tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38649764337761173792024-02-21T07:01:55.443-08:00visualising practiceTowards a methodology of visualising professional practice, organisations and biography.Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-50071069939570701722021-07-08T03:48:00.001-07:002021-07-08T03:48:19.121-07:00My problem with, and (visual) response to (some) implementation science.<p><span style="color: #666666;">I am currently <b>contemplating alternatives to traditional models of implementation </b>(i.e. putting plans, or 'evidence' into action)<b> using visual methods</b>, and this is a very early note for my thinking.</span></p><p><span style="color: #666666;">This post has two parts:</span></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="color: #666666;">Part 1: My context and problems with <i>some</i> implementation science. </span></li><li><span style="color: #666666;">Part 2: My early speculative thinking about how visual methods may improve things.</span></li></ul><p></p><p><b><span style="color: #a64d79;">PART 1</span> - context and (possible) problems with implementation science.</b></p><p><b>Context</b></p><p>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 <a href="https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/doing-visual-ethnography/book237694" target="_blank">visual ethnographer</a>, 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. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXmx0vFXObZl9gqMuQ-hAinwl9mJqG0zeGq0T1uS2to6KvAv-rDmWHzrSpdtof-wY863FwKxXGhyLMW2Ji7Opy2-zh19UgtOaIBS938fdsaE84TQSJ3FNvGiqGOQ_uUI6qPDZMcAR4Z08/s2560/A2AF4AB1-DA5C-4BD1-A835-17AE067AA174.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="2560" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXmx0vFXObZl9gqMuQ-hAinwl9mJqG0zeGq0T1uS2to6KvAv-rDmWHzrSpdtof-wY863FwKxXGhyLMW2Ji7Opy2-zh19UgtOaIBS938fdsaE84TQSJ3FNvGiqGOQ_uUI6qPDZMcAR4Z08/s320/A2AF4AB1-DA5C-4BD1-A835-17AE067AA174.png" width="320" /></a></div>I one of my roles, I enjoy being an implementation lead for work with children and young people within an <a href="https://arc-nenc.nihr.ac.uk/our-research-themes/families/" target="_blank">applied health research collaborative</a> 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 <b>I like to perspective shift, or consider different ways we can consider phenomena.</b><p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU9ZRelQs3X7N5IaMRfG8ByocbmwyLNg-O47SEG24PKx90uhxnA7dX5-MSb_6U2F25boU1Wvvjkgx5-wC6VNDNYFHpVC9fpcZDTBc32WTES-6TpTwqgGJd6Wu5ZnWQCWBgdy1AbnwgXqI/s4032/IMG_5975.HEIC" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU9ZRelQs3X7N5IaMRfG8ByocbmwyLNg-O47SEG24PKx90uhxnA7dX5-MSb_6U2F25boU1Wvvjkgx5-wC6VNDNYFHpVC9fpcZDTBc32WTES-6TpTwqgGJd6Wu5ZnWQCWBgdy1AbnwgXqI/s320/IMG_5975.HEIC" width="320" /></a></div><b>Q. What's the problem with implementation science? (if anything)</b><p></p><p>I work in some diverse communities of practice, including in local government and in applied health research. All are <b>concerned with implementation, or putting plans into action</b>. Particularly in the latter, health research, the discipline of <i>implementation science</i> is influential. Bauer et al. define implementation science as:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">"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)</p></blockquote><p>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</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">“…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).</p></blockquote><p>I am more familiar with <i>policy</i> 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 <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4573926/" target="_blank">implementation science</a>, I don't want to misrepresent implementation science as totally "inflexible" or "logical-rational" (also assuming these characteristics are <i>always</i> problematic). There <i>are</i> a variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches that exist within the implementation science world, which I am still getting to know, including:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>process models:</i> focus on translating research into practice through action models or similar. </li><li>determinant frameworks: describe barriers and enablers to implementation; understand influences.</li><li><i>classic theories:</i> existing relevant theories from sociology, phsycology etc., applied to the field. </li><li><i>implementation theories:</i> a variety of models developed by implementation researchers (e.g. May et al.'s [2015] <a href="http://www.normalizationprocess.org/" target="_blank">normalisation process theory</a>).</li><li><i>evaluation frameworks:</i> identifies aspects of implementation that can be evaluated to determine success. </li></ul><div>(adapted from Nilsen & Birken, 2020:11)</div><p></p><p>However, for now, I am speculating about the <i>general limitations</i> of implementation science. <b>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 <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/" target="_blank">paradigm</a></b> (a way of seeing, interacting with, and making sense of the world)<i> that I find problematic</i>. For now, I will say that this involves:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>not acknowledging the differences that exist between concepts/models and action/practice (e.g. differences in complexity and dynamism),</li><li>...leading to limited consideration of factors that are relevant to implementation (e.g. sensory, material, <a href="https://youtu.be/SeMS8QEYIQU" target="_blank">affective</a> or other factors, depending on the theory)</li><li>...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:</li><ul><li>assuming there is a 'one way relationship' between causes and effects (an ontological issue). </li><li>considering knowledge, and therefore evidence, as a singular, fixed blueprint for action (an epistemological issue). </li><li>assuming that it is Ok to impose 'evidence based' solutions on populations or communities (an axiological issue).</li></ul></ul><div>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</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">"Selecting an appropriate model, theory or framework [for implementation science] often represents a considerable challenge..." (Nilsen & Birken, 2020:23)</div></blockquote><p>and that all approaches are being developed incrementally and through testing, so</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">"it is also important to explore how the current theoretical approaches can be further developed to better address implementation challenges" (Ibid: 24)</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>That is my starting point, and at the moment, the onus is on me to see if the evidence stacks up with my concerns.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><span style="color: #a64d79;">PART 2</span> - visual thinking and experimenting to expand the paradigm</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>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 <a href="https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/" target="_blank">Blog</a> of the academic journal <i>BMJ Medical Humanities</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. <i>This</i> post is about the process behind those statements, and how I have come to realise how attached <i>I</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.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCY8j8ENDnCsJxAMI2LcYgW9a-kz_THbqynaHBakQHSsjxf-0PtXrXUG_n8rG197qHaAjp6mHzjxppNh-5YGbKZxUJMVBCYUlLImMNFm7QDnnlmuCnx9MNTBs3YlZNWIWCTUCl98dqpag/s1279/catherine+el-zerbi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="717" data-original-width="1279" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCY8j8ENDnCsJxAMI2LcYgW9a-kz_THbqynaHBakQHSsjxf-0PtXrXUG_n8rG197qHaAjp6mHzjxppNh-5YGbKZxUJMVBCYUlLImMNFm7QDnnlmuCnx9MNTBs3YlZNWIWCTUCl98dqpag/w400-h224/catherine+el-zerbi.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>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.</div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivpIOXGhdZHab_BtErOWOY_RHOKKBcxPzCB5FsvRhlsvyPBX3lfMZnDkGqBI3wv6UDdl61hgc52lm5pX8s4S9kuD7_OIY6Ydpd6C9QmEY_iHn6FtZmQ9YHKe5kDdL37jMk0Qr-Q8o3zvY/s1280/B09C7795-E58F-43F1-ADE3-E3AC2125CCB2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivpIOXGhdZHab_BtErOWOY_RHOKKBcxPzCB5FsvRhlsvyPBX3lfMZnDkGqBI3wv6UDdl61hgc52lm5pX8s4S9kuD7_OIY6Ydpd6C9QmEY_iHn6FtZmQ9YHKe5kDdL37jMk0Qr-Q8o3zvY/w640-h360/B09C7795-E58F-43F1-ADE3-E3AC2125CCB2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><br /></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj34vlwJ-nljxPCHGbanKYTXVJ5qTtZkGYyhWxIa-J_fc3NO7AoE9GrINDWaIOJmfPoUIMxcaPVCmmTsIOHHkwnMLoc3-GDycoESuOQ7BaxinnQkqR1k6rrhcFUUhex6t2cNHmTqmau0k0/s530/Dex.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="341" data-original-width="530" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj34vlwJ-nljxPCHGbanKYTXVJ5qTtZkGYyhWxIa-J_fc3NO7AoE9GrINDWaIOJmfPoUIMxcaPVCmmTsIOHHkwnMLoc3-GDycoESuOQ7BaxinnQkqR1k6rrhcFUUhex6t2cNHmTqmau0k0/s320/Dex.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>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 <b>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</b>. To kick start things, I contacted <a href="https://dexhannon.co.uk/information-about-dex-hannon/" target="_blank">Dex Hannon</a>, 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.<p></p><p>The <b>images below</b> 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!):</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Experience 1:</b> The act of painting helped me appreciate how much any 'end result' is determined by <i>pre-articulated, embodied, material and sensory factors</i>. 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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisu-QTajv7oJnopFQ8B2-TpPSTHske3k4XREh4bOR7BGqnx8q33dBoDvhiXliQs_yRfkMBXOpElwykNNHSs-zDBW74tyOJDVOaFogiutCXRK6SVxg9xqbv1JFaRrxho8P3bxMK3o5y6hk/s706/AE606764-49D5-4942-A684-B69CAAB9CD34.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="371" data-original-width="706" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisu-QTajv7oJnopFQ8B2-TpPSTHske3k4XREh4bOR7BGqnx8q33dBoDvhiXliQs_yRfkMBXOpElwykNNHSs-zDBW74tyOJDVOaFogiutCXRK6SVxg9xqbv1JFaRrxho8P3bxMK3o5y6hk/w640-h336/AE606764-49D5-4942-A684-B69CAAB9CD34.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Experience 2:</b> Painting together was very much about <i>connection, relating and response</i>. 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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeNuratpfTSbd3G_UdGarsj8MkockpP1SVSKAN-g44Kgz2PZVvzAJASNmEqxmZuFzQfXxZyxZtYModxTwkzBsckytk32oecettib2bORQb-Fy5qaG7V_7LEiAFehoCB4DcfchmOPUycUY/s706/3020CF4B-36A4-45EA-9D4C-4F52586F830E.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="371" data-original-width="706" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeNuratpfTSbd3G_UdGarsj8MkockpP1SVSKAN-g44Kgz2PZVvzAJASNmEqxmZuFzQfXxZyxZtYModxTwkzBsckytk32oecettib2bORQb-Fy5qaG7V_7LEiAFehoCB4DcfchmOPUycUY/w640-h336/3020CF4B-36A4-45EA-9D4C-4F52586F830E.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Experience 3:</b> The practice of co-painting was an <i>emergent </i>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.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbpEtNknAweeK-mArn0qM1mEVdGQTYJpZwo7vzJLoUHdHX2dbsFmOfbbQxiAf7j21UTEn0KFfIr4A9utj8dG4mejY5jVpNvx2ZOJG8YsSegRafSo6HSsUPRfkoJ2WMUDyT6dGa1oOpctc/s706/8E5B02C0-CA93-4DC0-B811-19CC06BF6C64.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="371" data-original-width="706" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbpEtNknAweeK-mArn0qM1mEVdGQTYJpZwo7vzJLoUHdHX2dbsFmOfbbQxiAf7j21UTEn0KFfIr4A9utj8dG4mejY5jVpNvx2ZOJG8YsSegRafSo6HSsUPRfkoJ2WMUDyT6dGa1oOpctc/w640-h336/8E5B02C0-CA93-4DC0-B811-19CC06BF6C64.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>Experience 4:</b> Innovation came as <i>factors interacted in the moment to co-constiture effects</i>, they were more than the sum of the parts. I thought of these as encounters, events, or flashes as we acted <i>with</i> the paint, making '<a href="https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/p/phenomena-agential-realism.html" target="_blank">agental cuts</a>' (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. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB-USbiFfMEUXA-sKEswJVmMHCHsjVGB49shRNd8nYcmVJP2LsumjLVL653OeHcq5V2gcuJWlUYYOGmklXMPE0CBUL7uiskpkjqp-FW1odeqEX6k5Fxh7cWQ66j7JefQGXdVYYAv_CTIc/s706/600A8E86-C101-4FA0-91B9-7BEC6D0AC601.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="371" data-original-width="706" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB-USbiFfMEUXA-sKEswJVmMHCHsjVGB49shRNd8nYcmVJP2LsumjLVL653OeHcq5V2gcuJWlUYYOGmklXMPE0CBUL7uiskpkjqp-FW1odeqEX6k5Fxh7cWQ66j7JefQGXdVYYAv_CTIc/w640-h336/600A8E86-C101-4FA0-91B9-7BEC6D0AC601.jpg" width="640" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. </div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b>References</b></div><p>Barad, K. (2007). <i>Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning</i>. Durham: Duke University Press.</p><p>Bauer, M.S., Damschroder, L., Hagedorn, H. et al. (2015) An introduction to implementation science for the non-specialist. <i>BMC Psychology,</i> Vol. 3 (32). Availiable online: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-015-0089-9 </p><p>Manning, E. (2012) <i>Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy</i>, (Technologies of Lived Abstraction Series, Eds. Brain Massumi and Erin Manning), London: MIT Press.</p><p>Manning, E., and Massumi, B. (2014) <i>Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience</i>, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Press.</p><p>May, C., Rapley, T., Mair, F.S., Treweek, S., Murray, E., Ballini, L., Macfarlane, A. Girling, M. and Finch, T.L. (2015) <i>Normalization Process Theory On-line Users’ Manual, Toolkit and NoMAD instrument</i>. Available from http://www.normalizationprocess.org </p><p>Nilsen, P., and Birken, S.A. (Eds.) (2020) <i>Handbook on Implementation Science</i>, Cheltnham, UK: Edward Elgar.</p>Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-53263710151635249692021-07-06T07:11:00.003-07:002021-07-06T07:11:37.728-07:00propositions for shared artistic-scientific visual enquiry.<div>If you don't already follow my blog, posts on <a href="https://twitter.com/ianrobsons" target="_blank">Twitter</a> or <a href="http://www.instagram.com/ianrobsons" target="_blank">Instagram</a>, hello. My name is Ian Robson, and I'm an educator-researcher working in English Higher Education. <b>I use visual methods to support engagement, participation and collaborative Sensemaking</b> (Weick, 1995, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1473325020968916" target="_blank">Robson, 2020</a>) 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. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicxUBz7oIAc6s1jdr74SyTgcbBeJf8Waz-JweIRKDqF-6WUUjc8o-RmR1THzY-7mKhhggcppX4a8XYNJ4fBP6N4EKW1_Y_22a3lcD-72qbmHcFpz8bVH_BCnJG16HTGNp48jBAJRUT348/s1342/2563E95E-5C67-4628-8E17-FCC6C981E3A8.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="1342" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicxUBz7oIAc6s1jdr74SyTgcbBeJf8Waz-JweIRKDqF-6WUUjc8o-RmR1THzY-7mKhhggcppX4a8XYNJ4fBP6N4EKW1_Y_22a3lcD-72qbmHcFpz8bVH_BCnJG16HTGNp48jBAJRUT348/w400-h210/2563E95E-5C67-4628-8E17-FCC6C981E3A8.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div>In this post, I offer a few of my <b>draft propositions</b> which (I think) underpin my visual practice, and a few <b>examples of my practice that have acted as sites for experimentation and reflection</b>. 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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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 <b>developed the dialogue and philosophical foundations</b> 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. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8PfA_oBrj9ak4SkbjdZHSpMKJht9UBobRXXHdTUvdPFIL8-UoC6Ca78bU6U1YWLVmfTjdB7MxCP3UOWLMYtLXa-XyuXiLHMgi89J9X1U4e2n4vX5ccx8KKGHY3fHOgl1oa_VQIbIH7qc/s1342/8B1B0573-1506-4E8B-906C-0D4F8FFC91B7.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="1342" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8PfA_oBrj9ak4SkbjdZHSpMKJht9UBobRXXHdTUvdPFIL8-UoC6Ca78bU6U1YWLVmfTjdB7MxCP3UOWLMYtLXa-XyuXiLHMgi89J9X1U4e2n4vX5ccx8KKGHY3fHOgl1oa_VQIbIH7qc/w400-h210/8B1B0573-1506-4E8B-906C-0D4F8FFC91B7.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>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 <b>activate new lines of enquiry</b>, <b>expand conceptual models</b> and to <b>materialise/mobilise learning</b>. I am less interested in post-activity decoration, or illustration. </div><div><br /></div><div>Like Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (2014)'s work on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2yHtYdI4bE" target="_blank">art, philosophy and activism</a>, my objective in writing about what I/we do is to develop a set of <b>propositions</b> for collaborative doing/thinking. Like them, I am interested in getting attuned to the <b>"<i>what is happening now?