Vital Signs 2: Keynote speakers - Jennifer Mason
Tuesday 7 September 2010, 11.30am, Cordingley Lecture Theatre
Knowing the In/tangible
How much of what matters in everyday life is intangible, ephemeral or ethereal? How profoundly do these things matter? How incisively do they inscribe the sensation of living? Should we understand them as part of the natural or the social or the cultural world? How do they connect with the tangible, the sensory, the visceral and the real? Do they leave traces?
In this lecture I want to consider whether it is possible or desirable to produce the kinds of social scientific knowledge of the intangible that could help us to address these kinds of questions. I will explore whether social science and its methods demand and construct a tangible form in the objects of their enquiry and if they do, how we might - in the words of Avery Gordon - ‘conjure otherwise’ as researchers. I want to pursue the precarious relationship between the tangible and the intangible - the in/tangible. I will try to work out how we can appreciate these dynamics without killing them and pinning them down as one might a specimen butterfly where a lifeless form is immobilised, and its dimensions and anatomy measured and categorised. The problem with this, apart from the fact that the butterfly dies, is that the thing we really wanted to understand – the life, the animation, the pulse – is put beyond reach, maybe because our science made us forget what fascinated us in the first place, or maybe because we became fixated on what we could know with certainty, and how we could preserve and own it.
If social science knowledge of the in/tangible is possible and desirable, and I think (although I am not certain) we should be hopeful that it is, then I want to argue that it is contingent upon, amongst other things: gentle, inquisitive and appreciative knowledge practices; a respect for the fascinations that motivate us; a readiness to accept and even celebrate the half-seen, the glimpsed and the ethereal; a playful approach to epistemology that involves the capacity for self deprecation as well as critique, and a recognition and appreciation of non-conventional ways of ‘coming to know’ that exist alongside/outside those we currently think of as ‘method’ and data.
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