauer et al., 2015:1)

At the risk of over-simplification, I’ll say that one of the drivers of implementation science has been the “evidence-based practice” (EBP) movement, which has

“…popularised the notion that research findings and empirically supported (‘evidence based’) practices...should be more widely spread and applied in various settings to achieve improve health and welfare of populations” (Nilsen & Birken, 2020: 2).

I am more familiar with policy implementation (as a quasi public administration person), but that gives me some familiarity with the field as there are overlapping issues. However, in making a case for different approaches within implementation science, I don't want to misrepresent implementation science as totally "inflexible" or "logical-rational" (also assuming these characteristics are always problematic). There are a variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches that exist within the implementation science world, which I am still getting to know, including:

• process models: focus on translating research into practice through action models or similar. 
• determinant frameworks: describe barriers and enablers to implementation; understand influences.
• classic theories: existing relevant theories from sociology, phsycology etc., applied to the field. 
• implementation theories: a variety of models developed by implementation researchers (e.g. May et al.'s [2015] normalisation process theory).
• evaluation frameworks: identifies aspects of implementation that can be evaluated to determine success. 

(adapted from Nilsen & Birken, 2020:11)

However, for now, I am speculating about the general limitations of implementation science. My assumption (let's be honest and get this into the open) is that implementation science, particularly those varieties strongly influenced by "evidence based practice" (EBP) approaches share a paradigm (a way of seeing, interacting with, and making sense of the world) that I find problematic. For now, I will say that this involves:

• not acknowledging the differences that exist between concepts/models and action/practice (e.g. differences in complexity and dynamism),
• ...leading to limited consideration of factors that are relevant to implementation (e.g. sensory, material, affective or other factors, depending on the theory)
• ...or more fundamentally, automatically privileging certain ontological (i.e. what is reality),  epistemological (i.e. what can we know and how?) or axiological (i.e. value) positions as their basis. This is perhaps more fiddly as an issue, but it might involve:
• assuming there is a 'one way relationship' between causes and effects (an ontological issue). 
• considering knowledge, and therefore evidence, as a singular, fixed blueprint for action (an epistemological issue). 
• assuming that it is Ok to impose 'evidence based' solutions on populations or communities (an axiological issue).

This is an educated guess, but I can say that at minimum, those critically reflecting on implementation science will at least recognise that different approaches may have advantages and disadvantages, so

"Selecting an appropriate model, theory or framework [for implementation science] often represents a considerable challenge..." (Nilsen & Birken, 2020:23)

and that all approaches are being developed incrementally and through testing, so

"it is also important to explore how the current theoretical approaches can be further developed to better address implementation challenges" (Ibid: 24)

That is my starting point, and at the moment, the onus is on me to see if the evidence stacks up with my concerns.

PART 2 - visual thinking and experimenting to expand the paradigm

Because this blog is about my development of visual methods, and related theoretical and practical topics, I'll now get more practical. In addition to careful reading to test out my guesses (see above), I'm developing by doing. The example I have relates to an informal creative project I am leading with friends and colleages (a research colleage, two artists and a film-maker). My aim is to produce a short film, speaking to the topic of expanding the paradigm of implementation science, hopefully to be published in the Blog of the academic journal BMJ Medical Humanities. 

I specifically reflect on my experience of developing this film project, as it has forced me to think through some very provisional ideas, some of which I began to express in my previous post. This post is about the process behind those statements, and how I have come to realise how attached I am to aspects of the dominant implementation paradigm! Quite rightly, my challenge starts with me owning up to my position and tensions before I judge others.

I started off talking with my colleage Catherine about different ways of thinking about child health. We got talking about the tradition of artists' manifestos, and I cheekily suggested that we should write an artists' take on implementation science: a set of propositions, if you like. To cut a long (and ongoing) story short, we then invited some co-collaborators to play with us. At the start of the project, I sketched a timeline for the film, setting out the various (sound, visual, spoken) elements.

The reality is that the project is taking longer than anticipated, partly because it has been a busy academic time of year (marking, funding deadlines etc.). The down side to this was that, from my point of view, the project became less dymanic and lost a sense of improvisation and I found myself, unintentionally thinking in quite a traditional way about moving from idea to action. To kick start things, I contacted Dex Hannon, one of the collaborative team, and we agreed to try some collaborative painting, to wake us up and to give us some time to reflect on what we were doing. Dex was great at helping me question the process.