</i>"</b> 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. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJNCIFW2LCtuqR3ihU7bxkz5B2neQ1Npzs6gOefi_9u2aIHMYZnT0FuUFqxr7iRjfMGdle1aKjzl4kemocHIvldCCswlec4ErFVx7mnQEKZb1AtIy65kTfH482JlYdzXuMs3-pU-kZDmE/s1342/B59F292A-8137-45DD-A3FD-9B6D5A0ACFB9.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="1342" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJNCIFW2LCtuqR3ihU7bxkz5B2neQ1Npzs6gOefi_9u2aIHMYZnT0FuUFqxr7iRjfMGdle1aKjzl4kemocHIvldCCswlec4ErFVx7mnQEKZb1AtIy65kTfH482JlYdzXuMs3-pU-kZDmE/w400-h210/B59F292A-8137-45DD-A3FD-9B6D5A0ACFB9.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>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 <i>reproduction</i>), 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). </div><div><br /></div><div>So, ( I ask myself) <b>on what basis can 'the visual' meaningfully connect the artistic and scientific modes of enquiry? </b>My emerging propositions are in part informed by Manning and Massumi (2014)<b>. A </b>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 <b>propositions that can form a starting point and working principles for my contribution to a scientific project</b>. Here's my work in progress:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Provide terms of engagement: </b>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. </li><li><b>Disrupt habits:</b> 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 <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey/" target="_blank">John Dewey</a> and <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/_/nz1RT-xskeoC?hl=en" target="_blank">Karl E. Weick</a> 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. </li><li><b>Keep things moving.</b> 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/<a href="https://3ecologies.org/" target="_blank">3Ecologies</a>, such groups need to attend to creating "initial conditions" and "enabling constraints" that start, and sustain, events of "live" enquiry. </li><li><b>Attune to emergence.</b> 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?".</li></ul></div><div><b>Three (example) experiments</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>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:</div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHLdm1g_V606cA5tUjgdjabXUbr1w520xTzSD1yGM2jukYElMCBbyh2ybkeLCkBgfQo8lsTfmf_70VL8lfRYE0pwFVAxApcI6PyIlkfdTuuKPJnF_ZPRVV_7zbXV9hk5Nojp4Rn1D885k/s974/IMG_2146.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="974" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHLdm1g_V606cA5tUjgdjabXUbr1w520xTzSD1yGM2jukYElMCBbyh2ybkeLCkBgfQo8lsTfmf_70VL8lfRYE0pwFVAxApcI6PyIlkfdTuuKPJnF_ZPRVV_7zbXV9hk5Nojp4Rn1D885k/s320/IMG_2146.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><u>a) The visual as a feedback loop.</u> 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. </div><div><br /></div><div><u>b) Playing with iconography</u>. 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 <a href="https://earlymultimorbidity.org/" target="_blank">KERNEL</a>, 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 <i>functions that might operate at different levels</i> 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).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFnauLq90zkTHJ_5Y4GUM5-5QFdO9Gj89HAaWpdIljcyD13vy_dBhWOjLLDjuqTAThS_ZLD9XhsOT1qJnuVcBKPa2jJyDt8WD1zadz55q9Vtfo-oVqEf8W9revPLRZ9tLykgeZvUrIYvw/s1280/IMG_1627.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="322" data-original-width="1280" height="162" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFnauLq90zkTHJ_5Y4GUM5-5QFdO9Gj89HAaWpdIljcyD13vy_dBhWOjLLDjuqTAThS_ZLD9XhsOT1qJnuVcBKPa2jJyDt8WD1zadz55q9Vtfo-oVqEf8W9revPLRZ9tLykgeZvUrIYvw/w640-h162/IMG_1627.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuk-21JJ8_zYRTVANspV-syW37qKoalL_4-kNJhWlouA-qHtUWXwDf73oro9HOZEKkHmGNfzFkmbBSr5JO0oxqzs-pcGke53Z6Exa8BuoEhRKxLkYfMltqYZrp9JE7SBvT4EfgkSFceWE/s2213/IMG_5563.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="741" data-original-width="2213" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuk-21JJ8_zYRTVANspV-syW37qKoalL_4-kNJhWlouA-qHtUWXwDf73oro9HOZEKkHmGNfzFkmbBSr5JO0oxqzs-pcGke53Z6Exa8BuoEhRKxLkYfMltqYZrp9JE7SBvT4EfgkSFceWE/w640-h214/IMG_5563.PNG" width="640" /></a></div><u><div><u><br /></u></div>c) The visual as alternative.</u></div><div><br /></div><div>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 <a href="https://earlymultimorbidity.org/" target="_blank">KERNEL</a>. 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). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY_RRlLr7TUzt59yuAI5XHFgtLLmpQG9supW9N5EAI_uxRI8I3i-9qYtRZMXH2BDjarnzCJZfEb2S6VH3O3WiESfBVnfduZni1_VmYMuEP95P7PGNSH6QPkWFkN4-0GKhjSy10ph9EBRY/s1280/IMG_1872.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY_RRlLr7TUzt59yuAI5XHFgtLLmpQG9supW9N5EAI_uxRI8I3i-9qYtRZMXH2BDjarnzCJZfEb2S6VH3O3WiESfBVnfduZni1_VmYMuEP95P7PGNSH6QPkWFkN4-0GKhjSy10ph9EBRY/w640-h360/IMG_1872.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix_ffdIEgBAhE-2KQdh6GNjRX-jzMJWjztX-k1swGDa9sNlgH3-Nq6L4orzdg0KM0c2OAZsKdD-qoSb9kTTd8pMGLhNwg-vjot-DwRyfLQ8Y3S9xKcNvL3KJAXLmS286d6nKmgPHk1r54/s4032/IMG_4915.HEIC" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix_ffdIEgBAhE-2KQdh6GNjRX-jzMJWjztX-k1swGDa9sNlgH3-Nq6L4orzdg0KM0c2OAZsKdD-qoSb9kTTd8pMGLhNwg-vjot-DwRyfLQ8Y3S9xKcNvL3KJAXLmS286d6nKmgPHk1r54/w640-h480/IMG_4915.HEIC" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA87FOqyGgQfXSpPSWyzef88Uj8gVgXSV23rd1VEGIfWS-UCZ8dF_6Y2a7UmrTNO9yKoFAAqedv5ZHs40P-vaRGy4139PsHmYsYhW1lUZ_mlYDdr-fhWpSIZEvEQJ4K14Y2fj8TLr-qBw/s1280/IMG_1714.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA87FOqyGgQfXSpPSWyzef88Uj8gVgXSV23rd1VEGIfWS-UCZ8dF_6Y2a7UmrTNO9yKoFAAqedv5ZHs40P-vaRGy4139PsHmYsYhW1lUZ_mlYDdr-fhWpSIZEvEQJ4K14Y2fj8TLr-qBw/w640-h360/IMG_1714.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /><div><div><br /></div></div></div>Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-26297143132711295362020-10-13T01:08:00.004-07:002020-10-13T05:34:58.194-07:00The difference between flow and dissatisfaction in collective (visual) action<p>It would be nice if learning didn’t involve <b>dissatisfaction</b>, 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. </p><p>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:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl_Vs0HrLm8NznuxoCI00vwvWFtwIY_JTIcKrTBwGibwMB5P4KLEVQ70eEH-R4FBugc_JudU_zBidM8D_vJiMrPEdMP84Yirk5wQOM8XwCJMgZdRD7PHop4xAKnJz_xwxrv44Lv0e1r50/s1024/V-M+collage+1.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl_Vs0HrLm8NznuxoCI00vwvWFtwIY_JTIcKrTBwGibwMB5P4KLEVQ70eEH-R4FBugc_JudU_zBidM8D_vJiMrPEdMP84Yirk5wQOM8XwCJMgZdRD7PHop4xAKnJz_xwxrv44Lv0e1r50/w400-h400/V-M+collage+1.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUUtri5O4PLMbcCtiqWUiGChEdO-_34j6v-qVGXGDbR4UzbSR4Okkhn8SkY0OO9yUU4Ti2Lw4gNYunf3Z-ekxGTmnS0OUv_JQ1egfFPRpxoMtFcRYq01Xfve-3nnDCdReFUuHhDmilcnY/s1024/V-M+collage+2.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUUtri5O4PLMbcCtiqWUiGChEdO-_34j6v-qVGXGDbR4UzbSR4Okkhn8SkY0OO9yUU4Ti2Lw4gNYunf3Z-ekxGTmnS0OUv_JQ1egfFPRpxoMtFcRYq01Xfve-3nnDCdReFUuHhDmilcnY/w400-h400/V-M+collage+2.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><p>...but I have become attuned to the exact moment when it seems like I am <b>reproducing</b> 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 <i>not</i> to say I am a creative genius, only that I function best when I am driven by genuine <b>curiosity</b>, in <b>relationship with others</b> and where there is a prospect of <b>something new emerging</b>. 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. </p><p>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 - <i>Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience</i>. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqUFpDFxxLlF5QgGNI4QzAkD8oCOaNjkfo6ep-aAIlSGyZDwFxbS2vMopxVUB8GhXtPRB7cxI4ymm8e6Wy8WetJNnxDW6ZBSBjJkpsBXLPRdPCxHrP_F0IKgS0n_3pssa29LiVgJgsM9A/s1024/6E45C002-65D1-4FFB-A3EE-F8F43DC4BD8C.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqUFpDFxxLlF5QgGNI4QzAkD8oCOaNjkfo6ep-aAIlSGyZDwFxbS2vMopxVUB8GhXtPRB7cxI4ymm8e6Wy8WetJNnxDW6ZBSBjJkpsBXLPRdPCxHrP_F0IKgS0n_3pssa29LiVgJgsM9A/s320/6E45C002-65D1-4FFB-A3EE-F8F43DC4BD8C.jpeg" /></a></div><p>In this book, Manning and Massumi cover lots of ground, including insightful reflection on the development of the <a href="https://senselab.ca/wp2/" target="_blank">SenseLab</a> 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 <b>what patterns of diffraction might come about as I throw my own experience in its way</b>. <b>My aim is to destabilise any sense of routine, reproduction and predictability in my work</b>, so that my research, writing and teaching practice can remain fresh, useful and new. Not perfect. </p><p>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 <b>research-creation</b> 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.</p><p>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:</p><p>* <span>The collective wanted to explore new forms of collaborative interaction. </span></p><p><span>* They asked: what “Initial Conditions” are necessary to enable emergence.</span></p><p><span>* 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. </span></p><p><span>* The technique of research-creation replaced those of ‘communication’ or ‘application’ (as previously noted).</span></p><p><span>* 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. </span></p><p><span>* 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.</span></p><p><span>* 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. </span></p><p><span style="color: #3d85c6;">* </span><span>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”. </span></p><p><span>* 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. </span></p><p><span>* 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. </span></p><p><span>* 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. </span></p><p><span>* 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. </span></p><p><span>* 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. </span></p><p>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. <b>I have to remain present and connected in order to keep the creative tension</b>. I liked the way that the SenseLab paid attention to process, and carefully built in explicit agreements and techniques to reflect philosophical principles.</p><p>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 <b>activating or continuing what others start</b>. I felt relieved that my contribution was not to be the expert in content (seductive, as I am familiar with the content) but to <b>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</b>. I saw much that resonated in my work with others, but felt prompted to write out a draft - incomplete - <b>manifesto</b> of sorts, that could be taken up with others and would connect to a toolbox of techniques and tools. </p><p>Onwards.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-58736319017801466542020-09-27T11:57:00.006-07:002020-09-27T11:58:41.638-07:00It’s about refining through doing (card game 2.2)<p>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, <b>to give then context and put them in relationship with people</b>. That has been (is) so true of this latest project, which I have blogged about previously. </p><p>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. </p><p>I will be putting this out to share and adapt, with a Creative Commons license. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1GBdkxKKSN3-LUZKE1BZAGUqI8pv11fsxFFCq71MSW7mTYGVCn1HcD8Zw3iJFl4zuLzrgqoQhERssChNU63E-kcmmA4iYl12-8IvmMidW9mgRtx6tU1hDFWfnwcNbXB-wwv4M2oncUYk/s2048/883B4A18-290D-47A3-8436-9A5C5A6214C1.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Visual of card activity showing three columns of cards with choice slots." border="0" data-original-height="1535" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1GBdkxKKSN3-LUZKE1BZAGUqI8pv11fsxFFCq71MSW7mTYGVCn1HcD8Zw3iJFl4zuLzrgqoQhERssChNU63E-kcmmA4iYl12-8IvmMidW9mgRtx6tU1hDFWfnwcNbXB-wwv4M2oncUYk/w400-h300/883B4A18-290D-47A3-8436-9A5C5A6214C1.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-67429801977139587672020-09-09T04:00:00.001-07:002020-09-09T04:00:12.865-07:00V2.1 card game to move from describing elements > storying > critical narrating<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgduUTLeirVyAfunjrwtZC7CCBONadxikSypD8bbQVIMiC_QHqTuynSnwnFNy6ybcH6KCbQEs3bKivMwERq80y29tGhNoaGYBJmNl35NpW_9W2qEtnpzhomUdrpQKKKuGgRtMU8qG2Gn9Y/s2048/9A205E8F-B148-4C98-A4E1-728426025FFB.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1448" data-original-width="2048" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgduUTLeirVyAfunjrwtZC7CCBONadxikSypD8bbQVIMiC_QHqTuynSnwnFNy6ybcH6KCbQEs3bKivMwERq80y29tGhNoaGYBJmNl35NpW_9W2qEtnpzhomUdrpQKKKuGgRtMU8qG2Gn9Y/w500-h354/9A205E8F-B148-4C98-A4E1-728426025FFB.jpeg" width="500" /></a></div><br />Following my previous post, here is more of the ‘work in progress’ - I have represented three ‘stages’ in the activity:<p></p><p>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.)</p><p>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.)</p><p>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’!</p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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!</p><p><br /></p>Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-3404667267622472362020-09-04T03:01:00.001-07:002020-09-04T03:01:59.863-07:00Pages from my notebook: teaching (Online) with cards<p>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. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcSPtuGMum9ncqu5yeUtI6Wm9UI-ggLXpgjj57gpDl28HUcbIJUnbhkvr-0mq-MYr7YgyATN1lIrwq_pbQKARI6dNc-ucH_aHi1DOF_e9K7XddxETzNOGThcDJKVK2mgRs9nDym4mPNRA/s2048/207180B6-643C-4E84-8702-CE1FAD6C8BEC.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1448" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcSPtuGMum9ncqu5yeUtI6Wm9UI-ggLXpgjj57gpDl28HUcbIJUnbhkvr-0mq-MYr7YgyATN1lIrwq_pbQKARI6dNc-ucH_aHi1DOF_e9K7XddxETzNOGThcDJKVK2mgRs9nDym4mPNRA/w354-h500/207180B6-643C-4E84-8702-CE1FAD6C8BEC.jpeg" width="354" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_fO9QVRMyzp2-h82N4AsG6q868a4_02uwSPOTaL4xNZsNc52EY_GsH8g7hxaJZ7YRvEMJfEoeKcVVlSRSqBZ5i71AKw_0_BRqF4W7PPnN1bPEg3zWZtwfZK6C-sDEC08yzomq5UkEc8Y/s4032/0ABC0E35-AFFD-4BA8-90ED-B8B2113F709B.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="375" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_fO9QVRMyzp2-h82N4AsG6q868a4_02uwSPOTaL4xNZsNc52EY_GsH8g7hxaJZ7YRvEMJfEoeKcVVlSRSqBZ5i71AKw_0_BRqF4W7PPnN1bPEg3zWZtwfZK6C-sDEC08yzomq5UkEc8Y/w500-h375/0ABC0E35-AFFD-4BA8-90ED-B8B2113F709B.jpeg" width="500" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj-p5nI-3Jyk0YwrXoZOlaQwYxV5SBfbyjva0ZXjbLac-IPs1ZZtYu6pvUFBWgu4AEHZQHyn7LaXPb7yXjDcpO1Y9ovvTQVR_cq2W5nLl9zt9yB9rAZXxGE7qzSj6vdOKRyl_j6isJJko/s2048/63C1F011-0C6D-4F0F-B5DA-BC1565A0397B.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1448" height="625" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj-p5nI-3Jyk0YwrXoZOlaQwYxV5SBfbyjva0ZXjbLac-IPs1ZZtYu6pvUFBWgu4AEHZQHyn7LaXPb7yXjDcpO1Y9ovvTQVR_cq2W5nLl9zt9yB9rAZXxGE7qzSj6vdOKRyl_j6isJJko/w443-h625/63C1F011-0C6D-4F0F-B5DA-BC1565A0397B.jpeg" width="443" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQUfGcbL7wQ4-7pAVlzZGTPPy3Dty0fl2gn01BIkqenDaTpoXZzMCXQRMta3MZrZOS7bthMl7bCLjZM_uDIU6nGCnKAH3anB-B8xQGwIIwn_Kl6r39IQvKLqMx0llVh_LrQjQo451os7M/s1440/78B09949-0594-4A0D-8B6C-57C02A0E513C.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="1440" height="625" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQUfGcbL7wQ4-7pAVlzZGTPPy3Dty0fl2gn01BIkqenDaTpoXZzMCXQRMta3MZrZOS7bthMl7bCLjZM_uDIU6nGCnKAH3anB-B8xQGwIIwn_Kl6r39IQvKLqMx0llVh_LrQjQo451os7M/w625-h625/78B09949-0594-4A0D-8B6C-57C02A0E513C.jpeg" width="625" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx1aYqhmyhDCsHlDBRRza9dsB8WxgVp3K_Y9hC_5DB-a4uplE1wqz7wDBd4Ho3R6InCtdUSTHWGrxzYQ4hnl6aPWPkXkWHF3R1hCjk7jwqUhnbTa0jXthrHPfck-XTUUl6DyrxNzyi0J0/s2048/BE9379BD-9582-4C56-A3FF-554106D74D1B.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1493" data-original-width="2048" height="455" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx1aYqhmyhDCsHlDBRRza9dsB8WxgVp3K_Y9hC_5DB-a4uplE1wqz7wDBd4Ho3R6InCtdUSTHWGrxzYQ4hnl6aPWPkXkWHF3R1hCjk7jwqUhnbTa0jXthrHPfck-XTUUl6DyrxNzyi0J0/w625-h455/BE9379BD-9582-4C56-A3FF-554106D74D1B.jpeg" width="625" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><p>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. </p><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><p dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Objectives:</span></p><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><ul style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To engage students in subjects they may feel intimidated or ambivalent about. </span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To encourage students’ participation in teaching and learning activities, especially when learning asynchronously and at a distance. </span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To help students to construct academic submissions that add complexity, reflexivity and nuance to initial ideas. </span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To incorporate sensory, aesthetic and poetic elements in traditionally ‘stale’ social science topics.