It's not all work...

Part of the 'Fulbright Experience', apparently, is to engage in cross-cultural learning and experience. To that end, I took a day off from my packed schedule of stressing about cognitive dissonance and the eternal struggle between interpretivism and positivism, and went hiking.


Oh my sweet Lord Jesus - it was FAAAABULOUS!

We went up to the top of Snowbird (11,000 ft), partly along road, partly along trail, and the last mile runs along a narrow ridge with steep drops down to the valleys on either side. It's a moderately difficult climb in spots... let's just say that I won't be mocking people with hiking poles anymore! Some of it is rolls gently and some is very steep. It gets harder as you climb higher and the air thins out - by the time we were near the summit, I had to stop every 3 minutes to catch my breath - but what an excuse to look around and marvel at everything. The sky was a deep, deep blue; the aspens are mostly still green, but starting to turn yellow; some of the other trees have turned red and rust; the limestone outcroppings are dramatic against the red rock.  I loved every minute. We cheated a bit, and took the cable car back down to the bottom, where the Snowbird Oktoberfest was in full swing, so we had a beer and ate our hang sangers before heading from the hills.


At that height, the air is thinner and cleaner; you can see for miles in every direction. It certainly clears the perspective. Happy day.

And now I'm really confused

I'm afraid that I'm being assimilated. I really don't know if things are genuinely making more sense to me, or if it's just that my brain is capitulating more quickly than I would have given myself credit for. At the end of my first three-day brainwashing, I mean, QI course, I was eagerly nodding assent along with all the others.

Actually, I wasn't really. But I had come to a fairly frightening realisation (much of this thanks to the judicious use of IM technologies with my sanity-pillars at home) that in general, I'm on pretty much the same page as these guys. The difference is (if you'll allow me to continue torturing this analogy) that we're reading from different versions of a book that's been translated into different languages and then back into English via two other languages, so a lot of the words are very similar (sometimes even the same), but the meanings attached to those words often are not.

Let me use Google Translate as an example. If I start off with a sentence in English, translate it into German, then to Chinese and then back to English, I get a result something like this:
1. At what time does the train to London leave this platform?
2. Zu welcher Zeit fährt der Zug nach London verlassen Sie diese Plattform?
3. 什么时候到伦敦的火车你会离开这个平台？
4. When the train to London you will leave this platform?

Now, if I take the same first sentence, and this time translate it into Greek, then Hindi, and then back to English, I get this:
1. At what time does the train to London leave this platform?
2. Σε ποια χρονική στιγμή το τρένο για το Λονδίνο αφήσει αυτή την πλατφόρμα;
3. क्या समय ट्रेन लंदन के लिए इस मंच पर छोड़ दिया?
4. What time the train left for London on this forum?

Both of these final sentences started off with the same original sentiment, though neither of them ends up saying the same thing. They're both in different tenses, for a start! But this just goes to illustrate that even though they're trying to say the same thing, they've been filtered through a language sieve (and a whole bunch of other stuff that plays an analogous role here, but would take me forever to expound in this post, and I've got a meeting in 5 minutes...) to the point that they end up saying very different things and neither one is really in agreement with the other. Even though, they really are.

See why I'm confused?

So, my question is, have I just realised that we're really interested in the same things, but because we talk about them in different languages, using different conceptual frameworks and theoretical underpinnings, aiming for different audiences that we're doomed to talk in circles around one another, until we negotiate some shared meanings and develop a common understanding?

Or have I been assimilated?

Your Mother Knits Socks in Hell

That's right folks, I'm going to need an intervention, or as the lovely Carolin put it earlier, a positivist exorcism. She reckoned that Anita would be only too happy to help. Séamas could probably be called in for a spot of heavy lifting, if required.

Sweet Jesus, people... I've mentioned the sense of alienation and feeling like a complete outsider before, but I have just spent 3 hours undergoing the most immense cognitive dissonance I have ever experienced IN MY LIFE! (and I've had two kids, and all my illusions of being an Earth Mother shattered when the reality of children failed to meet my vaguely hippy expectations)

I've been listening to a very well-respected man lead a seminar on Quality Improvement and here are some of the more memorable quotes...

"he said 'in my experience'... pure subjective recall... he just made it up!"