The images below have been adapted from our co-painting session, and next to each I will add some of the experiences that co-painting gave us that are now forming what we want to say about implementation science (I'll leave it to you to think how these four experiences may do this, and we will keep working on it!):

Experience 1: The act of painting helped me appreciate how much any 'end result' is determined by pre-articulated, embodied, material and sensory factors. We had to handle brushes and paint, and moved around the canvas which was placed on the floor of Dex's studio. Thinking, and 'results' were intimatley bound up with acting. 

Experience 2: Painting together was very much about connection, relating and response. How we related, and the athmosphere that was generated co-constituted the painting. Dex reflected on how brave one had to be, how an activity like co-painting required us to ditch our egos, and to become attuned and to move together. 

Experience 3: The practice of co-painting was an emergent one, that is, it could not be pre-formed and planned beyond what Erin Manning calls its "initial conditions" (Manning, 2012; Manning & Massumi, 2014). We noticed things, were moved by things and were only able to act as we saw things starting to happen.

Experience 4: Innovation came as factors interacted in the moment to co-constiture effects, they were more than the sum of the parts. I thought of these as encounters, events, or flashes as we acted with the paint, making 'agental cuts' (Barad, 2007). At one point, we saw a section of the painting that had just produced a sense of depth, and our 'knowing' or insight came as our attention and the paint-canvas connected at that moment. 

In conclusion, I don't yet have one. However, I have realised how much my process of work had been rooted in some of the paradigm shared by evidence-based implementation science I had been questioning. As we take the projhect forward, or it takes us forward, we will pay attention to issues of embodiment, relationship, emergence and co-constitution. 

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bauer, M.S., Damschroder, L., Hagedorn, H. et al. (2015) An introduction to implementation science for the non-specialist. BMC Psychology, Vol. 3 (32). Availiable online: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-015-0089-9 

Manning, E. (2012) Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, (Technologies of Lived Abstraction Series, Eds. Brain Massumi and Erin Manning), London: MIT Press.

Manning, E., and Massumi, B. (2014) Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Press.

May, C., Rapley, T., Mair, F.S., Treweek, S., Murray, E., Ballini, L., Macfarlane, A. Girling, M. and Finch, T.L. (2015) Normalization Process Theory On-line Users’ Manual, Toolkit and NoMAD instrument. Available from http://www.normalizationprocess.org 

Nilsen, P., and Birken, S.A. (Eds.) (2020) Handbook on Implementation Science, Cheltnham, UK: Edward Elgar.

propositions for shared artistic-scientific visual enquiry.

If you don't already follow my blog, posts on Twitter or Instagram, hello. My name is Ian Robson, and I'm an educator-researcher working in English Higher Education. I use visual methods to support engagement, participation and collaborative Sensemaking (Weick, 1995, Robson, 2020) in health, education and social care contexts. I am particularly interested in collaborative inter-disciplinary practice-learning-research. This blog is one of the places in which I document my own learning and development whilst doing this. 

In this post, I offer a few of my draft propositions which (I think) underpin my visual practice, and a few examples of my practice that have acted as sites for experimentation and reflection. In offering propositions, it's not that I don't discuss my contribution in projects with others, but as I develop my practice, I need to re-state things. Over the last year or so, which has coincided with the global COVID-19 pandemic, I have tested the ambitions previously sketched out in this blog. Doing, as you may also have found, is one of the best ways of testing, refining and improving. My recent experience of doing in new contexts and at new scales has been both the most rewarding and infuriating experience of my career.

I'm currently writing an academic journal article which is helping me to see why the process has been both rewarding and infuriating. In the article, which I have completley re-written once already, I needed to face up to the facts that a) visual sensemaking is broadly embraced by those who are of different disciplines to me, but also b) the process and results have been mixed because (in part) I've not developed the dialogue and philosophical foundations for that work, so my collaborators are quite right to be confused. I don't mind a bit of confusion, but I want it to be productive in some sense. 

Where do I (re) start? It's tempting to want to codify things, but what I need isn't to codify, fix, or create any sort of instrumental blueprint. I have reflected that my contribution (often in interdisciplinary health and social care research) it to activate new lines of enquiry, expand conceptual models and to materialise/mobilise learning. I am less interested in post-activity decoration, or illustration. 

