My tutorial with Lindsay Jordan on 6.12.2023 was incredibly helpful and admittedly also a scary: realising she had done very similar research to a much higher standard made me doubt the legitimacy of my work. But rather than bask in negative thoughts, I am attempting to take a positive approach and embrace the references she shared with me as a way to better position my own work.

I have written a few blog posts about why I have decided to use a feminist approach to research and fictional conversation as my presentation format (here, here), using references given to us in class. I’ve had a feeling though that these blog posts were possibly limited in scope and that I was going round in circles trying to justify my approach using the same references repeatedly. Narrative and fiction play a strong role on my design practice and are the running threads that connect all my projects. I realise only now that this is probably why I felt so drawn to this method when it was first presented to us during workshop 2. Before then, I had never encountered this kind of methodology in context of theoretical research and written practice so it was difficult for me, considering the timescale of this project, to know where to look for other people that might have used and/or written about this type of method to better ground my work (which until now, I admit has been very intuitive). Lindsay Jordan very kindly shared with me the fourth chapter of her PHD thesis: Spellbound…? A Hermeneutic response to disillusionment in the contemporary university (2020) and this has helped me cement my methodology and better justify my choices.

There are a couple things I want to discuss in this blog post:
– Ethics 1: Transparency about the researcher’s interpretive influence
– Ethics 2: Protection towards participants

Transparency

In her thesis Jordan discusses the use of explicit creative devices such as conversation and narrative as a way to be transparent (and therefore ethical) about the ‘researcher’s interpretive influence’ (2020). I had initially become aware of this style of writing whilst reading Analysing Analytic Autoethnography by Ellis & Bochner (2006). In this text, they posit fictional conversation as a method for sharing research that enables a stronger connection to the reader; one that is more emotional, less clinical. They challenge more scientific analytical methods, arguing that ‘Knowledge and theory become disembodied words on the page’ when more scientific analytical methods are used, resulting in a loss of connection with the topic presented. I am exploring the different ways in which we (educators) understand the university, challenge it and create spaces that transgress its limits, in the hope that if our experiences are shared, they might be amplified and create greater impact/change. To this end, I decided to use a feminist approach to research (Ahmed, 2017) to challenge standard forms of knowledge production, resulting in data collection that took the form of conversation, recollection, and informal interaction. All of the stories and moments collected are very personal and sometimes verging on the abstract so making sense of them in a thematic way or by using strict analytical methods didn’t feel appropriate. I was struggling to see how I could make qualitative research fit into a more quantitative model, or how I could remove myself and my bias from the process. But as Jordan notes: ‘Even if the influence of the researcher’s personal assumptions and biases is minimal, something is inevitably lost when reducing nuanced, tentative accounts of true experience into categories.’ The Ellis & Bochner text (2006) also opened my eyes to the fact that being transparent about my position in this research and being explicitly present within it is ethical by the simple fact that the reader is aware that what is being shown to them comes from the perspective of the researcher and not from an objective external entity. This connects to Hannah Arendt’s perspective on story-telling as a discipline that ‘reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it’ (Arendt 1973, 107). I deeply resonate with that statement as it implies that there is a multiplicity of ways in which the world can be understood and experienced, connecting back to my initial desire for the project: sharing our diverse experiences of teaching as a way to learn to collectively do it better.  

Protection

Jordan’s chapter added an additional perspective which I (embarrassingly) hadn’t previously considered: that fictionalisation can add an extra layer of protection towards the participants. She shows how fictional narrative has been used as a technique in various ways by psychotherapists and educational researchers such as Irvin Yalom, Susie Orbach, David Carless and Peter Clough, as a way to co-create and share research they had done without revealing the identity of their patients or participants. Interestingly, this notion of co-creation mirrors Victor Turner’s use of the terms ‘coactivity’ and ‘co-performance’ to describe the connection between ethnographers and the communities they study (1986). For my output, I am choosing to create a fictional conversation between two entities: the first is the composite voice of the people interviewed and the second is language I have collected from LCC and UAL through their website or signage in the buildings themselves. There will also be the voice of the narrator: me, contextualising the dialogue. The experience of each person interviewed is different, personal, and complex and using fiction allows for that complexity to be explicitly embedded into the output without compromising the participants. It will be obvious that there has been an element of editorial decision, which as I mentioned above, will be a strength rather than a set-back, and part of that editorial voice will involve making sure that the identity of the participant is never revealed.

Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a feminist life, Durham: Duke University Press.

Arendt, H (1973) Men in dark times, New York: Penguin

Ellis C. S. (2006) ‘Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography’ in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35 (number 4, August 2006, 429-449)

Jordan, L (2020) Spellbound…? A Hermeneutic response to disillusionment in the contemporary university, Oxford Brookes University, available at: https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/9a455eb5-4012-4d9e-ab2a-93d86aa4f09c/1/Jordan2020Spellbound.pdf (accessed 19.12.2023)

Turner, V. (1986) The anthropology of performance, New York: PAJ