Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 2b
Representation, valid knowledge and metaphor
Tuesday 7 September, 4 - 5.30pm
'Writing Camphill' - Miriam Snellgrove (University of Edinburgh)
Understanding the social world is most often elucidated through the written form. Textual representations of life as observed and interrogated are evidenced through the visible ‘fact’ of words on paper. In this way knowledge is constructed, presented and legitimated. Within this paper I critically evaluate my fieldnote writings undertaken during my recent PhD research at three Scottish Camphills (residential schools and homes for children and adults with additional support needs). Whilst my doctoral work is concerned with understanding everyday life within these Camphill settings; the everyday I suggest, happens always after the experienced event in hastily scrawled mnemonic notes and more lengthy evening compositions. Though participant observation enables an intimate exposure to Camphill life in all its complexity, my writings often struggle to convey this complexity in a ‘real’ and ‘accurate’ manner. With the passage of time, reliance on my fieldnotes grows, with all their representational limitations and inaccuracies. Increasingly then, I utilise my black and white fieldnotes as stepping stones into my Technicolor fieldwork memories where Camphill life is vibrant and from my standpoint, more complete. These competing realities of memory, fieldnote writings and attempted marriage between the two, exposes the tensions prevalent within research that seeks to be ‘rigorous’, ‘valid’ and ‘contributing’ to existing ‘knowledge’. Despite these challenges I am aware that the ‘impact’ of my research will be measured by the skill of my ‘finished’ writing and not by my perceived fieldnote failings. However documenting these struggles reveals the complex nature of writing the social world.
'Metaphorical Imagination: a surrogate methodology for social inquiry' -Dr Muhammad Tanweer Abdullah (University of Peshawar)
This paper introduces Metaphorical Imagination (MI) as a conceptual model for social inquiry. It commends Metaphor and Imagination as our finest intellectual tradition, from poetics to robotics, and views these as eternally linked. This paper examines MI as a 'surrogate' methodology that could allow us to draw upon the strength of ‘tacit’ knowledge for interpreting evidence, when and where empiricism fails to deliver.
This paper invites social researchers to revisit the epistemology and ontology of ‘evidence’. It reviews how ‘evidence’ in the data has traditionally been viewed as ‘physical’. It has weight, a body, or a perfect body. It is hard or soft. For that reason, many social researchers tend to project only its physical profile: the features and figures, and appreciate the trends and styles in a ‘visual’ presentation of the body in indented interview quotations, boxed observations, pie-diagrams, and indexes. Such configurations imply data sanctity by confining the cognitive parameters – as if that were possible, whereby it is very natural for researchers to follow a parallel sense to explore into the hidden realities, a tendency common to all traditions of the sciences and the social sciences. This paper draws support from Polanyi, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, and others, who assert the role and influence of intuitive, emotive and imaginative reflections in social inquiry. This influence, described as ‘tacit’, is substantiated in this paper with the support of contemporary literature.
MI characterizes Imagination as disciplined and reflexive; whilst metaphor unfolds, reinterprets, and transforms the complexity in cognitive processes. This paper highlights how preferring one metaphor over another, crystallization vs. the triangulation, for instance, we configure orre-configure the entire methodology. Thus, metaphorical surrogates allow experiential synthesis vis-à-vis creative interpretation for an ultimate ‘methodological‘ survival. This paper suggests how MI reveals something hidden, across the domains of inter-subjectivity, and inter-textuality and illustrates such inter-linkages as the ‘dotted’ lines that may be connected only tacitly. In creating a surrogate utility to interpret the multidisciplinary subject of evidence, this model takes us beyond disciplines and methods.
Key words: Metaphor, Imagination, Social Research Methodology, Tacit Knowledge,
'Interactions that Matter: Researching Critical Relationships' - Dr Brian Heaphy and Katherine Davies (University of Manchester)
This paper considers a number of methods we have deployed in researching the multidimensionality of critical relationships. The ‘Critical Associations’ project, funded as part of the Realities node of the National Centre for Research Methods, is researching relationships (with friends, neighbours, colleagues and the like) that were/are critical in people’s lives for good or ill. We have focused particularly on relationships that can be seen as ‘critical’ in the sense that they are not always positive. Thus we are interested in relationships that are difficult, jealous or cloying as well as those that are life affirming, supportive and fulfilling. We have employed a number of methods to study these critical associations including ‘Era memory workshops’ which involve remembering and narrating relationships in a collective setting, a Mass Observation directive comprising ‘privately’ written memories and narratives in response to a research directive and qualitative interviews involving the narration of relationships with an unknown interviewer – individually or with others. In this paper we evaluate the extent to which the particular kinds of relationship memories and narratives generated in our different research interactions helped us to get behind the gloss of ‘good’ relationship stories and we explore how research interactions themselves can shape the memories and narratives people conjure of the interactions that matter.
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