Like Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (2014)'s work on art, philosophy and activism, my objective in writing about what I/we do is to develop a set of propositions for collaborative doing/thinking. Like them, I am interested in getting attuned to the "what is happening now?" in situations, to activating others' responses to a trajectory of enquiry. I find it hard to write about this for scientific partners, and they have (quite rightly) asked me questions about what I mean. 

I have previously started off by explaining my methodology as "not" the scientific method (i.e. with hypothesis, variables, fixed experimental conditions, 'findings', and the aim of reproduction), but that creates an unhelpful binary opposition which does not promote coming together, neither is is honest or taking ownership of my work. As it happens, it also does an injustice to the invention and subjectivity I have found is part of the scientific method (even if this isn't shouted from the rooftops). 

So, ( I ask myself) on what basis can 'the visual' meaningfully connect the artistic and scientific modes of enquiry? My emerging propositions are in part informed by Manning and Massumi (2014). A proposition asserts some ideas, so I like to think of my propositions as 'offers' for agreement. In my case, I have found that relating, building trust, and finding common ground is the basis for any methodology to connect to new audiences. Therefore, I continue to work on propositions that can form a starting point and working principles for my contribution to a scientific project. Here's my work in progress:

• Provide terms of engagement: As much as it might seem tempting, simply producing 'attractive' or 'engaging' visual material does not add change the substance of research activity or scientific data. Collaboration, I think, is aided by some sort of protocol, which is what this list might become. This protocol or terms of engagement should help ALL who work with artistic visual contributions to direct their questions and contrubutions. 
• Disrupt habits: My sense is that one way the artistic-visual can contribute to scientific dialogue is by promoting critical and reflexive inter-disciplinary enquiry. As thinkers like John Dewey and Karl E. Weick have famously pointed out, much learning starts when something stops 'working', or is somehow confusing or problematic. Put simply, artistic-visual practices can make subjects "strange", metaphorically 'turning them round' to appear other-than. As a minimum, I have found that this can move all participants out of habitual ways of working as they are forced to work out  what they each see, making positions, assumptions and priorities explicit. 
• Keep things moving. Inter-disciplinary diaologue, and specifically the development of shared/connected lines of enquiry does not 'just happen'. As Manning and Massumi (2014) found in their work in SenseLab/3Ecologies, such groups need to attend to creating "initial conditions" and "enabling constraints" that start, and sustain, events of "live" enquiry. 
• Attune to emergence. Shared enquiry needs shared, or complementary/connecting questions if we want to avoid passive responses like "that looks interesting/nice". Again, in my practice, I have found that shared enquiry is most agile and focused when it is concerned with spotting 'cues' for shared Sensemaking (Weick, 1995). Being attuned to emerging patterns and sensitised to sites of activity in a field of data / visual phenomenon can have a powerful role in directing questions in the course of shared enquiry. What questions look like will vary according to the learning community, but they might take the form of questions like "what is changing?".

Three (example) experiments

In recent work, and work in development, I offer a few examples of how these propositions might (to different degrees) may have been present without formal articulation - a) as feedback loop, b) as iconography, and c) as an alternative mapping:

a) The visual as a feedback loop.  In putting together plans for improved searching for scientific papers / evidence on 'fuzzy' subjects, and my visual contribution, a colleague asked if my work would act as a "feedback loop". This felt useful, to a point. I thought: can I take data and do something (visually) different with in so that outputs from the process, in turn, feed into mainstream scientific enquiry? In this approach, the 'something' is perhaps to relate data to other data (e.g. adding in lived experience, or contextual data), or to re-animate that data in speculative or imaginary ways. At this level, I enhance an existing (scientific) paradigm, but I don't turn up my nose at this, as this still has value, and is more likely to get funded by mainstream health grantmakers, let's be honest. 

b) Playing with iconography. I have increasingly focused on foregrounding my use of visual notes. Some of these are useful for my reflective / reflexive work, but increasingly, these can 'break out' of my personal reflection and into colaborative work. At a simple level, I have found that others like to see my thinking behind positions, proposals or claims. For others, sharing playful sketches helped provoke questions or contributions in response. One example, still at an early stage, was provoked by my work in KERNEL, an early life research collaborative. My prompt was to address a conceptual 'itch' that had emerged for me as I woked with colleages across the collaborative. In short, it was something to do with whether I could describe a set of functions that might operate at different levels of description (e.g. concept, process, local practice). This remains speculative, a form of "what if?" that I have found to play one useful part in collaborative activity. When visualised, they are easier to review, select and apply in discussion. Put simply, a group can 'pick one' and playfully consider what it might be like at different levels (e.g. concept, process, activity). In other examples, I have been more playful, imagining an iconography as a form of proposition, or manifesto (see the second image below).

c) The visual as alternative.