"if you're an experienced practitioner, something happens in your brain, [sarcastically] you're touched by the hand of God... 'I know the right thing to do and this guarantees the best possible outcome'"

"If I know the algorithm and the seed point, I can tell you exactly what's going to happen"

I'm railing against it now, but this is only Day 1 of a three-day course. Next week, I'm sitting in on another two-day course and the following week, there's a full five days. I'm either going to end up as a drooling, gibbering vegetable (back to the cabbage analogy) or I'm going to crack under the pressure and start talking. Now, to be honest, I don't think that this is really the right time or place for me to present an alternative view, i.e. mine, but what if I can't help myself? They'll think I'm a cabbage and have me committed anyway.

More on this later. Perhaps.

-phic, -pher, -phy: on wearing hats and staying dressed

So, Carolin made an excellent point on my last post and it made me think a little harder about what I was saying. I realised that I am not really doing an ethnography, but rather I am using ethnographic methods (observation, shadowing, archival and document analysis, etc.) to draw out and develop an understanding of what I see happening. [Does this point up the difference between method and methodology?]

This fits well with the practice-based perspective on knowledge that I have been pursuing for some time now and also means that I do not need to exile myself any further. This practice perspective means that I can acknowledge that I interpret new experiences (including my research findings) through the lens(es) of my previous experiences and understandings of the world, rather than disregarding (or trying to discount) my conceptual underpinnings.

I still get to wear my hat but I wear it to set me apart from everyone else, so it's really not an ethnographer's hat. The up-side of all this is that I don't have to "strip down", which I'm sure is a great relief to everyone! (Especially me... it gets very cold here in winter!)

"... and then... Realisation!!"

Not that it's the funniest moment in a movie ever, or anything, but you know when there's a line of dialogue that just stays with you and seems to fit so many other situations... anyway, watch 'Shirley Valentine' and you'll realise that "realisation" must be said with a deeply mustachioed Greek accent and you'll laugh too...

Anyway, I've had a couple of epiphanies in the last week that I'm going to share. That might be a record. Both of my light-bulb moments relate to the sense of alienation I feel here and ways that I am trying to deal with it and make it work for me... building that outsider's perspective into the research, I suppose. Or at least, using it purposely and deliberately to stop myself from assimilating and losing sight of what makes me different in the first place.

The first is the understanding that as an ethnographer (a wanna-be, or for-real, let history judge that one) my job is not to make sense of what they do, rather it is to make sense of how they make sense of what they do. Is this mere pedantry? Maybe, but I see it as a subtle and important difference and I try to consciously remember it daily. I might buy myself a hat for the winter and call it my 'ethnographer's hat' so that every day when I put it on, I am also putting on a material reminder of what I am here to do.

If you think that was a bit up-it's-own-arse, then I suggest you stop reading now because the second is even more so! You have been warned. At a very basic level, I problematise concepts like 'knowledge', 'practice' and 'expertise', yet I am now working in an environment where these things are taken as given. This is presents difficulties for me because I see issues with what they're doing even if there are no immediate problems in practice. At a practical level, there doesn't appear to be a problem, so the issues that I have remain invisible and unacknowledged. Indeed, when issues do arise, they're put down to a "breakdown in communication" or a "communication gap", which does not recognise that what is at stake goes somewhat deeper than "you never said that" or "i didn't know/hear about that".

Eat the Cabbage

I used to blog fairly regularly and then I fell out of the habit. So now I have decided that it is time to start again.

'Researcher in Exile' is where I will keep some sort of open field journal relating to my research and my life. (In fact, I have lately found myself wondering if the two are actually different. The jury's still out on that one.) My exile is a strange and multi-faceted thing: self-imposed; a reward; a burden; physical; mental; conceptual; theoretical; practical; hypothetical; emotional; material.

I knew that I would face homesickness and that I would miss my family (and sometimes, being so far away causes me physical pain). What I did not expect to miss the people in my research network so much! At home, I would often go several weeks without physically seeing one of them, but we would be in regular contact by phone, skype or IM. I've still got that regular electronic contact with them. But now, I find myself surrounded by people who understand the world from a very different perspective to mine.

On the surface, there are only superficial differences between here and home. In fact, I quite like it here. On a conceptual level, however, I feel like I am marooned on an island with a village full of vegetarians, and I'm the cabbage! I want the cabbage to grow; they want to eat the cabbage.