</span></p></li></ul><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><p dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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: </span></p><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><ul style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All activities are easy to ‘start’ with a prompt question or simply a response to artefacts in front of people. </span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All these activities, in different ways, materialise thinking (i.e. they made thinking visible through artefacts and images).</span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The activities are, in different ways, practical, exploratory and sensory - that is they incorporate heuristic / playful elements.</span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They involve selection (e.g. of elements of an image, of artefacts) and choice.</span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They make the process of constructing meaning explicit, and structure it, so participants can reflect or narrate.</span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They make enquiry a shared activity, as artefacts become shared objects of reflection and action. </span></p></li></ul><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><p dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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:</span></p><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><ul style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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. </span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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.</span></p></li></ul><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><p dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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. </span></p><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><p dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The idea in development</span></p><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><p dir="ltr" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In summary:</span></p><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><ul style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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.</span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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. </span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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 </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">name</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> 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. </span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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. </span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At the start of the module, students are presented with a ‘starter set’ of cards to illustrate each category.</span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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.</span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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. </span></p></li><li dir="ltr" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; list-style-type: disc; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">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. </span></p><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" role="presentation" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA5eqvqwFl59pWZ8v9sXHzxqqyxjAJcgXv9UR7a1hBrN-DvJxxwY-RU9_0BSVrBGhq9v5wVuJ2N4mk3u__JylDz_X_UaV9pOBQYrExJXFd36Yr4hLjqSPpzgGEajkDO6wkqIFdsAxsq0M/s1024/30D00939-0FB1-42E7-86DC-A26D6FBB5418.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="625" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA5eqvqwFl59pWZ8v9sXHzxqqyxjAJcgXv9UR7a1hBrN-DvJxxwY-RU9_0BSVrBGhq9v5wVuJ2N4mk3u__JylDz_X_UaV9pOBQYrExJXFd36Yr4hLjqSPpzgGEajkDO6wkqIFdsAxsq0M/w625-h625/30D00939-0FB1-42E7-86DC-A26D6FBB5418.jpeg" width="625" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: 11pt; 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margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><br /></p><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGgfDItBVPEavNMlyrUqgsueF7UDEhBzXYP542goam2IHTCCYMIsqhyphenhyphenlk0ljV4YqF6tN72vW9ZktcsGFXi-rltjKauSYu-X1NtvkaWIuV3KsuXeC40onRIasxhr7L3F7muGSoAHLjJ28M/s2048/C8177513-1102-4447-AA42-B225CBF1E68B.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="781" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGgfDItBVPEavNMlyrUqgsueF7UDEhBzXYP542goam2IHTCCYMIsqhyphenhyphenlk0ljV4YqF6tN72vW9ZktcsGFXi-rltjKauSYu-X1NtvkaWIuV3KsuXeC40onRIasxhr7L3F7muGSoAHLjJ28M/w586-h781/C8177513-1102-4447-AA42-B225CBF1E68B.jpeg" width="586" /></a></div><br /></li></ul>Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-24851070748754755082020-05-12T13:22:00.000-07:002020-05-13T05:20:31.114-07:00Affirming the visual-material: taking (theoretical) stock, finding an argument that works<span style="color: #38761d;">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 <b>what visual-material methods are</b>, and <b>how I can affirm their substantial position (my) social research </b></span><span style="caret-color: rgb(56, 118, 29); color: #38761d;">(and why I’m feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the label “methods” as a result).</span><br />
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<b><span style="color: #666666;">Note</span></b>: <i><span style="color: #666666;">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.</span></i><br />
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1. <b>Much work with “visual methods” is (both intentionally and unintentionally) decorative, instrumental or focused exclusively on novelty</b>. People often ‘like’ visual methods because they are ‘nice’ or make things more interesting. If we mean <i>harmless, pleasant, decorative</i>, then nice is not good. The next step up is to take a more instrumental view, along the lines of ‘<i>visual methods are good for eliciting qualitative data</i>’. 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 <i>really</i> take a positivist view of data, that we know methods are <i>not</i> invisible, but do we/I practice what we/I preach?<br />
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2. <b>Visual-material methods are <i>not</i> neutral</b>. 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 <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer-aesthetics/" target="_blank">Gadamer</a>, or <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Crossing_of_the_Visible.html?id=L0C-O0rdYm0C&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">Jean-Luc Marion</a>’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, <a href="https://www.phenomenologyonline.com/inquiry/orientations-in-phenomenology/hermeneutical-phenomenology/" target="_blank">hermeneutics</a> also, but I’m not sure the visual-material <i>as mimesis of something else, towards something else</i> is much <i>more</i> than method, even if - granted - it’s a much more acceptable, active method. <br />
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3. <b>We need an affirmative and substantial view of visual-material “methods”</b>. 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 <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-construction-naturalistic/" target="_blank">social constructionist</a> 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?<br />
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4. <b>The time has come for methods ‘like’ the visual-material</b>. 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.<br />
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5. <b>PostHumanism is an ideal ground for the future of visual-material methods</b>. 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:<br />
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<li>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.</li>
<li>‘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. </li>
<li>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. </li>
<li>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 <a href="https://visualisingpractice.blogspot.com/2016/01/foundations-for-visual-methodology.html" target="_blank">previous post</a> on Deleuze, diagrams, mapping, stacking and folding.]</li>
<li>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.</li>
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6. <b>If we take these points seriously, the purpose, status and substance of methods must be revised to be relevant</b>. 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:</div>
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<li>Visual-material methods are not some neutral ‘other’ relegated to the role of novel decoration, illustration or even way of elicitation. They <i>materialise the flow and connection of forces</i> that connect as we engage. </li>
<li>They come loaded with potential, and offer to re-imagine, rather than represent. They are part of the act of relating: a <i>generative, productive act</i>, affirming the human-with.</li>
<li>Visual-material methods achieve this by <i>making strange and turning the traditional subject</i>, and by (re)animating situations, (think of ethnographic study or performance, rather than a still life study). </li>
<li>They can <i>fore-ground that which is excluded</i>, marginalised, edited out and prohibited under homogenous and oppressive regimes of power. </li>
<li>Visual-material methods therefore become <i>active</i> 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. </li>
<li>Their ambiguity allows for <i>exploration and holding of tensions, contradictions, negative spaces</i> and give form to what is traditionally not described in research. </li>
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<br />Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-61708858882158440442020-05-06T19:29:00.004-07:002020-05-06T19:29:44.192-07:00The down side to theoretical nomadism (towards a way of talking about visual methods and practice)<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">
<i>Disclaimer: I wrote this at 2.30am, because these thoughts were in my head. I am in a process of re-writing, so read at your peril! - You may find this helpful if you struggle to articulate your theoretical points of reference. </i></div>
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I need to find a way forward with an article that is convincing and do-able. An article with a long history of crashing and re-booting. </div>
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I can see the need to pull together some coherent thinking, given that the article has been developed over a long time and incrementally, for different audiences. </div>
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On one hand. I can see an opportunity here - I potentially have a few articles on the timeline which would benefit from a similar foundation. ...and I don’t have a solid theoretical foundation for the thing that I have found myself wanting to write about. </div>
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This ‘thing’ - the common thread through lots of my work - is to do with the <b>agency of the visual-material in practices</b>. In this case, it’s the process of Sensemaking. I want to talk about perspective change, reflection / reflexivity, the ‘doing’ of things and finding ways to connect and collaborate (both in terms of people/systems, but also the development of narratives). </div>
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I think part of my challenge has come about because <b>I have been eclectic in my choice of inspirations</b> for thinking about practice and visual-material methods. My PhD gave me a hermeneutic perspective (initially via Paul Ricoeur), and that connected me to a thread of literature about phenomenology, mimesis self and narrative. This connected me to existential material from Heidegger and Gadamer, where I connected to reference points around the life-world, being-in-the-world (Dasein), things being to hand, encounters, shared horizons and the like. </div>
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I have traveled <b>nomadically and heuristically</b>, not paying much attention to the logic or implications of the epistemological ‘jumps’ I have made in moving from one body of literature to another. This was demonstrated again through further theoretical ‘turns’ I have made whilst looking for material on how people get things done, how we engage with the world, and the role of the visual. </div>
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Next came forms of (or cousins of) <b>practice theorisation</b> - attractive because it gave me a framework within which to integrate different sorts of things. On reflection, this has been such an interest to me because I want to settle on a perspective that is satisfying both theoretically and practically. It has to be useful, but must make sense ontologically and epistemologically. In (versions of) practice theory, I can think about patterns of things that come together at certain places and times. Familiar patterns that can be improvised, but which are altered as the elements are altered. </div>
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At the same time - writing this helps me see why I get so confused! - I have found really interesting motifs and images in post structural work, initially of <b>Deleuze</b>. I could not have jumped around more if I had tried. As an artist, the ability to move beyond and between traditional boundaries has felt useful; I don’t define myself as a scholar or expert of “a discipline”, but someone who wants to put ideas to work pragmatically. So - a focus on <b>flows, becomings, emergence, diagrams, maps, rhizomes and lines of flight</b> has been another way to connect “things” in situations. </div>
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This sort of heuristic and nomadic development of ideas over the last ten years or so has given me the ability to have LOTS of different conversations, to change perspective, to ask questions. What it has also done is thoroughly confuse my academic writing. I now see that if I had landed on one idea and mined that in a persistent, rigorous and thorough way, I would be publishing more articles (a better “publishing machine”).</div>
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Am I putting too much pressure on myself - of course - BUT at this point, facing the need to have a more coherent and developed paradigm to write within, I can take the opportunity to settle on a framework (not the only, but one at least) that I can shore up. </div>
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I return to the topic(s) that I keep coming back to - shared activity, meaning-making and the visual-material - in the context of wellbeing, professional practice and children’s services. Or, to put it in a shorter way, visual methods and collaborative practices. </div>
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<b>If I expect to summarise a synthesis of all the theoretical perspectives above, that isn’t possible.</b> I didn’t connect with them because they had logical connections, but because I was looking for people who talked about experience, change, activity in the world and aesthetics. I have written something recently <b>Silvia Gherardi’s relational-materialism</b>. This was satisfying for me because it was a form of practice theory that was about <b>materiality and affect</b>. It’s getting me closer to a territory I feel I could create something more robust about. I struggle with the tension of needing to develop ‘ rigour’ and wanting to journey and connect things nomadically. I hate snobbish implications from reviewers who pick up the amateurish aspects of my thinking. I would hate to be an “expert” but I want to journey with questions. However, to publish, I’ve got to make sense. I can’t publish questions or present drawings alone!</div>
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My next step, for an article I am doing a complete re-write of (familiar theme), is to connect Sensemaking, professional stories and visual-material methods through a new materialist / posthuman frame that focuses on affect and inter-action. I want to find a way of talking about acting with others AND the visual-material. I don’t want to create an intellectual project, I just want a way of saying “See! This is what I’m talking about! These things!” In a way that won’t get blown out of the water for being inconsistent, lacking rigour and so on. </div>
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<b>Next steps: Gherardi, Braidotti and a relational-material ‘place’ in which I can talk acting together and the agency of the visual within that. </b></div>
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This is why I got up at 2.30am to write this, and may regret that.</div>
Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-64646035111643278012020-04-17T06:31:00.003-07:002020-04-21T00:06:42.235-07:00The “Post and Return” method - an example of making meaning, together, with things.<b>How can a fold out object help people think and talk?</b><br />
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Isn’t it great when you get to use ideas that have been in your head for a while? Over the last year, I’ve populated my <a href="https://pin.it/AmwWd8v" target="_blank">Pinterest Board</a> with images of origami, folding and card structures for no other reason than I find them fascinating: but those images have found their moment. Over the last year, I’ve done LOTS of work with images and objects to help people think and talk; and of course, the Global COVID-19 Pandemic has forced us all to think about how we talk and think ‘at a distance’. So, back to paper, literally.<br />
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As my sketches in this post attempt to show, I returned to why ‘things’ are so important in thinking. I was inspired by the idea of receiving something (the philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur/" target="_blank">Paul Ricoeur</a> talked about gift giving in fascinating terms, for example), something that showed care and could be personalised. I thought about the sort of research partnerships I wanted to develop, in this case with parents of young children, and I knew that any research ‘at a distance’ would have to reflect ideas of care, nurture, crafting and personalisation.<br />
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<b>Senses and Interactions are important</b><br />
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Over thirty years of work with children, young people and professionals (I know!), one of the simplest, but most useful insights I have developed is that looking at things and handling things REALLY helps us talk and think individually, and together.<br />
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We use a wide range of experiences to “think” about things. Before we are born, we “make sense” of the world through our senses and interactions, and as we get older, we still rely on our senses and interactions to problem solve, work out what is going on, and decide what things mean to us and others. This can be quite a tricky task - no wonder we need all the information we can get!<br />
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Before we have a well crafted story to tell about “what’s going on” we wade through LOTS of environmental information. We have to sift through so much information, but our brains and bodies are really quite good at this (sometimes in different ways). We find ways of making sense of the world and (inter) acting with it - some people have called them <a href="https://www.pacey.org.uk/working-in-childcare/spotlight-on/schemas/" target="_blank">schemas</a>. If think of how you make sense of things you will probably recognise your own patterns (or schemas) of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Sensemaking_in_Organizations.html?id=nz1RT-xskeoC" target="_blank">sense making</a>. Before you have the slick explanation and plan for action, you will have do all sorts of things almost without “thinking” in the traditional conscious sense - things like gazing, moving, mark-making, handling, sorting and grouping, right through to things that ‘look’ more like conscious thought, like annotating or note taking.<br />
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Imagine receiving something. I can imagine for most of us, there might be some curiosity - especially if the ‘thing’ didn’t look like a marketing circular, or a bill. I wanted to build on that as part of a wider, multi-channel research methodology, but the “Send and Return” method developed as a part of that.<br />
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Look at the graphic below: here’s some quick notes on what a crafted object (in this case, a fold out interactive visual) could do, and why.<br />
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There is something about the act and experience of giving and receiving that is fascinating. We all experience this at times of celebration; there are so many interesting and pleasurable moments in both giving and receiving. What if we utilised this in research, even research at a distance? The ‘back and forth’ of pen pal letters (if you are under a certain age, you won’t appreciate that) builds a sense of intimacy that a tick box or cold call could create. Together with other methods, I wondered if I could build up a shared story or picture with my research partners, being experts in their own experience and family life. You can see some early thinking I’ve had below for a current project, below.<br />
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HOW we ask questions matters. Authors like James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium explain this in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Handbook_of_Constructionist_Research.html?id=_MkmsFn5NeQC&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y" target="_blank">constructivist</a> terms - that is, the “data” we look for is not “collected” but is constructed in the process of interactions. What we ask, how we ask it, who we are, where we are all matter, as they co-construct the data. So, I began to develop the “Post and Return” method as a a conversation. This conversation begins with me showing something, incomplete, but inviting. Research partners are invited to show me what the topic looks like for them. See my early note on this, below.<br />
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Asking research partners to “show me” something of their lived experience needs more than a blank page. As much as I’d like to get a fold out origami through the post, it won’t become a meaningful conversation if I don’t have anything to say, or any way for people to express themselves. The detail is critical - both <i>what</i> and <i>how much. </i>There has to be a connection between what I want to appreciate and what research partners want to tell me. <a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/gadamer/" target="_blank">Gadamer</a>’s concept of the shared horizon of experience is a useful reference here. The thing I ask must connect to a recognisable aspect of lived experience, and also must invite a response. I want people to interact, from the moment of unfolding the origami right through to sending a completed one back through the post. This is also about thinking carefully about what I am asking participants to do - not too simplistic, but not to complex.<br />
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For me, my emerging “Post and Return” method is derived from a core set of principles, the same ones I draw on to run whole system events, create graphic narratives or to teach at University. I see it as one making of the principles, and it will be shaped with those I use it with, as we make meaning together.<br />
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[NB. I’ve been on a great journey since my last blog post ONE YEAR ago, but no apologies, as I’ve been busy doing the work. I’ve had the pleasure of working with academic colleagues and professional partners in Health, Social Care and Education to develop and ‘test drive’ a range of methods. You can follow me on <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/ianrobsons" target="_blank">Twitter (@ianrobsons)</a> to find out things as they happen.]<br />
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<br />Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-14656500964616120572019-02-04T06:55:00.002-08:002019-02-06T00:55:50.922-08:00Making space for visual-material methods: reflections on work with organisations and in local authority partnerships. If you follow me on Twitter, or read this blog, you may know I am a researcher who develops visual-material methods (involving actions such as making, viewing and handling), to support review, reflection and planning. You’d think this is a pretty fun job, and it is, but if done well, it’s also challenging, humbling, and it requires lots of learning on my part. In this post, I thought it would be useful to record some of that learning, as the success of my work with others depends on it. There are lessons, perhaps not just for me, about developing innovative methods to support collaboration and creating the environment to do that successfully.<br />
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Some context is useful. As a researcher, I am concerned with supporting learning and change in professional practice and collaboration that benefits children, especially in English local authorities. I have worked in local government, and also have developed a specialism around the development and used of visual and material methods in research and higher education. I have spent lots of time listening to and coaching managers in local government children’s services (and beyond), and this has only made me more passionate about supporting their vital work.<br />
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I’ve had time to think about the value of innovation in local authority children’s services - but I’ll be honest: in this field, as with most others, the label, “innovation” can be a highly irritating and useless word. Like “modernisation” or “partnership working” it can mean many things to many people, including poorly thought through, if fashionable, initiatives we could all do without. It’s not the first idea I introduce into a conversation with managers in Children’s Services. However, I argue there is a case for innovation in public services. Before I reflect on developing tools that involve visual-material methods (the detailed stuff I do), I’ll set out the case I’ve made for innovation in local authority children’s services, and will reflect a little on creating the conditions or culture for developing new approaches. I have found that you can’t do one thing without the other.<br />
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<b>The challenge of addressing complex issues</b><br />
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Local authorities have an unenviable job when it comes to leading and organising change for children and families. Of course this applies to individuals’ practice, but I focus here on organisation and in particular cross-organisation work with partners in the community, voluntary, health and private sectors. I won’t rehearse the ways in which the roles, powers, mechanisms and resources of local authorities have changed over the last forty years or so, except to say that much of contemporary work of local authorities is done with others, across sometimes informal and blurred organisational boundaries. At a strategic level, the objects of that work - like reducing child obesity, identifying early language delay, or reducing teenage pregnancy are affected by many variables in a complex and changing situation. In policy terminology, such issues are “wicked”. Wicked problems, as originally described by Churchman (1967), are those that are complex, interdependent, and that have no ‘easy’ solution. Forget any simple ideas of implementing a single ‘solution’ through a single organisation to a single population in a linear way.<br />
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Of course, despite complex and changing times, there are some types of tasks that benefit from established methods. These tend to be on the end of a spectrum to do with information gathering, auditing or consultation. For these things (although they are not often straightforward), local authorities work regularly with organisations to do things like ‘map’ services. On the sort of imaginary axis proposed by Stacey (2002), the less agreement and certainty that exists about a solution, the more likely that factors like judgement and political consideration come into play. Hence the need to move beyond information gathering, towards more sensitive and adaptive tools.<br />
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<b>Towards meaningful and effective tools</b><br />
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Lots of my development, coaching or research work has been in such a zone. Whether working with looked after young people talking about mental health services, partnerships working with families of disabled children, groups of senior managers or evaluating wellbeing initiatives in schools, these situations share common challenges, despite (often) very different contexts. In my experience, they have all required things like:<br />
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• A methodology that allows meaningful ownership and participation.<br />
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• The ability to work with lots of different ‘types’ of information in one space, including emotional and embodied material.<br />
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• Easy and purposeful interaction between participants.<br />
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For me, work with visual-material methods provides an ideal practice through which to work on these things. Through trial, error and study, I have come to see some of what they offer (their ‘affordances’). Here are some themes:<br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;">• Visual-material ‘things’ can be artefacts; more than decoration, they can be used as tools to act on us and be used by us to achieve things.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;">• Visual-material artefacts can have a permanence that is useful in many ways. They act as ‘place markers’, helping us to remember, relate and deal with complexity.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;">• Visual-material things can bring diverse sets of ‘things’ into a single space in the way that the conventional linear structure of narrative cannot. We appreciate new things and ask new questions when we encounter such collections or assemblages.</span><br />
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Given my previous list, these big themes need to be embodied by methods that feel simple, empower and recognise expertise in participants, are inclusive and hit the right balance between totally prescriptive templates for activity and scary ‘blank sheet of paper’ high stakes activities. There is no easy way round ticking these boxes: I refine, talk and reflect a lot with partners in the process of development.<br />
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<b>Nurturing the right conditions for innovation in local authority led activity</b><br />
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Most of my work on innovative tools (visual-material methods, in my case) happens well before the actual implementation. This is bad news for those who want to rush to the methods, and skip constructing an understanding and readiness for new approaches. In my context - the high stakes world of safeguarding, supporting and educating children and young people, this must be handled with thought. Changing "how we do things" is a universally tricky challenge, and in my work, local authority partnerships can operate outside of formal terms of reference, organisational commitments, budgets and roles. Making things work as they are now seems hard enough, with limited resources, never mind going through the pain of change. Making a practical case for change is needed, alongside the development of new tools that embody new approaches.<br />
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I have found that concepts can really help he. If introduced pragmatically, concepts can help create a shared ‘space’ for the agreement of principles, and conversations about what those concepts can look like if put into practice. I say ‘done right’, because I have to keep any mention of concepts tied to practical benefit - and have learnt that this can be tricky for time-pressed and ‘initiative’ weary managers. On the plus side, there are some great resources that help us think about systems and how a given ‘situation’ has come about. For example, Activity Theory (e.g. Daniels et al., 2005) is one framework I have used to consider that:<br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;">• Issues are best understood at the level of the activity system they are connected to.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;">• Phenomena or issues evolve over time through the interaction of parts of the activity system.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #0b5394;">• Learning comes from understanding contradictions within an activity system.</span></span><br />
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For me, this is hard work, and easy to misjudge. I have spent lots of time developing tools at the expense of understanding the context in which they will be used and stumbled at times. Thankfully, I am learning orientated, and I find it helpful to be transparent about mis-steps with those who I encourage transparency and honesty from. It’s not always a bad thing. We like to read about ‘innovative’ methods (I know I do), including the sort of visual-material methods I develop, but often the majority of the work is done getting to the point where diverse groups, with different agendas and shared histories choose to try something new. In my case, it involves putting children, young people and parents ‘in the middle’ and understanding resistance, frustration and questions from professional partners as an opportunity to make space for new methods.<br />