The third (of many) experiments offered as exanmple here is of an alternative imagining of the 'story' of health as it develops across the life course, again from my work in KERNEL. This work borrows from the traditions of design thinking and graphic design layout work, in that it is an attempt to show how an idea might look. I have found that materialising ideas is an extremely productive thing to do, nto least for myself, as it makes be be explicit about some things, and in other respects, visual elements can prefigure an explanation not yet developed (so in drawing a line or circling something, I am reaching towards an idea to be discussed). 

The difference between flow and dissatisfaction in collective (visual) action

It would be nice if learning didn’t involve dissatisfaction, but in my experience at least, it usually does. If I were to qualify that, I would add that it involves dissatisfaction and being moved, both being poles (perhaps) of sense. I am making sense of visual-material methods, and their application in public sector (health and care) contexts. 

My prompt for this post is both dissatisfaction and being moved, each coming from a different place, and both useful stimuli for learning, as it happens. I start with the dissatisfaction, which is probably unfair, because it’s not dissatisfaction with the actual work on visual-material methods, but a feeling that something - however briefly - stagnated. I know I’m being unfair to myself, but hey, you have to work with what comes up. Over the last two or three years, I have been delighted to work in a range of public sector contexts to develop visual-material approaches, techniques and methods. You might have seen some of these moments:

...but I have become attuned to the exact moment when it seems like I am reproducing them. When I start to reproduce, or even face the prospect of this (which is more likely the case) my research-creation feels stale. I have an in-built alarm for reproduction, that is, churning the same stuff out. I can’t do it in teaching or research. That is not to say I am a creative genius, only that I function best when I am driven by genuine curiosity, in relationship with others and where there is a prospect of something new emerging. I got the feeling of reproduction from my contribution to a particular online meeting. Nothing big, just the sense that I was performing as expected, going through the motions, running the agenda. That started a sense of dissatisfaction. 

Anyway, moving from the unnecessary self-blame, I found some counter inspiration, as I returned to a magnificent book written by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi and first published in 2014 -  Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. 

In this book, Manning and Massumi cover lots of ground, including insightful reflection on the development of the SenseLab project, initially based in Montreal, Canada. Here, I use it as a reflective provocation for my own work, not to duplicate it, but to see what patterns of diffraction might come about as I throw my own experience in its way. My aim is to destabilise any sense of routine, reproduction and predictability in my work, so that my research, writing and teaching practice can remain fresh, useful and new. Not perfect. 

So, I start with the material I have just re-read in Thought in the Act, and in particular in Part 2: Propositions. I am not (right now) interested in a review or summary, I am pragmatically crashing myself into this work, to see what resonates and catalyses. The only context you need without reading the text is to know that Manning and colleagues, based at the Society for Art and Technology (SAT) in Montreal, sought to discover what a form of research-creation could look like if it was based on interactions that avoided the paradigm of ‘communication’ or ‘application’, associated with the reproduction of outputs and transmission of passive content.

What they developed, through collaborative success and failure of artists and philosophers, was a research-creation alternative to this communication/application paradigm normally associated with academic or creative ‘centres’. I simply note some of the features that hit me on this reading, starting diffractive patterns in my own practice. You will pick up some of their shorthand, but also a sense of their work, which I follow with some concluding thoughts:

* The collective wanted to explore new forms of collaborative interaction. 

* They asked: what “Initial Conditions” are necessary to enable emergence.

* They wanted their events to be just that, not delivery of pre-determined conclusions. Events as collective thinking that game rise to new thoughts through new interactions on-site. 

* The technique of research-creation replaced those of ‘communication’ or ‘application’ (as previously noted).

* Events needed to bring something new to participants’ practices on the level of “techniques of relation”, or techniques for joining their practices to another. Such techniques of relation were focused on catalysing and modulating interaction between members.  This was recognised as a domain of practice in its own right. 

