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theories and research methods: acts of communication

Workshops: 12 x 2 hours:

1.

Knowing what I am doing I: the project

First things first: we ask ourselves, whats my problem?


In this first seminar we play the ten word game in order to unpack
how we develop the core problem that informs the project.
Moving from the experience of the random to crafting the work:
how can I share my understandings with others?
2.
Knowing what I am doing II: the position of the
researcher
Interrogating critical reflexivity:
as practitioner/researcher, who am I?
How do I position myself, how am I positioned?
Through the reading (in advance): Daniel Miller (2004), The little
black dress
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/academic_staff/d_miller/m
il-6
we develop the crucial understanding of
practitioners/researchers in these specific
undertaking.

who we are as
projects we are

First online reflection due Friday and comments due next


Tuesday.
3.
Using position to locate the ethics I: understanding the
frames
How does a research project connect with the world? Is it ok to
shock an audience? Is it legitimate to consider people as subjects of
research? How can we perform the academic role of disruption of
the accepted and the unthinkingly conventional?
We ask these questions and more through a reading of sections of
the document which provides the ethical frames for all human
research done in Australian universities.
In this session we will work step-by-step through the few essential
elements required for an Ethics C (minimal risk) application.

Reading (in advance): National Statement on Ethical Conduct in


Human Research (2007), s.1 Values and Principles of Ethical
Conduct, and 3.1 Qualitative Methods
http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/book/national-statement-ethical-conducthuman-research
To bring to class: download (and either print out or bring to class on
your tablet/laptop/mobile device ) the ethics c forms online at
4.

Using position to locate the ethics II: in the real world

Researchers often demand much of themselves, and much of their


participants and their audiences. Here we take a glimpse inside a
research project of considerable ethical complexity.
How do they define and negotiate the ethical issues?
Reading (in advance):
Sargent, Carolyn and Larchanche, Stephanie (2007), The Muslim
Body and the Politics of Immigration in France: Popular and
Biomedical Representations of Malian Migrant Women, Body &
Society 13: 79-102.
For another, arguably even more complex project (in an ethical
sense), conducted by a researcher who brings an intense personal
politics to her work, you might be interested to read:
Additional reading (optional):
Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2004), 'Parts unknown: undercover
ethnography of the organs-trafficking underworld,' Ethnography 5,1:
29-73.
In so doing, you could ask the same question of the paper as for the
Sargent and Larchanche paper, and add:
How does she struggle with her own reflexivity and position?
Second online reflection due Friday and comments due next
Tuesday.
5.
Just what does a text look like? Working texts I:
reading>narrating>making the story
If anything, text is everything. So powerful a metaphor for
culture has text become that anything usefully understood as

text has become fair game for reading, including film,


performance, landscape, image, fashion, the city, and last but
not least, the bodynote that Daniel Boyarins appointment at
the University of California is in Talmudic culture and Carnal
Israel is subtitled reading sex in Talmudic culture (emphasis
added). Scholars speak of writing the body. They speak of
the body as the inscribed surface of events. Socially
inscribed, the body becomes the text that is written upon
it.
(Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2005), The Corporeal
turn, Jewish Quarterly Review, 95, 3: 449)
In this workshop we explore the elusive possibilities of text is
everything.
To bring to the workshop: examples of what you have been reading
that has some connection with your research project since the last
workshop: blogs, poetry, papers, graffiti, books .
6. Just what does a text look like? Working texts II:
reading>narrating>making the story
One of the ways to understand our own research is to interrogate it
through different lenses, to disrupt our own assumptions, to arrive
where we started and know the place for the first time (with
apologies to T S Eliot).
Reading (in advance):
Gregory, Derek (2010) Seeing red: Baghdad and the event-ful city,
Political Geography 29, 5: 266-279.
And for another view, one redolent of Southern Theory and
disruptive lenses:
additional reading (optional):
Adlk Ad (2012), From Orality to Visuality: Panegyric and
Photography in Contemporary Lagos, Nigeria, Critical Inquiry, 38,
2 : 330-361.