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<b>References</b><br />
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Churchman, C.W. (1967) Wicked Problems, <span style="font-style: italic;">Management Scienc</span>e, Vol. 14 (4).<br />
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Daniels, H., Edwards, A., Engeström, Y., Gallagher, T. and Ludvigsen, S.R. (Eds.) <i>Activity Theory in Practice: Promoting learning across boundaries and agencies</i>, London: Routledge.<br />
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Stacey, R.D. (2002) <i>Strategic management and organisational dynamics: the challenge of complexity</i>. (3rd Ed.) Harlow: Prentice Hall.Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-81198523471274129602017-06-15T03:42:00.002-07:002017-06-15T03:44:04.870-07:00Developing a visual-textual academic paper: lessons on process and style.I have begun working on a visual-text journal article with a colleague at work. This has continued a learning process about developing a visual vocabulary that began for me in earnest at Christmas, when I asked for a graphics tablet so I could integrate my artistic practice much more into my teaching and research. Some of my most challenging learning in this context has been about <i>visual style.</i><br />
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The year started really well on the visual front, and I had some good feedback on using illustration to teach a social policy module on my Childhood and Early Years Studies programme. It reminded me of the power of the visual, but also how much work has to go on behind the scenes in order to make it accessible, inclusive and meaningful to students. It's not 'just drawing' or 'making things look nice', and it IS valid academic practice when appropriately utilised. At the same time, drawing in academic contexts is not <i>automatically</i> valid, relevant or accessible - hence the need for serious consideration.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6MzmJsjZuah63LUVxeFWKa5zsf_C1N1JnuOi2P4rdofswFLxzEt_cnt5MvizbXkuuWnA8YsircxiYUXHzNF5WG9rIlaXy_kIf2_p7uMN7aivw-Li4Ep_Sqw9YHnHNjmVg79J1Yckc2Mc/s1600/illustration+collage+for+TQEF+application.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="161" data-original-width="688" height="91" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6MzmJsjZuah63LUVxeFWKa5zsf_C1N1JnuOi2P4rdofswFLxzEt_cnt5MvizbXkuuWnA8YsircxiYUXHzNF5WG9rIlaXy_kIf2_p7uMN7aivw-Li4Ep_Sqw9YHnHNjmVg79J1Yckc2Mc/s400/illustration+collage+for+TQEF+application.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Examples of new illustrations used in a recent Social Policy module.</td></tr>
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My more recent focus has been on the article I mentioned, in collaboration with a colleague who is a cultural geographer. It has been a real eye opener in terms of building technical skills, swapping audiences and most significantly, thinking about my visual style(s). This has allowed me to take the learning from my teaching practice and really forge something new for me.<br />
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Because I love drawing and painting, I entered the process of creating visuals for an academic article in quite a relaxed way, but quickly realised that drawing, like writing, could be lots of things. I have learnt whilst doing, as multiple challenges and questions arose. Practically, I have learnt about sketching, layers, line art and colouring in <a href="https://www.sketchbook.com/?locale=en" target="_blank">Autodesk Sketchbook Pro</a>. I have asked questions about whether I start with line art or blocked tones and about what sorts of marks work well together. More importantly, I have thought very hard about what job my visuals need to do in articulating a particular narrative, alongside text. I tend to call this the development of my <i>visual vocabulary</i>, and I realise it needs as much thinking through (and work) as does writing. I have dealt with questions such as: what do I want to draw attention to? how might it be 'read'? how does a visual narrative differ from decoration? Therefore, my focus is on how I communicate visually in specific contexts, or my <i>style</i> for shorthand.<br />
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The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language defines <i>Style</i> as;<br />
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"A general term that primarily means a way of doing things, with additional senses such as doing them appropriately, doing them well or badly, doing them in a distinctive way, or doing them in one of a number of ways." (OUP, 2003). </blockquote>
Finding a <i>way of doing things</i> is a simple phrase which requires serious attention, especially if we want to that way of doing things to be <i>appropriate</i> and <i>distinctive</i>. It has made me think about how the various parts of my artistic repertoire will work well together, what I should select and reject, and what is going to help my 'reader'.<br />
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You can see some parts of the process below. It's a work in progress.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqLYmo6d4O_gsvo4QTVqq-5VHjMtF_fJwRw6IQX4OgF6miMqgH1HDHvDpYMlFcpn88kbhEAwEkdNbtFvjOhCpBnnFsUoJ0iyy2d1D_EhJlEWADW80dt86hYbKtiwZyohcFnVznUd8W_vM/s1600/cartoon+collage+for+blog+June+17.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="779" data-original-width="644" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqLYmo6d4O_gsvo4QTVqq-5VHjMtF_fJwRw6IQX4OgF6miMqgH1HDHvDpYMlFcpn88kbhEAwEkdNbtFvjOhCpBnnFsUoJ0iyy2d1D_EhJlEWADW80dt86hYbKtiwZyohcFnVznUd8W_vM/s640/cartoon+collage+for+blog+June+17.png" width="528" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Parts of the development process towards a style that works for one article.</td></tr>
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<br />Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-88717857866444407322017-04-25T02:38:00.001-07:002017-04-25T02:40:09.747-07:00Drawing and writing together: pushing my boundaries<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeDXXGKYasqenzTYZB9QwGsSDMUcAOjOvgSJ1e1I9T1XHSOfuwILZuUFdb59hmfNLFdeRXvKQt4R-9BA7qB_1bLGpv2GnXWX1dRGzfE8D10mq80rNbv3C1gUX_vrT0AHq6hoEB5McYh1U/s1600/profile+at+desk+25.4.17.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeDXXGKYasqenzTYZB9QwGsSDMUcAOjOvgSJ1e1I9T1XHSOfuwILZuUFdb59hmfNLFdeRXvKQt4R-9BA7qB_1bLGpv2GnXWX1dRGzfE8D10mq80rNbv3C1gUX_vrT0AHq6hoEB5McYh1U/s320/profile+at+desk+25.4.17.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shocking mess at my desk.</td></tr>
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I started my occasional blog on developing visual methods in research and teaching as a way of documenting my own process of grappling with developing my artistic-academic practice. It gives me an opportunity to connect up thinking about how I can know things, my perspectives on subjects and how I develop and use visual methods in a coherent way. This is important for me, as my fields of teaching and research (e.g. children, young people and families, service design and evaluation, leadership and organisation) are ones, like others, that benefit from the application of visual methods but deserve more than decoration or illustration in the traditional sense. <i>So - I am here to push myself both in my teaching, research and writing activities.</i> Below are a couple of examples: firstly from teaching, then from a writing project in progress. They are not perfect, but that's not the point.<br />
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I started this academic year with a personal commitment to increase the use of drawing in my teaching practice, which I have done (and loved). The images below are from a module I have taught with a colleague on social policy for children, families and communities. As someone who has studied social policy and public administration, I know this can be a dry subject if simply considered as a body of knowledge to be transmitted, so the challenge for me has been to use drawing to <i>stimulate the imagination, disrupt thinking and to provide spaces for thinking and and questioning</i>. I have done this with a fairly loud voice in my head saying "stop playing about on the edges", as I have introduced imaginary machines that make social policy, or birds that get involved in family life. I know, it sounds a bit crackers. The thing is, I have found from student evaluation that drawing has enabled some of my students to find <i>new 'ways in'</i> to this topic. This new sort of access has also helped them to <i>explore</i> and <i>navigate</i> in new ways, but I have more to do to document this which will be exciting.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_K5JyQCjQbuYpeL-walQIjSa4PUbFWTe_iPGm7onwgZb62JCNxOkXbpOP4XUZ9JYKBT1PsjR6pC5PcwKUJtHg1db2u-8VP7m3Oar-VeuPcqGQHsxRlMwk5MMJt0vopAQefvcTWWVuiv4/s320/education+and+schooling+system.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An education / schooling "machine"<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_K5JyQCjQbuYpeL-walQIjSa4PUbFWTe_iPGm7onwgZb62JCNxOkXbpOP4XUZ9JYKBT1PsjR6pC5PcwKUJtHg1db2u-8VP7m3Oar-VeuPcqGQHsxRlMwk5MMJt0vopAQefvcTWWVuiv4/s1600/education+and+schooling+system.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> </a></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUltpZX1oC8yD-MmniiFd5JTZNAT8t68ibBPa_BQEa3weSH06P4zYOsnSMxdln6kWYEMfWmLRQTfTg7Z1W9zHh3PqL0v-kAAY_4Yut-Qnp6edG8zJL47LzvFUT_6MnOzYIwW92XIJh5dU/s1600/family+birds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUltpZX1oC8yD-MmniiFd5JTZNAT8t68ibBPa_BQEa3weSH06P4zYOsnSMxdln6kWYEMfWmLRQTfTg7Z1W9zHh3PqL0v-kAAY_4Yut-Qnp6edG8zJL47LzvFUT_6MnOzYIwW92XIJh5dU/s320/family+birds.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Family intervention birds.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSfjztv7gA7dEsBCHPa27cVYK7MpQMFGuBr57zUb16W8pzdIhtuoxStFANo-8tCCVoBl4F2FSndN4tJMR8zPhbMlvUFJCZJFRWyixBbK8hUVdWk1kPYtBiP5tIflHO2adA1L2mBPKU-yY/s1600/townscape+visual.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSfjztv7gA7dEsBCHPa27cVYK7MpQMFGuBr57zUb16W8pzdIhtuoxStFANo-8tCCVoBl4F2FSndN4tJMR8zPhbMlvUFJCZJFRWyixBbK8hUVdWk1kPYtBiP5tIflHO2adA1L2mBPKU-yY/s320/townscape+visual.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Three point perspective 'community' with contrasting elements.</td></tr>
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On the writing front, I'm also working with a colleague who is a cultural geographer and fellow childhood person to develop a way of thinking and writing together. This is new territory for me, which I can tell because I spend my time thinking (again) "is this properly academic?" "am I wasting my time?" "shouldn't I be doing this the other way round?" and so on. In the end, I have realised that this process of exploration and adventure will result in learning, and I will be a better writer and illustrator because of it. After some initial conversations, I've made drawing my <i>starting point</i>, which has been a challenge, as I'm normally thinking about what the issue is, what contribution I offer and what impact it has had to please reviewers and readers to please a more (social) scientific audience. I am more than sure the process of writing and then peer review will develop clarity and rigour, but I'm starting a conversation (which includes visuals) with my co-author. Examples from the early part of the process are below.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilUKCklRaT7t8ZuDag9aquw5aB24uTsVBivIjsTtsv5tw-ZUMRR74qjwF7ucJ5LbM52bfnYrL77G3g6Oxc7pgv5nh5IQx_x5ZzyA6g1Wy1HFhGLSZJ7IcNiohIrSlkODJSlEf7COotYh8/s1600/sketch+composite+april+2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilUKCklRaT7t8ZuDag9aquw5aB24uTsVBivIjsTtsv5tw-ZUMRR74qjwF7ucJ5LbM52bfnYrL77G3g6Oxc7pgv5nh5IQx_x5ZzyA6g1Wy1HFhGLSZJ7IcNiohIrSlkODJSlEf7COotYh8/s400/sketch+composite+april+2017.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sketching elements that will eventually feature in a image-text article.</td></tr>
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In this process, we are imagining a composite image which will also be deconstructed and used with text (sort of) in a way inspired (but not copying) a graphic novel format. I'm taking some of Deleuze's ideas I've previously blogged about (stacking, mapping, folding etc.) and applied them to early childhood education practice. I have found the process of sketching multiple versions has been helpful, and has caused me to think about relationships between elements and "arguments" in new ways. We will be discussing how text will interact with the images.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg1LHCiA9_oU6qT1hHKabhLgVwOAXXb0jCHVwAk6l_faDsqod0PWxUBSn6KwLwYBpp7HY0HAUF_ISIyCnCtW7feR028Kc5kLZtky5UKeWXcFUUZZFqN9856zXmZlkgTJeLPggfyCUO4ns/s1600/lava+sketch+early+one.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg1LHCiA9_oU6qT1hHKabhLgVwOAXXb0jCHVwAk6l_faDsqod0PWxUBSn6KwLwYBpp7HY0HAUF_ISIyCnCtW7feR028Kc5kLZtky5UKeWXcFUUZZFqN9856zXmZlkgTJeLPggfyCUO4ns/s400/lava+sketch+early+one.jpg" width="275" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An early composite image featuring the elements previously sketched. </td></tr>
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This is an early version of a composite image I have produced with a graphics tablet which may start or end the article. The time spent drawing and revising has given me space to consider and reflect on the topic in a way which writing alone does not tend to do. It's helped me avoid some of the early editing and self-censorship that can sabotage my writing projects, so that has been helpful.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVzNRByno9Lxe1hCjIlQr9kvJ81pyEc-8kekSoNlPsLQ20JAgS7WJjO3iKFNf-qdgsHzOFGAVoyX3Lyfy2VqI0oWuThG_566KmfkTTgrXPbWxcUif2_76Zy8voNPr1GvQnVJbRzzSb_KY/s1600/sketch+artefacts+on+table+24.4.17.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVzNRByno9Lxe1hCjIlQr9kvJ81pyEc-8kekSoNlPsLQ20JAgS7WJjO3iKFNf-qdgsHzOFGAVoyX3Lyfy2VqI0oWuThG_566KmfkTTgrXPbWxcUif2_76Zy8voNPr1GvQnVJbRzzSb_KY/s400/sketch+artefacts+on+table+24.4.17.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Creating elements as artifacts to support writing collaboration.</td></tr>
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I am developing new ways of collaborating for academic publication which are helpful for me. In addition to having a shared Google document with my co-writer, I am also in the process of creating a series of visual artifacts (in this case, the six 'elements' of the composite image above) which we can use to configure a visual and textual narrative. I am also finding that adding in ideas and themes as text boxes to imagine possibilities helps, and the test will be when I meet up with my co-writer and we see how they make a difference to the writing process.<br />
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I will continue to think about what all of this means for the sorts of journals and special editions I submit to, as I think I need to continue to be really clear about what 'counts' as valuable, useful and clear to audiences. As I become even clearer about my artistic-academic practice and identity, that will help, so here's to that journey.Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-49518576939654773562016-05-22T13:52:00.000-07:002016-05-22T13:52:02.195-07:00Drawing-with-others: visual and hermeneutic ethnography<div style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue'; font-size: 14px;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRTfM3PjNrSDIvam7-8w4csV5HMnjc_cb8_CbgTqiXCJDTTq6gmc2f2o3IqueT-zdRqTUz2WvX-mV_LcY2d5yfChgw_kbZLinrv_TFgrY0nKnYDDdnAQbnOvhQjCfE_0iCJ4xaHKXCfsE/s1600/IMG_0341.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRTfM3PjNrSDIvam7-8w4csV5HMnjc_cb8_CbgTqiXCJDTTq6gmc2f2o3IqueT-zdRqTUz2WvX-mV_LcY2d5yfChgw_kbZLinrv_TFgrY0nKnYDDdnAQbnOvhQjCfE_0iCJ4xaHKXCfsE/s400/IMG_0341.JPG" width="400" /></a>I think I have reconnected with the reason why drawing (and other production of images of various sorts) is one of the central strands that runs through my work. I am beginning to understand - again - what drawing is to me, and my research practice and I am excited to explore the implications of these ideas more fully. This is good timing, as I was beginning to fall into the trap of seeing drawing as ‘a thing’ somehow apart from me, a method to be used, or worse, a decorative stimulus. I was becoming disconnected from drawing through this objectification, and this was fatal. Instead, I write this post to remind myself that drawing demands that I am fully authentic and present with others, that drawing is meaningful and vulnerable communication where my horizon of understanding connects with them, enabling real conversations.