* To achieve this, the diverse collective (not their term) developed “enabling constraints” which were opportunities for creative participation in their events. These constraints conditioned interactions as opposed to “framing” them. Enabling constraints “modulated” the event as it moved through its phases.

* Interestingly (as I have found), the group found that simply “letting things flow” as unconstrained interaction lacked what was termed “rigour”, “intensity” and “interest”. Conditions were needed to promote “co-generation of effects”. These included asking participants NOT to present already-completed work, and for participants to read the same philosophical texts as a primer. 

* Participants were encouraged to prepare what came to be termed “platforms of relation” elements of (intra) activity which could later be organised in relation to others, forming the structure of the workshops. Activities would focus on initial conditions, enabling constraints and “strategic incompleteness”. 

* Activity in groups resisted the traditional “reporting” task that small groups are so often asked to do. Instead of description or “reportage”, participants were encouraged to focus on sharing work in “capsule” form, retaining performative force so that they “activated” further actions, and did not passively describe progress to other participants. 

* Practically, events were carefully planned, including the experience of entering and settling in - they talked about a “hospitable estrangement” which would “disable participants’ habitual presuppositions” (p.98) without deconstructing participants attachments to role, status and so on too quickly. 

* Failure, importantly, was seen as a generative force - acting as a prompt for participants to explore the limits of what can be thought / created in particular contexts. 

* After playing with disrupting participants expected contributions (in order partly to generate something new), the group considered what could be done with incomplete ‘platforms for relation’ that were stopped, or not put into action. Thought was put into how such elements could be disseminated, and focused on the concept of the gift, and later, emissaries from groups as activity became distributed geographically. 

* The idea of having a “process seed bank” emerged later. This was less about the content of an activity, as  it was considered that an “events’ relational force cannot be reproduced. It remains, always, a singular movement” (p.115). As such, processes were things that set initial conditions, modulated interactions as events unfolded and had what was termed “velocity” and an “arc”, like Paul Klee’s lines, which could be “iteratively reactivated” to different effects. 

This is a list of what was useful to be, what connected and the material (as I say) that I ‘crashed myself’ into, to see what diffractive patterns emerged. I noticed the tension in my practice between constraint and enabling, and liked the idea of enabling constraints. I noticed that when I felt tired, stuck in a rut, or disconnected (easy enough in COVID-19 times!) from people, I ended up over-structuring, or relying on bureaucracy. I have to remain present and connected in order to keep the creative tension.  I liked the way that the SenseLab paid attention to process, and carefully built in explicit agreements and techniques to reflect philosophical principles.

My work has a different context. I span boundaries of art/philosophy and social care/health and working class communities. How did this material meet my dissatisfaction? Reading about the work of SenseLab, I felt hope, and interest in, the ability to use structure, techniques, incompleteness. I liked the idea of groups or people interacting (possibly at a distance, given our new normal), and activating or continuing what others start. I felt relieved that my contribution was not to be the expert in content (seductive, as I am familiar with the content) but to balance those initial conditions, ongoing enabling constraints and the ‘back and forth’ of becoming together within diverse and distributed communities of interest, place or experience. I saw much that resonated in my work with others, but felt prompted to write out a draft - incomplete - manifesto of sorts, that could be taken up with others and would connect to a toolbox of techniques and tools. 

Onwards.

It’s about refining through doing (card game 2.2)

A short post. This one is to reflect on the importance of refining through doing. Great tools often start, for me, with something that is a ‘hook’ - something enjoyable, pleasurable or that makes me curious. I get these ideas by being open to a diverse set of inspirations - origami, literature, art, or in this case, card or board games. The next step is important, however, and that is to refine the ideas. I need to do that with others, to give then context and put them in relationship with people. That has been (is) so true of this latest project, which I have blogged about previously. 

See the latest version (still in development) and you will see refinements that have come from context and relationship. The wonderful spin off is that I will be adapting them for both teaching and research activities online especially, and that is very rewarding. 

I will be putting this out to share and adapt, with a Creative Commons license. 

V2.1 card game to move from describing elements > storying > critical narrating

Following my previous post, here is more of the ‘work in progress’ - I have represented three ‘stages’ in the activity:

1. Each student collects or creates cards as they read, participate, look at the shared online gallery, and hear lectures. Element cards could have ‘top trump’ style descriptive boxes, so students can’t simply add a care that says ‘theory’ To their collection without being able to summarise key aspects of it (focus, assumptions, scale, historical context, intended application etc.)

