"... 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".