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I am not sure exactly how this translates into research methodology other than to say I am seeing drawing is a way of <i><b>being-with-others</b></i>, one in which things are re-presented and encountered in new ways, supporting insights and new stories for those participating. I am finding it helpful to think of as a form of <i>visual ethnography</i>, in which there is a shared <i>hermeneutic encounter.</i> My philosophical basis for this is the work of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer (as as you may know from previous posts, I find motifs in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze inspiring although the connections to the former two sources are minimal, if not non-existent). I have another post I plan to write on Gadamer’s Truth and Method which I have found, together with several of Ricoeur’s works frame these sorts of ideas. </div>
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One of the implications of these thoughts about drawing as conversation with others is to prompt me to keep it alive. I stalled when I began to think about images in a passive way - simply ‘things’ that needed to be impressive. As I have re-focused on the activity of drawing, and how I might help others encounter and respond to images, I saw something I wanted to develop. Part of what motivates me is to put myself and others in situations where <i><b>genuine enquiry and curiosity can come to the fore</b></i>. There is too much formulaic, ‘safe’ social research out there, in which people play the roles of expert and subject, we ask the same questions and get the same answers. The problem is, people taking part in research like this know this. If I can put myself and others in a much more interesting place, where I and (hopefully) others see things in new ways, and we are equally engaged, then we might work harder to understand. I will be interesting to test out ways to develop this ‘drawing with others’. </div>
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Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-3073697546316804732016-01-28T03:33:00.002-08:002016-01-28T03:33:24.833-08:00Making mapping (of professional lives) workAlongside the activity I am undertaking to develop a conceptual base for using visual methods, I am getting on with the job of creating tools that I and others can use to explore professional life. As a researcher, I am particularly interested in helping children, young people and adults to understand services and organisations they work in or use better. As a visual person with a background in community work, I have had the opportunity to do things like develop visual methods with young people in the care system (reviewing their experiences of mental health services, for example). More recently, my PhD research used visual artifacts (cartoons, data maps and table top assemblages) to help leaders of early childhood services understand their professional narratives. Since then, I have begun to introduce visual and interactive teaching methods in my lecturing role at university - and have taken visual tools into my research practice in schools.<br />
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Developing visual and interactive tools is a real test, because I want them to be meaningful (to both people using them and academically) and effective (which includes them being fun, easy and intuitive to use). Combining all these things is harder than you might think, and many hours of practice and refining have gone into this so far. I am now at the stage when I want to formally test and develop visual tools within my research context - services and educational settings that work with children, young people and families. I have a particular interest in emotional well-being, inclusion and how children experience settings and services. Specifically, as a coach I want to develop tools that I (and professionals) can use to better reflect on their practice, so they can be more effective, self-aware and inclusive.<br />
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I have lots of potential directions and sources of inspiration (on the conceptual front, see previous posts), and am currently working with the idea of mapping professional life. The picture I have included here is one example, which thinks about the idea of mapping as an activity which relates and brings elements into the same 'space' so work can be done with them. In that sense, this example is inspired by my use of the visual in my coaching practice, the ideas in my previous post and generally by <a href="http://clarkessituationalanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">Adele Clarke</a>'s work on situational mapping.<br />
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...I have lots of scribbly pages and messy models ahead of me.Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-29573044306063282292016-01-22T06:36:00.001-08:002016-01-22T06:38:01.436-08:00Foundations for a visual methodology<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14px;">As I have previously blogged about, I am working on a philosophical and practical base for my developing research practice. As the title of the blog suggests, I am a researcher of professional practice and service user experience having come from roles in UK Children's Services. Specifically, I am interested in developing user-friendly, interactive visual tools to explore both children / young people's experiences of institutions or services and that of the professionals that work with them. I do this with a fairly long track record in developing interactive and visual tools in community work / planning and teaching practice in higher education. I took my next steps in developing this work through my PhD research, which utilised various visual artefacts and was influenced by the philosophy of <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur/" target="_blank">Paul Ricoeur</a>. </span><br />
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My post-doctoral challenge is to take what worked so well and develop it practically and conceptually so it speaks to children / practitioners and the academic community. Most people try to specialise in one direction (children or academia, not the band), but I am convinced that there are benefits to having a practical method rooted in a philosophy of practices and experiences and vice versa. In other words, good methods can speak in profound ways and philosophy and concepts should be things that can be shown. That's the aim.
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My journey into this practical philosophy, or towards philosophical tools has involved (amongst other things) reading some of the sources that have inspired me so far. Superficially, these sources are diverse. More than that, they are written utilising very different positions on the nature of being and knowledge (i.e. ontological and epistemological positions). This is dangerous territory that I have explored knowing that I am dealing with a minefield of possible contradictions, languages, metaphors (or none) and communities of thought and practice. Ultimately, it has been a heuristic, exploratory and pragmatic journey, where I have sought to 'look across' sources of inspiration for common space, connections or points of overlap. It is certainly not complete, but as I move between this work and the practical work of developing visual tools, each activity provokes and refines the other.</div>
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Amongst these sources I have found authors who deal with a huge range of visual motifs. Some use visual or metaphorical devices explicitly, some implicitly. For example, Ricoeur deals with the significance of the metaphor, mimesis and transformation from one state to another, texts as traces and sedimentations of activity. <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/" target="_blank">Heidegger</a> addresses the nature of being in experiential life-worlds as spaces with (intentional) horizons, objects, modes of being with their own patterns and possibilities. Ted <a href="https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/users/schatzki" target="_blank">Schatzki</a> takes Heidegger and practice theory and develops his take on human practices as spatial and temporal things with patterns of involvement. The outlier is the work of Giles <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/" target="_blank">Deleuze</a>, whose philosophy rejects much of the existential or hermeneutic foundations of the previous thinkers. Despite this, Deleuze is profoundly and explicitly visual and conceives of an immanent space characterised by virtual planes, lines and maps which stack and fold into diagrams. </div>
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I have yet to decide if and on what basis I can find points of connection between all of these elements, or pivotal concepts, but I play with the idea of a life-world, one with actual and virtual elements connected in a system: places, objects, habits, structures and so on. I'll start with the life-world, because that is currently my 'canvas' for a visualisation of experience and activity.</div>
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The life-world: So far, the concept of the life-world has been helpful to me as a rather abstract ‘holding space’ for everything to do with the subjective experience individuals share with others. It is a phenomenological term used initially by Edmund <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/" target="_blank">Husserl </a>(1936) to describe the way in which the world is self-evident, ‘given’ or already existing in the form of socially, culturally, historically constituted meanings: a “we-subjectivity” (Ibid). The life-world therefore acts as a passive background to defines things as meaningful to people. I have noted how the concept has been adapted by Martin Heidegger to focus on the nature of being-in-the-world, and by authors such as Alfred <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schutz/" target="_blank">Schutz</a> and Jurgen <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/" target="_blank">Habermas</a> who focused on sociologically meaningful action and communicative action respectively. For me, the life-world is a interesting candidate for a ‘canvas’ for the visual description of everyday life precisely because it is not an abstract transcendental concept, but (certainly for individuals like Schutz and Habermas) it describes how life (and schools or systems) are meaningful to groups of people based on socially, culturally, historically constituted basis. Consequently, I am thinking that the basis and operation of life-worlds can be described, sketched and mapped as a sort of landscape of experience or space for action.
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Beyond this early thinking about lifeworld as canvas, I become interested in how this space can be explored as I make the connections between ideas and practical activities (or you could say, in moving from ontology > epistemology > methodology > methods). For me, the ideas are useful in a very pragmatic sense insofar as they justify certain sorts of visual and material enquiry. Towards this, I am thinking and playing with the following ideas which have caught my attention in the texts in mentioned. As I have said, this is not a logical enquiry, but a heuristic and pragmatic one, considering things in the same space and drawing up questions about how and if they might relate. The aim is that as I think this through it results in a very practical method of enquiry that is simple but very grounded in the ideas I am working with.
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The sketch: Made up of visual and material marks in space, the sketch is a virtual state of composition that prefigures actual things. <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=H8nyo6Z72PgC&pg=PP6&lpg=PP6&dq=zdebik+deleuze+and+the+diagram&source=bl&ots=zramGxmafI&sig=IsIAXXDBJRlfr-6ns_Rtx0hKBLg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi0hvCO0b3KAhXBWhQKHS7nCK8Q6AEIXzAO#v=onepage&q=zdebik%20deleuze%20and%20the%20diagram&f=false" target="_blank">Zdebik </a>(2012, p.139) suggests the sketch is created to create a general concept - something one might draw out before making a sort of trip, something preparatory. It is a "contracted image of a thing" (Ibid, p.108) which allows the one drawing it to explore something materially and to direct thought along certain paths. Elsewhere, Heidegger (1927/2010) provides a sense of the sketch as something analogous to a theoretical schema.
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue"; font-size: 14px;">The map: In the work of Deleuze (1983/2013;1988/2013), the map provides a way of navigating a space and is a form of potentiality in that it enables discovery and is creative or generative. It organises spaces and thinking but as Zdebik (2012, pp.10-11) notes, this creativity and production does not rely on the activity of tracing, which "...although necessary, cannot offer anything new to thought because its function is to copy and represent what is already there" (Ibid, p.34). In other words, mapping explores another aspects of the thing and as the map is also virtual, it connects and communicates between things not necessarily proximal in time or space (Ibid, p.100), visualising functions, intentions and ways in which elements intersect or diverge. Practically, the idea of mapping (which is not always the material map itself and certainly not the traditional cartographic map) is making everything that is relevant visible, enabling a way to explore the workings and possible directions of a thing like a school, a policy or a family.</span><br />
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Stacking: It is through the function of stacking that maps form diagrams, described below and in a previous post. I have previously mentioned the idea of stacking, which is concerned with reducing the distance between images and the things themselves (Zdebik, 2012; <a href="https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/introduction-to-simondon" target="_blank">Simondon</a>, 1958). It is a form of analogy, where connections are made between disparate elements. Zdebik (2012) states that the purpose of stacking is to "...visualise an unrepresentable process that is no less actual because it is virtual" (p.43) - in the activity of stacking, a visual form begins to connect and mediate concepts that may be from different orders or depths. For me, I can visualise different orders of things - the physical space of the school, the discipline system, the movement of teachers and pupils for example - and in placing them (actually or conceptually) on one another, questions may be prompted as one connects functions and structures.
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Folding: In Fold: Leibniz and the baroque, Deleuze (1992) articulates the fold as the connection made between autonomous and concepts, things or systems. Whilst it helps to appreciate the materialist metaphysics of Deleuze's work (and I am not sure I am there yet), it is an intriguing idea. As I understand it, the function of the fold is to move an object from one dimension to another (Zdebik, 2012, p.73). For my purposes, it helps me to imagine a piece of paper folded so parts of an image which are separate are connected. When a fold is created, objects are contracted, and conversely can be unfolded and expanded. For Deleuze, existence is things folded together. Deleuze (1992) relates the fold, or inflection, to the work of the artist Paul Klee (p.15) and the way in which points or fold on a line can reveal the change of direction of an active line. I imagine this through the idea that in a painting, a line has the potential to move different ways.
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The diagram: It seems that partly through the activity of stacking and folding things like maps, the diagram is assembled. It multiplies the characteristics and functions of the sketch and the map, enabling an exploration of possibilities as processes are connected to structures. Zdebik (2012) describes it as a "productive dimension" (p.139). As I have previously described, the diagram is not representational, but is a way of connecting functions and traits in two things. An example might be the school and the exam system, or the residential home and systems of managing risk: two 'things', not the same, but which can be connected as functions of one thing (a policy, discourse or system) connect to a different but related other, perhaps something spacial and material like an institution. </div>
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I continue to think about these possible activities or motifs within the canvas that I would like to create to explore children's and professionals' experiences of institutions, systems or processes. As you will have gathered, they are not offered in any particular relation to one another at this stage, but I continue to play with them and see how I can use them to ask about very practical things. If you have any views or insights, please leave a comment, I'd like to hear.</div>
Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-43339933126463398222015-06-09T13:43:00.000-07:002015-06-09T13:43:13.166-07:00Beyond decoration: committing to visual (research) practiceAlthough I haven't posted lots here yet, my journey into developing a thoroughly 'visual' research and teaching practice is something I've been thinking about and working on. Although I'm on a mission to go <b>'beyond decoration' with drawing, painting, photography and map making</b>, I've 'decorated' my office with a recent painting test. Why? I think if you want to thoroughly integrate something into your daily activities and workflow, it should not sit in a draw somewhere. It's on my wall not because I love it, or because it's my best possible work, but as a statement of intent and a point of connection - with whatever I am doing. I am becoming committed to thinking visually first, and that's what's going on for me at the moment. <div>
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I'm doing this because activities like drawing are intensely practical and philosophical. I love how thinking visually has necessitated being visual. It has pushed my practice on because I have needed to get off my backside and kick-start my painting, to use a sketchbook in all my academic meetings, and to <b>work on visual research methods as 'plan A'</b>. Doing this has also made me think about how all this is received. Tradition dictates that visual arts are consumed or <i>admired</i> by others, which is something I am aware of when people look at what I am doing; we are conditioned to respond to certain types of visual artefacts we are told are 'art'. I want to push past that and to locate my work in a collaborative process of work with others, not as 'final product' but as a response amongst other responses. My work is intended to prompt, to open up, to question, to shift - not because it is 'great art', but because it presents a different view, and one that calls for a response. At the moment, I am thinking through a research project that I hope will involve me in drawing aspects of professional practice. I have a job in health, education and social care research to blend this visual process with a philosophy of the social sciences and an ability to speak to pressing and concrete professional issues. In other words, my visual practice is not 'simply' about visual art as a product - I am not primarily presenting myself as an artist - but I am <b>working on a sort of accessible, practical visual philosophy</b>. The sort social workers, looked after children, teachers and so on can engage with and that speaks to their frame of interpretation. </div>