1.1 Element cards can be discussed singly (‘show and tell’), or combined to talk about relations (theory<>policy, societal mood<>oppressed groups, Policy<>tools etc.)

2. Once we have enough cards (by selecting from the gallery, or creating our own) we can begin to make the story. We can think of this story board as ‘key events’. It might work well to create and narrate this story in small groups online, or in a larger group with the tutor or nominated student as the ‘dealer’!

3. Once we have an agreed story, we create a set of authors’ notes. Using the purple prompt cards at the top, we choose to say (argue?) some things. This is the narrative that could develop into an academic essay. 

Note: this is an example that could be used in one of my modules on Social Policy, or Collaboration in Children’s Services...but might work as well for ANY topic that depends on building up knowledge and perspectives from individual elements to critically reflective narrative. I also plan to use this in a proposal module on research methods, where the elements could be paradigm, methodology, methods etc. 

Comments and ideas welcome on this work in progress - you can see the graphic does not have ‘user notes’ on it yet; the left hand side has space for those!

Pages from my notebook: teaching (Online) with cards

No apologies - this is a work in progress. As I look forward to the start of a new academic year, albeit facing challenges created by COVID-19, my mind has been turning to how my teaching methods can adapt to give students the best possible environment in which to enquire and learn. I am building on experiments in various directions - see some examples, below. 

In this case, however, I am going full NERD. I love card and table top games, including variants on Role Playing Games. As I thought of things I could do with my students, and things they could do ‘at a distance’, I thought of card-based games. Card games have been used, and studied, in pedagogical literature, but all I will say is that their discussion and application can be a little specialised. I wanted to take the key features of card based gaming, and make the most of their ability to structure a process, to help me teach and help students enquire and learn. The text below is taken from my note book, and is a work in progress. See what you think. 

Objectives:

• To engage students in subjects they may feel intimidated or ambivalent about. 

• To encourage students’ participation in teaching and learning activities, especially when learning asynchronously and at a distance. 

• To help students to construct academic submissions that add complexity, reflexivity and nuance to initial ideas. 

• To incorporate sensory, aesthetic and poetic elements in traditionally ‘stale’ social science topics.

This teaching idea builds on work that I have done in higher education and social research. Previous examples include a Childhood and Early Years Studies booklet providing visual scenes with reflective questions as ‘ways in’ to so-called ‘difficult topics’, a School Space tool which helped looked after young people talk about how to feel safe through selecting statements, and a dice activity that generated critically reflective questions for Children’s Services professionals. All three (and many more) share some common features: 

• All activities are easy to ‘start’ with a prompt question or simply a response to artefacts in front of people. 

• All these activities, in different ways, materialise thinking (i.e. they made thinking visible through artefacts and images).

• The activities are, in different ways, practical, exploratory and sensory - that is they incorporate heuristic / playful elements.

• They involve selection (e.g. of elements of an image, of artefacts) and choice.

• They make the process of constructing meaning explicit, and structure it, so participants can reflect or narrate.

• They make enquiry a shared activity, as artefacts become shared objects of reflection and action. 

I want to continue to take these ideas and combine their most effective elements (as I see it). Ideally, I am designing a flexible framework for learning that can be adapted. To help me do this, I am thinking of two different courses I will be teaching in the second semester of academic year 2020/21 (January-May 2021), one being a third year (UK level 6) undergraduate course on Leadership and Collaboration in Children’s Services, and the other a second year (UK level 5) undergraduate course which supports students to develop a research proposal. These are useful courses to design this activity for, as I have found that students perceive (and face) challenges linked to circumstances such as:

• The subjects are new to students, prompting a range of emotions or placing students in a range of ‘positions’ relative to the subject that are not conducive to participation and learning. These include: feeling intimidated, feeling ambivalent or disconnected, or confused by the amount of content. 

• Studying modules whilst doing ‘other things’ - an enhanced sense of distraction linked to anxiety, semester two workload, part time work or care responsibilities or, currently dramatic changes to the teaching and learning environment linked to COVID-19.

It is with these two challenges in mind, as well as wanting to build on previous developments I now think of this particular idea. I have been interested in how educators can adapt game mechanisms to teaching and learning activities, partly because many types of games address the sorts of features I have listed previously (e.g. thinking is made visible, there are shared objects of attention, selection and personalisation is often a feature). I also am thinking very much of students who may feel isolated and ambivalent about my third year module, and want to support their engagement and confidence in it as much as possible. 

