Re: like a Jeopardy question

Diane HODGES (dchodges who-is-at interchange.ubc.ca)
Sun, 7 Mar 1999 23:13:16 +0100

At 1:53 PM 3/7/99, Mary Bryson wrote:
>Diane wrote:
>if you want to understand something so much that the only thing you
>can do is change whatever it is, then it can't be what it "is" that is
>of interest, but what kinds of effects human interventions have on stuff.

>
>So Mary writes back:
>I am assuming that just walking into a room changes what's happening there,
>and so any social science research is of necessity always already changing
>something as it envisions itslef attempting to understand it.

absolutely. But your assumption is implied nowhere in the quote, not really.
The quote just
proposes that change is a source of knowledge, which is valid (like in the
research-movie "Twister"!!)

but the phrase, grammatically, assumes that the desire to know is
sufficient reason for effecting a deliberate change as a method for
producing data that will, in turn, reveal something that satisfies the
desire to know
whatever is conceptualized on that side of the proposition.

Lewin advocated education as a way to explore how education was an effect
on social
change. (But I could be so wrong about this, actually, maybe it was
Collier, or Dewey, or the wife of Henri Matisse, but anyhow),
in social sciences, obviously any organization or group within society is
only knowable in-relation to all sorts of other relations.
Implementing change / effecting change can be both a structure that is
applied to a situation; or it can be a MECHANO-SET, where everyone sits
down and starts trying to come up with a differetn strucutre; or it can be
a shared desire in the modes of changing practices;

but all the the ripples or trickles or eruptions or explosions are
potentially in-relation to the social as a highly volatile mix of lunacy
and bureaucracy. bloody hell, gotta be careful with people eh? Society.
Messy.
Not like mixing chemicals. Or Smashing atoms.

I don't think researcher reflexivity, and the realization of how research
practice invents research practice really has impacted yet in social
science.

I still read the quote as mis-representing the functions of effecting
change in a context where change is already effected by your presence.
And really, change is freaking HARD: no one likes to change, we want
everyone ELSE to change, please... so when changes do start happening, les
faeces mashez sur la vol-mechanique, oui?

people feel hurt and people cry and someone gets mad and quits and someone
else steals a jacket and then returns it and then wants a job and then
leaves with your tripod and then someone else has changed their mind about
participating, ...

change is bloody HARD. You know that better than ...many. Well. Most
Certainly more than me.Surprisingly, this knowledge doesn't shut me up.
Huh. :-)

So then you said:
> I think this
>quote is about being reflexive concerning the fact that one *is* always
>having an efffect. I have been looking to see how far this idea will talk
>me in thinking about "gender", because it has struck me on numerous
>occasions, like if I happen to get my hair cut just a bit too short, that i
>learn lots about gender that day, or week.
>
>Mary

OK: via a string of uncollected thoughts: let's see:

I actually do accept how my "being" here in university, by my
participation as a research student/novice scholar I
am implicitly contributing to the oppression of all those who are denied
entry; I am explicitly validating privielge and am benefitting from this
privielge in some cases:
I am always in relation
to all of the discriminatory practices that maintain white faculty
dominance in the social sciences, I read the white-boy-books, need to know,
saying uh-huh yes authority authority, He said it see? IT'S TRUE.
This is part of the complicity; and though it plays out in social spheres
differently as power, it is, bottom of the shoes-truth: power.
SO,
the logic is that epistemology justifies effecting changes;

whereas
the haircut scenario is a reversal of the proposition:
you changed something, and then engaged with subsequent knowledge-events ..
. ya?

Or, you interested in knowing something about hair and gender in a
particular social
sphere
and so were prompted to change your hair as a method for studying this effect? -

EXAMPLE:"if you want to understand something, try to change it."
__________________________________________________________________
Researcher A: What is an atom made of?

Researcher B; I do not know. Let us blow one up and watch.

Researcher A: Yes. Let us smash atoms and study them. And we will build a
great machine to do this for us, and yea. We shall call it by its name:
Atom-Smasher.
________________________________________________________________________

I mean that's silly - but ya know it's also true, which is, again, why that
phrase is a license to do anything so long as it can be justified in the
pursuit of knowledge.

"If you want to change something; understand it."
Now here I can suppose that "understand" it (change) includes the
effects-effect of entering a room, how power plays and controls and slips
under doors seeps in and out; and so on.

diane,
Hello my name is Diane and I have a fear of acknowledging my power.