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The second image here is a page from my sketchbook. Again, it's quick work, but it is an example of me thinking through an article on the 'life-world' of young people in school. For me, it was more than decoration because it forced me to commit to a visual explanation of what I was thinking through in a previously vague way. I have been able to build on this in my reading and writing, and have come back to my workbook to build on it. Visual thinking is as valid as, and complements writing but provides a different set of practices for exploration and questioning. The experience has been therapeutic (I find drawing and painting therapeutic) but also <i>exposing</i>, because I have to put my naivety on the page, or canvas, or Instagram, in an academic world which is all about 'performing' expertise. <br /><div>
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Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-90532259334285222092015-03-05T01:46:00.001-08:002015-03-10T02:35:21.294-07:00Ambitions for drawing in teaching and research<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlNGcGPINnvSOLgjTk_6I72E-zjtMKfy9U7P-_XmFiJjP36fBWxDRN0VdJ38bhTk5GRZfKrAsLmix76O9QJ5KKUeNzYsLNEmbGwi82XUrfS7LrrYeIxv1e0as0ISw_c-fd5sKXUMhjTpM/s1600/IMG_2163.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br /></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlNGcGPINnvSOLgjTk_6I72E-zjtMKfy9U7P-_XmFiJjP36fBWxDRN0VdJ38bhTk5GRZfKrAsLmix76O9QJ5KKUeNzYsLNEmbGwi82XUrfS7LrrYeIxv1e0as0ISw_c-fd5sKXUMhjTpM/s1600/IMG_2163.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlNGcGPINnvSOLgjTk_6I72E-zjtMKfy9U7P-_XmFiJjP36fBWxDRN0VdJ38bhTk5GRZfKrAsLmix76O9QJ5KKUeNzYsLNEmbGwi82XUrfS7LrrYeIxv1e0as0ISw_c-fd5sKXUMhjTpM/s1600/IMG_2163.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">I started this blog to explore my thinking and practice around drawing and using images in my research and teaching practice. If nothing else, it gives me a sort of accountability for making progress. </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Because I am doing that, I am looking out for things that will get me thinking. I came across one such opportunity when I read about a public lecture to be given by Professor Keith McIntyre entitled <strong>'Lines of Desire'</strong>. I have written about it here because it has given me a great opportunity to reflect and think about what I am doing in going back to drawing in my academic work.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"></span> </div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><em><span style="color: #444444;">"Keith McIntyre’s work is well renowned for crossing over a range of studio practice and performance disciplines. His interest lies in drawing, graphic fine art media and theatre. Keith has had numerous exhibitions and has been Visual Director on a range of collaborative projects including Rites (Scottish Chamber Orchestra), New Constellations for Wind, Reed and Drawing Instruments (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Sage Gateshead) and HEID (Sounds of Progress). Keith has previously won the Scottish Open Drawing competition and recently worked with renowned children’s writer David Almond and actor Kevin Whately to produce The Savage, an ITV documentary in partnership with Seven Stories Centre for Children’s Books.</span></em></span></div>
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<em><span style="color: #444444;">Central to his current research is an interest in constructed narratives and the potential of the contemporary diorama. Large black ink works on white foam-board are produced in the studio and became the catalyst for a series of improvisations in workshop practices with other artists working across other arts disciplines. While drawing remains the fundamental interest in McIntyre’s work, the cross-fertilisation nature of this activity means that there can be a number of project outcomes, either as an exhibition, a live performance or both."</span></em><br />
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(see the original on the <a href="https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/events/2015/03/public-lecture-series-lines-of-desire/" target="_blank">Northumbria University</a> web site)<br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"></span> </div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">After a frantic car journey back into Newcastle Upon Tyne to get to the lecture, I found the studio where the lecture was being given and not only enjoyed the lecture but was kept awake afterwards thinking about my response to it. </span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Professor McIntyre spoke about drawing and making as academic / research practice. His focus on lines, assembling, responding, 'larking' (playful innovation, change, improvisation) and collaboration with others was amazing. Because he was speaking about his practice over time, it was great to hear about the tree like structure of his productive and not so productive routes, and the value of learning from failure and embracing of that as necessity. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYwkP6OyilNy5EA21LbFHkna5UnrdQbIUT07pmEEMqFANIMCQ3BwQXzgKdXb-zFqr7CimcqpbuxEWH4uEtNxIqcQY0eNpN1EhfNnQdmf3pdW2sljSadVAPSoBAFbwckaLm4N3jHwiOxhA/s1600/IMG_2130.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYwkP6OyilNy5EA21LbFHkna5UnrdQbIUT07pmEEMqFANIMCQ3BwQXzgKdXb-zFqr7CimcqpbuxEWH4uEtNxIqcQY0eNpN1EhfNnQdmf3pdW2sljSadVAPSoBAFbwckaLm4N3jHwiOxhA/s1600/IMG_2130.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">self-portrait edited in iOS</td></tr>
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It made me want to pursue what I have (re) started to do with more energy and purpose. I made a note to myself that I need to develop my artistic practice so that it can work with and respond to others in research and teaching contexts. Sitting in the lecture, I realised that I had backed off from doing this in my research and teaching until recently. I felt, perhaps because much of social science, organisational and sociological research has an uneasy relationship with the arts, drawing was seen as illustration or decoration, and certainly not serious enquiry. To counter this, I decided that I needed to do something. My response is to <em>develop, discuss and apply my rationale</em> for using artistic practice to teaching and learning. I must address the question of what am I doing in drawing, assembling, presenting, responding to visual things.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">developing a new teaching and research landscape</td></tr>
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I caught myself thinking in and after the lecture about Keith's thoughts on collaboration, and saw his conversations 'in the process' of making, and in the process of responding to presenting his work as the sort of research conversation I have had in a small way. I noted to myself that I just need to launch in, to give myself permission, to create, discuss, listen to responses. The idea of assembling and making together as collective enquiry was central to this. In making progress, I should not be embarrassed that my drawing is somehow imposing something <em>on</em> people: rather, I decided I must see it as a way to participate in conversation and to open up responses in others. I have already seen through my PhD and other research projects that others participate not so much by drawing with me (although that sort of collaboration would be interesting, but I find people don't want to do this) but by <em>moving pieces, selecting, framing parts of images, annotating, responding with narrative</em>. This research data that gets constructed in that site is where I can locate myself in as an artist.</div>
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These reflections have helped me think about what I can do to make this happen. To date, much of my work has been an 'add on' to teaching and research practice, and many of my images have ended up on my phone, accessible only to me. I can take from the lecture some encouragement to draw and make images in a more prominent way, but not simply 'for the sake of it', but at the same time developing a rationale for how the process and product of drawing can enrich my teaching and research. Watch this space. </div>
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Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-40492780138857679442015-01-20T02:16:00.001-08:002015-01-20T06:18:22.251-08:00Drawing, philosophy and professional life: can drawings be more than decoration?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Following my last post, I have sent a few tweets posing (perhaps slightly obscure) questions:<br />
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<li>How would drawing your life give you insight?</li>
<li>Would looking at your team, family or service visually spark new questions?</li>
<li>How might seeing our stories differently mix them up and open up new trajectories?</li>
<li>Can mixing and editing biographical images cause us to see them *as* other things?</li>
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You can see these as they were posted if you follow me as <a href="https://twitter.com/ianrobsons" target="_blank">@ianrobsons</a></div>
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Each of these was posted with an image I had been working on - which I've included below - so the question and image could be seen together. Viewing these tweets invited a movement between text and image, with the hope that there could be something which occurs as attention moves between them. Glimpses of insight, perhaps. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_YfdimK3okBD_nyr-Q484fEYHcctX-brLu2AwdjqxtvlAXAauBCeME_lXl7Yk5tHgDIScVbqiYbsD1zWXP_9pgpUxGlbSllmJtdg65UUQ4OHjE2vTtYQgl-CoHQq8OzQSK-CLD8y-3jY/s1600/IMG_1895.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_YfdimK3okBD_nyr-Q484fEYHcctX-brLu2AwdjqxtvlAXAauBCeME_lXl7Yk5tHgDIScVbqiYbsD1zWXP_9pgpUxGlbSllmJtdg65UUQ4OHjE2vTtYQgl-CoHQq8OzQSK-CLD8y-3jY/s1600/IMG_1895.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
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This is abstract stuff, and potentially frustrating for the ultimate object of this work - insight for teachers, social workers, nurses and the like. I stop and ask myself: what do these images achieve? What is happening as they are fragmented, overlaid with colour and line? If these images are viewed through a 'realist' lens (where the object is direct representation), the best they can surely be is decoration. I am aiming beyond that, and I may need to re-trace my steps if in a process of playing and wondering they do become decorative. </div>
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So what is going on in these images, as far as an 'answer' can be given? At this stage, far from any practical application to professional life, they are my efforts to develop an alternative to professional life measured, copied, categorised in what I have previously called the evidence based paradigm. In these naive efforts, I am picking up philosophical ideas that interest me and that I think may offer an alternative way of investigating what people do in professional life. I want us to 'see' professional activity differently, so we open up different questions and gain new insights. I will try to summarise some of this journey of thinking which is still playing out, hopefully towards a practical outcome. Some of it may be useful, but not all may seem well developed - it is my playing with ideas and images.</div>
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<b>Starting with Ricoeur's 'narrative space'</b></div>
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My starting point in thinking about thinks that can 'stand for' lived experience was the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, who I read for my PhD. Ricoeur provides a fascinating starting point in his discussion of narrative identity and a strange term: mimesis. Ricoeur's mimesis being an adapted theory of representation and transformation, relating lived experience to the idea of the text. Looking back on what really interested me about this were some of the abstract ideas Ricoeur's work pointed to, which I thought about as 'narrative space'. Ricoeur's concepts which I bundled together under this term addressed issues of how the 'text' of a life related to lived experience, and how social time, or lived experience, left 'marks' which could be read. His starting point is to say;</div>
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<i> "…the life of others can be discerned and identified in its manifestations. Knowledge of others is possible because life produces forms, externalises itself in stable configurations; feelings, evaluations and volitions tend to sediment themselves in structured acquisition [acquis] which is offered to others for deciphering."</i> (Ricoeur, 1981, p.50)</div>
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This is the reading or interpretation of others lives through texts, but importantly, Ricoeur rejects a romantic definition of 'interpretation', or any seeking for hidden meaning in a text, and instead opens up the possibility of a more abstract vision of the text, or a life.</div>
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In fact, Ricoeur's very rich philosophical work on this topic does not attempt to over simplify the working together of biography, experience and narrative, but presents narrative - and the idea of the text - as a place of <i><b>multiple marks and connections made complex</b></i> when seen socially (as narratives are interwoven) and temporally (as events play out in time). </div>
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<i>“Social time, however, is not only something that flees; it is also the place of durable effects, of persisting patterns. An action leaves a 'trace', it makes its 'mark' when it contributes to the emergence of such patterns, which become the documents of human action.”</i> (Ricoeur, 2008, p.149)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2y2ysEE2jeBuMtm3RbrkzbrIFJrP24nCxQN3zBKADOoZeyXEq3De7Vx7WB1us8YzKmhLVPWHmWXI7heyb733NVEWUc-Bce-5kvzqxztr8_dMDnGSU4v9jwq4IKxDyg6hoifaARmYECxE/s1600/narrative+structure+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2y2ysEE2jeBuMtm3RbrkzbrIFJrP24nCxQN3zBKADOoZeyXEq3De7Vx7WB1us8YzKmhLVPWHmWXI7heyb733NVEWUc-Bce-5kvzqxztr8_dMDnGSU4v9jwq4IKxDyg6hoifaARmYECxE/s1600/narrative+structure+3.jpg" height="220" width="320" /></a></div>
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In my thesis, I realised many of my insights played with these ideas, as I worked to 'read' real and conceptual marks in Ricoeur's narrative space. </div>
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<b>Taking up ideas of visuality and space through Deleuze </b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDMhiTUEgbvpTU1pvSGQYofEks7Po6_Z4S1rO2g_c6Y2ZR2FSmhlN8TF6akublqZ9JUSFt8d7OMIermWWYVPhTsM2WFV_rXZcl4pTn4qnXowFeRDq-LFdnLlG1L6u3BdBeHxtjkaSk1VI/s1600/deleuze.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDMhiTUEgbvpTU1pvSGQYofEks7Po6_Z4S1rO2g_c6Y2ZR2FSmhlN8TF6akublqZ9JUSFt8d7OMIermWWYVPhTsM2WFV_rXZcl4pTn4qnXowFeRDq-LFdnLlG1L6u3BdBeHxtjkaSk1VI/s1600/deleuze.jpg" /></a>Towards the end of writing my thesis, I started reading a text which was in many way miles away from Ricoeur's books - Deleuze and Guattari's <i>A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia</i>. Apart from being a work of continental philosophy whose authors had only recently died, there is - superficially - little in common between the narrative hermeneutics of Ricoeur and the (seemingly) anarchic thought experiment which is A Thousand Plateaus, which follows the authors' previous work in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series, <i>Anti-Oedipus</i>. Brian Massumi, who translated the text, suggested it was a "...constructive experiment in schizophrenic, or 'nomad' thought" (Massumi, 1993). Putting observations about the type of philosophy it represents and what I didn't like about it, <i>A Thousand Plateaus</i> fascinated me superficially because of the way in which it was a text which developed visual space(s) and connected topics, and insisted on a distinctive way of seeing which rejected simple, objective, superficial categories of things. Some of it is insane and incoherent to me, but in places, I found a connection with the way I had begun to read Ricoeur's work on what I called the narrative space. It read like an artists' thinking process.<br />
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Beyond <i>A Thousand Plateaus</i> I looked for a way forward. In my last post, I said I'd found a text which helped me focus on the visuality and connectedness of Deleuze's work: Jakub Zdebik's (2012) <i>Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organisation</i>. Like the trail of reading that got me this far, I was shamelessly practical and pragmatic, looking for ideas that would help me find a way of eventually connecting ways of drawing and image making to the everyday professional life of social workers, teachers and nurses. This book seems to be doing that as I grapple to understand it. What drives me here is not primarily an intellectual motivation, but a drive to find some principles or framework to explain a relationship between life and drawing: otherwise I would simply be decorating. I mentioned some initial points of connection in my last post (on the topic of <i>the diagram</i>); here I set out further reflections on material I am working with in that text. Some of this thinking I will relate to images I have been making from my drawings. </div>
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Like Ricoeur (but in different ways), Deleuze rejects traditional representational, reproductive, imitative (mimetic) drawings, moving, as suggested by Zdebik (2012) "...into modes of representation of a far more problematical and uncertain nature." (p.74). Rather than try to summarise the whole system of thinking underpinning Deleuze's efforts, I pick out a set of ideas I find interesting. I write as I begin to understand, which is a dangerous but productive place! </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB1D0I_YsftzuoSx4wy5qWRl9cpjpvyPRRy9yeNi9wHjejCX3pQMUyqRcleTLbhJ_yNTV2MuS_N7TIwuWne19q4sONBNPdhp4JzQAhPl8Zq5YUqg206pSxKx1h-KdV_N67uUzfK0GIrZw/s1600/IMG_1889.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB1D0I_YsftzuoSx4wy5qWRl9cpjpvyPRRy9yeNi9wHjejCX3pQMUyqRcleTLbhJ_yNTV2MuS_N7TIwuWne19q4sONBNPdhp4JzQAhPl8Zq5YUqg206pSxKx1h-KdV_N67uUzfK0GIrZw/s1600/IMG_1889.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a><b>Stacking, simultaneity and the allagmatic</b></div>