The idea in development

In summary:

• Students select, personalise and construct cards that are raw materials, inspiring a ‘story’. The cards, then, are the ‘actors’ or ‘elements’ (human and non-human) in a developing scenario.

• Different categories of ‘element cards’ will include people, policy, actions and  places. Using these cards helps students think about the situated and applied nature of the ideas and issues they want to focus on. They also support active relating of theory and practice elements. 

• Each card will have descriptive categories that need completing (think of Top Trumps, or role playing games involving cards) - so students do not simply have a card saying the name of a theory (for example) but they should add characteristics in prompted fields. So, for a particular theory card, fields might be things like; historical context, focus, key claim, questions asked. For a professional actor card, fields might include; focus, priorities, knowledge, approach...and so on. 

• The cards are created / collected week by week as the course progresses. This can be a collective effort if I can create a shared library of such cards on my e-learning platform (BlackBoard Ultra). So as students learn (independently, or via taught sessions) about what ‘things’ feature in the topic, they can build their set. 

• At the start of the module, students are presented with a ‘starter set’ of cards to illustrate each category.

• The growing collection of cards will not automatically configure into a story, so students are presented with a storyboard tool which provides a place to layout their cards (“who or what is important”) and a (several?) basic plot structures, as well as a template that would allow them to create their own.

• This modular structure (individual cards, a scenario of multiple categories, then a storyboard / plot structure) allows students to (literally) collect and build up their understanding, and to fit this together in increasingly complex ways, i.e: 1) individual cards, 2) multiple (and increasingly complex) combinations of cards, 3) plot or scenario structures, THEN 4) authors’ narration. 

• Stage 4 is the point at which students begin to shape up their academic argument, as narrative cards (added last) describe, explain, justify, theorise, argue, defend and so on. These provide the authors’ voice and critical argument. 

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Affirming the visual-material: taking (theoretical) stock, finding an argument that works

Progress. This post was NOT written at 2.30am. It’s a rehearsal for a series of papers-in-development, about “the visual” and social research, and it builds on the crisis-induced stocktake that was my previous post. This post gets down to the job of constructing a workable theoretical framing, by considering what visual-material methods are, and how I can affirm their substantial position (my) social research (and why I’m feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the label “methods” as a result).

Note: I use the term “visual-material” methods instead of simply visual methods because I am talking about images and things, drawing and materials, ‘artefacts’ that have substance.

1. Much work with “visual methods” is (both intentionally and unintentionally) decorative, instrumental or focused exclusively on novelty. People often ‘like’ visual methods because they are ‘nice’ or make things more interesting. If we mean harmless, pleasant, decorative, then nice is not good. The next step up is to take a more instrumental view, along the lines of ‘visual methods are good for eliciting qualitative data’. I have a little more time for this view, but my PROBLEM is the relegation of methods as a tool, something that gets the “real” work done, i.e. the “data collected”. We might say that we don’t really take a positivist view of data, that we know methods are not invisible, but do we/I practice what we/I preach?

2. Visual-material methods are not neutral. I say that visual-material methods are active, generative materials, not window dressing, or a style for some other substance. I say that they have an interesting, multi-dimensional status - they can “be” several things at the same time and can connect diverse things in new ways (e.g. including, but also beyond logical-rational relationships). I still like (existential) phenomenologists (e.g. Hans-Georg Gadamer, or  Jean-Luc Marion’s) ideas that the arts (including painting) are something to be ‘encountered’ in an active sense, are work with us to cause is to see (ourselves) through strangeness, analogy, metaphor and so on. However, I’m not sure the existential argument goes far enough. Encounters, yes, hermeneutics also, but I’m not sure the visual-material as mimesis of something else, towards something else is much more than method, even if - granted - it’s a much more acceptable, active method.

3. We need an affirmative and substantial view of visual-material “methods”. What’s the alternative to decoration, or even space for encounter? My line of thinking is as follows. If visual-material methods are to be “more than method”, this requires - ultimately - to challenge the subject-object relationship between method and data. We might accept that methods ‘influence’ the data in a social constructionist sense, but I’m wondering if that’s not much of an (epistemological) shift. Instead, what if we challenged the artificial separation of methods-methodology-theory-data that we are keen to segregate in our desire for ‘rigour’ and so on? What if we took seriously that each ‘contact’ with the data changed the data? What if data only becomes accessible to us in and through our means of seeing?