Third online reflection due Friday and comments due next


Tuesday.
7.

Stuff, things, and bodies I: embodied practice

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2005, see above) quotes Foucault


( in his Nietzsche, Genealogy, History) to remind us that Socially

inscribed, the body becomes the text that is written upon it. But
we also know that the body is the site for perceiving and knowing
the world, that its habitus (Bourdieu) and its ways of being-in-theworld (Heidegger/Merleau-Ponty) offer us embodied knowledge and
experience of the world.
As Eva Mahdalickova (2009) interprets Merleau-Ponty for us:
The experience of the body reveals an ambiguous mode of
existence. The body is a notion that holds a double meaning:
it can be viewed and understood as an object (when we say
avoir le corps - to have a body) and as a subject (when we
say tre son corps vcu - to be a living body). An experience
of the body should give us both at once. However, the
reflection of the body only gives us the thought of the body
and not the experience of it. Therefore, the two perspectives
on the body, the object and the subject, are separated when
the individual only thinks of his body. This is why we have to
put an emphasis on the experience. There is no other way to
know the body than to live it in the whole, as a subject and
object, as the one who is perceived and who perceives. " Je
suis donc mon corps "[4], I am my body, says Merleau-Ponty
and to live the body, it also is to live the space.
Readings (in advance):
Perez-Gomez,
Alberto
(1987),
Architecture
as
embodied
knowledge, Journal of Architectural Education 40, 2: 57-58.
Kennedy, Rosanne (2012), Humanitys footprint: reading Rings of
Saturn and Palestinian Walks in an Anthropocene era, Biography
35, 1: 170-189.
8.
Stuff, things, and bodies II: objects and touching the
world
In conceptualizing the idea of the social life of things Arjun
Appadurai (1986) opened up the possibilities of material culture as
a research site and as a research tool.
Objects contain/evoke/translate/transform memory:
they possess biographies:
they represent social class, ethnicity, religious affiliations :
they can be read, interpreted, analysed, represented
Readings (in advance):
Malkogeorgou, Titika (2011), Folding, stitching, turning: putting
conservation into perspective, Journal of Material Culture 16,4: 441455.
Sutton, David, and Michael Hernandez (2007),
Voices in the
kitchen: cooking tools as inalienable possessions, Oral History
35,2: 67-76.

9.

Stuff, things, and bodies III: ways of seeing

This seminar is provoked by John Bergers Ways of Seeing (1972):


It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding
world; we explain that world with words, but words can never
undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation
between what we see and what we know is never settled.
Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is
turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation,
never quite fits the sight. (Berger, 1972, 7)
As painter, international relations scholar, fashion designer,
journalist, poet, how can we know what we know? How can we know
what we see (in the world, in a text, a sound, an image)?
Readings (in advance):
Ingold, Tim (2010), Ways of mind-walking: reading, writing,
painting, Visual Studies, 25:1, 15-23
Stoller, Paul (1994), Embodying Colonial Memories, American
Anthropologist, N.S. 96: 634-648
Fourth online reflection due Friday and comments due next
Tuesday.
10. (Re)presentation: shaping, crafting and communicating
I: knowing the project and preparing the presentation
Looking ahead to the end of the semester yet looking back to where
we began, in this seminar we will workshop the black arts of
presentation to help you prepare both for your presentation at the
Honours Conference and for the final outcomes of your Honours
year.
11. (Re)presentation: shaping, crafting and communicating
II: structure drives all
Throughout the semester we have thought about the intention that
lies at the heart of scholarly research, no matter what form that
research takes. In the context of those discussions, here we ask
how structure informs process and ask you to do so through a paper
which had considerable impact at the time it was published, and
which set far reaching political agendas. We read it however not for
its politics but rather to understand how an idea can be constructed,
crafted and communicated to a particular effect.

Reading (in advance): Samuel P. Huntington (1993), 'The clash of


civilisations,' Foreign Affairs 72,3: 22-49.
12.

Honours conference all day the three minute thesis

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