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Zdebik (2012) relates the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon to Deleuze's work in considering the "...possibility of collapsing the distance between images and concrete things" (p.43). Some ideas can be pulled out of Zdebik's (2012) text, with apologies to the author, to convey a sense of his argument. Towards this aim, Simondon's work discusses the idea of <i>analogy </i>(a comparison between things)<i>, </i>where this deals with "...understanding how connections can be made between disparate elements" (Zdebik, 2012, p.43). This may be useful - drawings and professional life are two 'things', but may be related through analogy.<br />
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The idea of the analogy is developed by Zdebik (citing Simondon's work) through the idea that two things - <i>structure</i> and <i>operation</i> - can be related. Structure and operation of a thing are related, although they do not look the same. Simondon calls this the <i>allagmatic</i> and emphasises that the term addresses an ontological relationship between two things - the term ontology describing what things are and the nature of their being (a bit like the idea of abstract functions in the diagram in my last post). The purpose of the allagmatic is to "...visualise an unrepresentable process that is no less actual because it is virtual" (Zdebik, 2012, p.43). There follows (pp.47-49) a quirky discussion of the 18th and 19th century fascination with crystals, in order to talk about ideas of transformation (via the growth of crystals) and the process of becoming where the structure and operation of crystals are related. As it happens, Simondon created his own philisophical system which created analogies between the operation of crystal formation and very different structures, including human development. Putting crystals aside, what interested me was Zdebik's (2012) claim that this 'worked' because Simondon moved from the known to the unknown by connecting a similarity of operation. In other words, crystal formation helped Simondon talk about similar processes at work in other systems, such as human development.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjI0QnVvK1ZsUlQ0ytkpHrYzE2egmEUeEuIymfGqa7sM3R7FG57rPv4GawUNzGmQgqMXj1Chnu0UNb8gxLq2Sk5_5Gg7d4N8ODfBdbWZWFHVB2KgnOYUOkyHiXNLwelLREidmhApp3hAc/s1600/IMG_1898.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjI0QnVvK1ZsUlQ0ytkpHrYzE2egmEUeEuIymfGqa7sM3R7FG57rPv4GawUNzGmQgqMXj1Chnu0UNb8gxLq2Sk5_5Gg7d4N8ODfBdbWZWFHVB2KgnOYUOkyHiXNLwelLREidmhApp3hAc/s1600/IMG_1898.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a>Simondon's idea of the allagmatic is described by Zdebik (2012) as more than an <i>idea</i>. The allagmatic requires visualisation and its graphic form mediates between concepts (p.53). Zdebik (2012) says that presenting an analogy visually does something interesting: "...spread on a spacial surface, we do not perceive something as if it were another, but instead, something and another at the same time. The function of the allagmatic collapses two things, makes them one" (p.54).<br />
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This interested me because in my own work I often find there is something productive about seeing things together, collapsed into one image, where images are fragmented, redistributed or framed by lines.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhngpK7zM93_pXVaGA6jit95ltlFHMBtSRERyviJ3akEPyZC_fBIItbwWQuZdVuY7xpjnRt_MnKxAfraJeT71hVUPvQlqJ-QfsPIgb8uyBO3wr5klmOMrh_RJnz3KK3PTpRAS_B2Rvl3zw/s1600/IMG_0418.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhngpK7zM93_pXVaGA6jit95ltlFHMBtSRERyviJ3akEPyZC_fBIItbwWQuZdVuY7xpjnRt_MnKxAfraJeT71hVUPvQlqJ-QfsPIgb8uyBO3wr5klmOMrh_RJnz3KK3PTpRAS_B2Rvl3zw/s1600/IMG_0418.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a>Zdebik (2012) presents this allagmatic as an assemblage of two orders of things, or a "...stacking up different levels of depth", where things are not resolved, but the schism between them becomes a "productive rift" (p.56). I have tried to work this out by thinking visually in my own visuals: lines or fragments do not 'fit' neatly onto drawings, they cut across, mix up and force us to look at something in a different way in my own sketches.<br />
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Clearly, I am at an early stage of my thinking and drawing here, but one that I think will be useful before I rush to develop any simple or 'neat' methodology for drawing professional life. I am resisting that, and prefer to draw on concepts such as the allagmatic (or the principles behind such concepts) to develop images that are not 'copies' or direct representations of professional life, but function as analogies, drawing attention to what Deleuze talks about as functions or operations.</div>
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Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-26091786125647659592015-01-07T03:14:00.002-08:002015-01-07T03:14:26.959-08:00The abstract potential of professional life: notes on Deleuze, drawing and disruption.I have spent some time 'thinking visually' about why I find visual language so useful, and what sort of potential it offers postdoctoral work (as soon as that much delayed Viva is passed). This has involved sketching, as well as dipping into Jakub Zdebik's (2012) book on <i><a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/deleuze-and-the-diagram-9781441115607/" target="_blank">Deleuze and the Diagram</a>.</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7uVR_BiOAq7eSMBb7iadrpwACD9RyjS1O3xU7W3lG1iAC9N9eIID27m9XNYQVtuDtYbShGQ1APxlX0ClsGkdkQdjEr4UQLcq8h8WdozbdPKFyXpCLOjSA9J8yJpV5WAlyRFEOt_q_hFI/s1600/IMG_1847.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7uVR_BiOAq7eSMBb7iadrpwACD9RyjS1O3xU7W3lG1iAC9N9eIID27m9XNYQVtuDtYbShGQ1APxlX0ClsGkdkQdjEr4UQLcq8h8WdozbdPKFyXpCLOjSA9J8yJpV5WAlyRFEOt_q_hFI/s1600/IMG_1847.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a>My interest in visualities is in their potential to 'open up' biography, and human practices by attempting to disrupt forms of description which are cause us to think is restrictive ways. For example, I have a specific interest in helping social care, education and health professionals to develop alternative ways of seeing and questioning what they do. In that specific domain, our thinking is limited when we only see through the 'lens' of evidence based practice, which relates things causally, in a linear way, and where understanding can be substituted for metrics. I don't suggest that lenses such as 'evidence based practice' have specific value, only that they are designed to do certain things, represent in certain ways, and raise only specific types of questions. In developing my own research practice, my challenge is to understand and articulate what an alternative - visually orientated - approach might look like.<br />
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Part of my thinking has been to go to texts that deal with ideas about aesthetics, and the way lines (or different sorts) may connect, open up and re-imagine reality. It has been an opportunity to pick up philosophical interests developed in doctoral study, but with a very pragmatic approach. I ask: what inspires? What could I adapt? and so on. One of these texts, as I previously mentioned, is Zdebik's (2012) "<i>Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organisation</i>". At this stage, I am digging up and laying out ideas, rather than synthesising and discussing them, so I hope you might find the following items - interesting as 'things to consider and wonder about', and you can find your own questions and inspirations as you read my notes with me.<br />
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I am digging around the idea of the diagram at the moment. The idea of the diagram is complex, attractive and intriguing to me. Having previously read a little Deleuze, I found myself equally confused and inspired by his work generally, not being familiar with this type of philosohphy. I liked the connections, the disruptions and the visual landscape Deleuze provided. In his 2012 work, Zdebik focuses specifically on Deleuze's concept of the diagram, which may have particular use in my task. Fragments of this idea are summarised below.<br />
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Zdebik (2012) identifies a diagram variously as a plan, a map or a graph, or schema - a "configuration of lines" where representation is not the aim, but it "maps out possibilities prior to their appearance" (p.1), and "...is the dynamic, fluctuating process occurring between static structures." (Ibid.). The diagram displays "abstract functions". In short - it relates and informs diverse systems, connecting each on the level of abstract functions. Zdebik (2012) offers concrete examples in discussion of Foucault's <i>Discipline and Punish</i>, where two different systems - in this case, prison and penal law - are identified as things that influence one another, and are related, even though "...they are not linked in any way that could be understood as representational" (p.3). Zdebik illustrates a connection between the prison environment and the discursive penal system by noting that both systems experienced a shift at a particular point in time. Specifically, he highlights the shift in the penal system from the idea of revenge, to the idea of what is articulable. The prison, in parallel, shifted from a place of "hiding" to visibility, a place of seeing and disciplining prisoners under a hidden gaze. The idea of the diagram is the connecting "essential traits" or "abstract functions" which can be seen in both. It "makes abstracted functions pass from one formation or system to the next" (p.5). The diagram, in this case, is the function of surveillance. The diagram, like the drawing, is something that connects, and relates different things. May it help us visualise 'what is going on' when we look at places, activities and people?<br />
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Elsewhere, Zdebik (2012) mentions Deleuze's famous focus on architecture, and identifies the diagram as "...that stage between the idea of the building and the actual building", where it "...connects between the theoretical and the real stages of the construction of a building" (p.8). Here, abstraction is vital as a creative force, in opposition to attempts to simply represent. Close to this idea is the image of diagram as map, which connects vectors and relates things, where potentialities can be viewed; it is experimental. Zdebik argues that the map can make the (virtual) diagram visible in a snapshot of time. The idea of snapshot, considering potentialities, to understand complex relations between things is interesting.<br />
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I found Zdebik's example from the art of Frances Bacon useful in thinking about the idea of the diagram as something that relates, influences and redistributes (although I'm not sure I 'like' the painting). Bacon's work is cited as it features in Deleuze's <i>Frances Bacon: The Logic of Sensation </i>and famously features blurred and distorted figures. The diagram is identified in catastrophic preparatory work, as it moves towards what Zdebik identifies "a zone of indiscernibility" (p.18). Swipes and rubbed marks are real <i>and </i>virtual in Bacon's head. In his work, Bacon's distortions are "nonrepresentative...suggestive" (p.18), offering the germ of an idea; it is controlled and finds itself expressed in tangible parts of the work. In <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painting_%281946%29" target="_blank"><i>Painting</i></a> (1946) "The diagram is responsible for the elasticity of the bird-figure, which is topologically redistributed into other forms on the canvas." (p.19)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr2oy3WwvSlWO31W0Om7JJb79gQ2r-On-18A7T9-T00jZeUDvW7Lpk5df_U3fOeJ58jmx8Sw0bhsey4cGV9QixSZBiqO7qbRDHpewbLPozjrIg3-H78wFqmM8WpIHGNTGlN5kbpS7Be74/s1600/IMG_1835.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr2oy3WwvSlWO31W0Om7JJb79gQ2r-On-18A7T9-T00jZeUDvW7Lpk5df_U3fOeJ58jmx8Sw0bhsey4cGV9QixSZBiqO7qbRDHpewbLPozjrIg3-H78wFqmM8WpIHGNTGlN5kbpS7Be74/s1600/IMG_1835.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></a>These are strange and abstract ideas. The artist in me likes the playfulness of them, but the practitioner wants a pragmatic application. I am in the phase of thinking about these ideas, such as the diagram, and playing with how something like drawing could help (temporarily) materialise connections, potentials and layers operating within services and in professional life.<br />
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I'm going on to consider the value of the abstract, so often rejected as fiction, to disrupt and open up ways of seeing these things. These ideas make me think about drawing as opening up and speaking about the space of experience and professional life. This stands in creative relationship with the concrete, the literal, the empirical. What I am aiming at is not representation directly, but the creation of a shift, a lens which redistributes those things (as in the indiscernable zone in Bacon's Painting). Perhaps I can find a way to draw out lines which take a life of their own. These are productive lines on which new formulations of professional life can be explored.<br />
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<br />Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-72352663238677744962014-11-21T12:17:00.002-08:002014-11-21T12:18:11.915-08:00Images of organisationI'm writing something at the moment about seeing professional practice, and organisations differently. What I'm getting at is the use of visual approaches, metaphors and images to 'open up' new lines of enquiry and to provide an alternative to literal, linear and static 'images' of those things. Aesthetic approaches to practice, if you like. Of course, I'm saying that this sort of thing is needed - in our professional practice, and in organisational development, we face things that are complex and dynamic. If professional practice, or organisations we easy, we'd be a lot better at them, and find ways to improve and innovate much quicker. We get set in fixed ways of thinking, and habits of practice. The visual or aesthetic 'opens up' practice and organisations. We experience this in our everyday lives when we feel inspired by a film, or listen to music or stand before a painting. We may even stumble upon an idea whilst doodling.<br />
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One of the features of the aesthetic, the visual, or the text is it's ability to 'shift' our thinking into another place. A few thinkers have written about this, but one philosopher who helps us consider the refiguration of experience is Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur (1913-2005) spent a lifetime thinking and writing about language, narrative and metaphor, relating these things to lived experience and the human project. Sounds grand, doesn't it? In particular, Ricoeur went as far back as that famous thinker Aristotle to develop his ideas about the relationship between life and art. Specifically, he adapted Aristotle's ideas about poetry as the human activity of making, and mimesis as a form of imitation of life, but not imitation as copy. His series on <i>Time and Narrative</i> (1984, 1985, 1988) and 1992 text <i>Oneself as Another </i>developed his thinking on narrative mimesis by arguing for a three phased structure to this activity. Put simply, he suggested the human experience prefigures a configured text (mimesis1), which is then configured through emplotment, achieving distance and an element of fiction (mimesis2); the text contains marks of action, so to speak. Once a text is configured, it's meaning is achieved in the reception of that text by the audience - it is refigured back into life (mimesis3). This way of seeing mimesis helps me think about the value of achieving distance, of adding a strange (different) perspective, of using metaphor to 'hold together' diverse things...the list goes on. Visual representations, like a text, are configured and also have the ability to relate in creative ways to life. I'll fast forward to saying that we can use this quality to examine practices, and organisations.<br />
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As I write about visual approaches to seeing practice and organisations, the image that is in my head is of a virtual narrative 'space' - the space of Ricoeur's configuration - where activity leaves marks, and marks are organised, adapted and transformed. It is not a space of literal reproduction of experience, but things can be 'seen as': it is a space that can be read in multiple ways, and demands re-application to the world. It's a rather abstract idea, but one that I want to make available for very practical applications.<br />
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<br />Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-68374261126541896812014-11-09T13:15:00.002-08:002014-11-09T13:15:48.048-08:00Switching modes of thinkingAnother quick post. I'm spending regular time writing my second article from my PhD. In my experience, I do better work when I tap into a 'direction of travel' in my thinking, not simply recounting experience. Perhaps it is obvious to say that we write to understand and to enlarge our understanding. That is all well and good, but the downside to this is that despite the best plans ( I have got one) the way forward isn't always clear, as I'm on the edge of my understanding. So, there are two main challenges at the minute - conceptual (what do I mean exactly), narrative/technical (how do I say it). I am loving it and hating it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYlRQEZaobbDpoNxzyQXFpxQ7cnyDY1eFntfY0LcsGon-g08yyzwcBdrKWyDG__PmTq03NZhvKh0EsY-WQBfIIY7r-fBO-3JzMnaegOEP4KXNeYB_-yeolzZuk5US9i7o_4jjuqY8J-1w/s1600/writing+sketch.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYlRQEZaobbDpoNxzyQXFpxQ7cnyDY1eFntfY0LcsGon-g08yyzwcBdrKWyDG__PmTq03NZhvKh0EsY-WQBfIIY7r-fBO-3JzMnaegOEP4KXNeYB_-yeolzZuk5US9i7o_4jjuqY8J-1w/s1600/writing+sketch.png" height="320" width="240" /></a>I say this because I am finding the need to regularly get 'unstuck' and to be clear about what and how I am writing. One strategy I am using to help in this regard is to sketch out ideas. I do mean <i>sketch</i> - rough, quick, messy things not designed for public consumption. I use my iPad and Wacom digital pen for this, and save them to Evernote.<br />
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What I find useful about doing this is the ability to switch modes of thinking. Visualising ideas, in any given form, helps me to conceptualise things differently, relate ideas and ask different questions. In many ways, that is the theme of this blog and I hope to post thoughts here over the next few months from my teaching, research and writing about the visual as mode of knowledge (epistemology) and doing (methodology).<br />
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<br />Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3864976433776117379.post-78613272732474857282014-11-08T14:54:00.001-08:002014-11-08T14:54:27.802-08:00Give me a chance!OK, I thought it was time to move on from my PhD blog as I'm very nearly done...just waiting to finalise by Viva. I'd like to keep blogging, but would like a fresh start to develop ideas started there about visualising organisations, professional practice and biography. Here's a place holder to prove there is more to come!Ian Robsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11960287587996066679noreply@blogger.com0