4. The time has come for methods ‘like’ the visual-material. I suspect I will have to refine this argument, but this grand statement is my way of saying that the characteristics of advanced capitalism produce some messy effects. Human life is entangled with technologies and their metrics and global issues such as climate change and stateless people are issues that cross boundaries. These things (and more) drive complex, contradictory scenarios in which people become new, fractured, hybrid  subjects, and specific groups experience marginalisation, and inequality. In the face of complexity, ambiguity, multi-speed and multi-scale issues all at play together, leaving traditional research methods appearing ill-equipped. I’m going to suggest that visual-material methods represent a type of method that have the potential to speak to this situation. Given my last blog post about my theoretical nomadism and the journey I have been on to find a home for my research practice, I therefore am ‘trying out’ PostHumanism as a conceptual frame to argue this.

5. PostHumanism is an ideal ground for the future of visual-material methods. I admit, I have resisted reading much about PostHumanism, as I assumed it was a pendulum swing against the human, and given that all my work is about relationships, I didn’t have time for (what I saw as) theoretical pretentiousness and first world / middle class anxieties which might be hard to apply in working class communities. I’m shifting my position now. Without giving a lengthy summary of PostHumanism here (which I’m not qualified to write, being new to the game) I will point out a few simplified features, as I understand them, which make it an ideal ground for (my) visual-material methods:

• Restricting our ‘unit of analysis’ to the individual human, community or society is a flawed decision. Human activity is not “solely” human. ‘Human’ identity, activity and agency is intimately connected to, and co-constituted by much that is not ‘human’: computers, algorithms, objects, spaces, cartographic lines and more.
• ‘Human’ projects are more-than-human projects: global warming, income inequality, what and how we eat, mental health...the list goes on. Unfamiliar as it may seem, a key to moving towards connected solutions is to refine the relatedness of the world through a complex, diverse, but single immanent-material system. This is not simple monism; a single, unified, homogeneous unit, but a messy entanglements and patterns of people and (many) things. 
• We see things less as individual ‘units’ (as markets require) than lines, processes, collectives, patterns: things that emerge and become. ‘Becoming’ replaces the individual human as an ethical and productive unit of enquiry. We could say: relationships, not things. 
• Affect is something shared, passed through, transmitted, and the opposite to individual autonomy. Once we take affect seriously, we can take up Braidotti’s (2019) call for “an intensive form of trans-disciplinarity and boundary-crossing among a range of discourses” (p.28), or, I say, a concern with following lines into all the places they go. [For more on this, see my previous post on Deleuze, diagrams, mapping, stacking and folding.]
• The consequence of all these points can be heightened anxiety, but more importantly, can be a desire to affirm that which is different, affective and relational (Braidotti, 2019: 11, 34) through a desire to act; an ethical praxis. Humans and their relationships are not lost, but enhanced, viewed with a concern for diversity, relatedness and ethics, rather than commodification and exploitation.

6. If we take these points seriously, the purpose, status and substance of methods must be revised to be relevant. I focus on the connected, the in-between, the processes of becoming, and start with some of Braidotti’s (2019) calls for action, responding to her call for “conceptual creativity” (p.34) and to develop a material (practical) “plane of encounter for multiple differentiated positions” (p.38). I note some principles in a move towards an affirmative view of the visual-material:

• Visual-material methods are not some neutral ‘other’ relegated to the role of novel decoration, illustration or even way of elicitation. They materialise the flow and connection of forces that connect as we engage. 
• They come loaded with potential, and offer to re-imagine, rather than represent. They are part of the act of relating: a generative, productive act, affirming the human-with.
• Visual-material methods achieve this by making strange and turning the traditional subject, and by (re)animating situations, (think of ethnographic study or performance, rather than a still life study). 
• They can fore-ground that which is excluded, marginalised, edited out and prohibited under homogenous and oppressive regimes of power. 
• Visual-material methods therefore become active in the research site, acting back on situations and co-producing ‘data’. Their persistence allows for different sorts of encounters, work-with, and new forms to emerge. They can be challenging and insistent. 
• Their ambiguity allows for exploration and holding of tensions, contradictions, negative spaces and give form to what is traditionally not described in research.