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.

"... 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".