Situated speculation
I am reading Sarah Truman's new book on Research Creation - it is the one I decided to read after reading After Childhood by Peter Kraftl and Language in a Globalised World by Khawla Badwan. Both Peter and Khawla in their books are saying basically that constructs like childhood and language are not helpful particularly for young people in multilingual and diverse contexts.
Sarah's book is nice as it feels both familiar and helpful-she treats you like a doctoral student and takes you by the hand and tells you how it feels to do research-creation.
I got to this footnote and then I wanted to blog:
Because of this, you might wonder (I’m currently wondering) why I didn’t write this section
before the ‘situated speculation’ section above? How could the ‘situated’ person speculate if they
haven’t come into being just yet, or are constantly emerging? I didn’t write it above because I
don’t think they’re mutually exclusive or linear but because of how research projects run (with
enabling constraints and speculation ‘beforehand’ and throughout, it made sense to start with
the situated speculation). That said, speculation is going throughout the research-creation process.
And what we encounter while speculating, planning, thinking—throughout the research
event—changes us and we change it. This includes the theories we might read and how they
might affect thinking. Thinking and theorizing are material practices.
This is quite a clever way of pointing out that we change as we do research projects. Odd was good as we wrote a good article from it and I learned about how ethics can be hard work.
This project will change us and the work will change us. Maybe situated speculation, like concrete utopia, is a platform from which to start thinking and making together.
I like this photo as it gives an entirely unrealistic picture of our Walk this weekend up Ingleborough and Whernside and the Howgills -it rained all weekend except for this one moment of sunshine.
As humans we seem to need the sunshine to live in hope.
I read Sarah's book - this is what I think . All research cherry picks philosophy and tries to make it fit what they want to say. As I said at my RD2 most social science tries to retrofit the discipline propping up old ways of working and the habits that chain us to our vomit with webs of mends and repairs to the holes that always form. Research-creation does the same but is more open about it - Loveless can look to Lacan Petite object A without taking on the totality of Lacanian thinking. Sarah can work with Nietche eternal return to play games with ideas. This is how many artists work with theory already. Sarah say we can legitimately do this but we need to be robust and we need to have rigor.
ReplyDeleteIt is not OK to say you are using Barad and to talk of quantum mechanics unless to thoroughly understand the difference between Niels Bohr propositions on Agency and Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You don't have to know much more than this but without engageing in this piece of theoretical history you are working with no base and ultimatly no challenge to habitual ways of thinking.
Simply then (although manning veils this in much newspeak) but actually does it through bringing Deleuze into the mix. Rersearch -creation allows you to activate theory and liberate it to an extent from the complex webs of knowing because its focus is on making something new - not something that already exists.