i am learning, here, in denver, at UCD, from a very different tradition
of academic production - i am posting here the thoughts
and practices that i have been working through:
...for me, interdisciniplinary "methods" speaks to those of us who seek
connections across
epistemological work -
there is a limit to knowing and a space where acting with what you know
matters - i have found the traditional
approach restrictive in this sense,
in that all academic publications reproduce what has been done - but what
if we / some of us could completely
transgress the traditions?
what if?
what if work was done, where learning took place that was not specifically
connected to established
theory/methods of practice?
Arttech [my community-based art-actvism] represents a project that i
literally innovated in defiance of research projects - everything that i
had learned from traditional ethnographic/research work was
abandoned/positioned as oppositional in the project - if funding was from
research
orgs. then i would find from nonproft orgs,.
if the objective was to gather data
then i would make the data public so that anyone could ask questions about
what was produced -
if the ethnographer is the knower, then i would position the participants
as primary knowers,
if order is needed, then chaos would be promoted;
if if educational objectives are to be explored
then i;d abandon the assumption of epistemology, and allow those folks to
tell ME what they want- they did, of course,
but i was so consumed with privilege and knowledge, that i couldn't hear
what they were saying -
now i can, and it is discordant, chaotic, uneven, there is no "data" but
for the histories of us and our abilities to account for those as honestly
as we can - no victory narrative,
i envision a work of identity-in-resistance -
struggle, failure, the clash of privilege with lived realities in the
midst of shared struggle with addiction,
mental health, perceptions of personal authority and so on -
the book i am writing is, in many ways, an assertion of authority that
differs from academic authority,
[where to make a claim, the writer must first establish all the claims
that have been made already] -
who cares? academics care, because the more you are cited, the more often
your numbers
climb in the SOcial Science Citation Index - literally, a document of
numbers, how many times have other academics
referred to your work?
ohmigawd. HOW can this be learning?
READ JOHN FOWLES' "The Tree" and ALICE WALKER "The temple of my familiar"
and Perkins-Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Mary Shelley's
"Frankenstein..."
these are prime examples of brilliant texts that refuse the tradition of
citation and position re-interpretation as
novelty - knowledge
there is terrific resistance to my ideas of writing, of course, the
possibility that the art itself ought to count for something,
that the art itself is what permits an authentic project of intellectual
accountability -
i am pretty sure one of the reasons why writing is not "taught" in adult
education is because most adults hate to write.
so/.
my next project might teach/'explore the process of identity in writing -
the work of composition - who writes and why?
in the university especially, who writes, and why? to secure tenure? to
appeal to a community of scholars?
at what point does what we do matter to the general nonacademic public,
and why the shame of appealing
to these parents, teachers, students people?
ON WRiTING
my relation to writing is particular, certainly
but there is always the issue of critique-rejection:
i have found in my own work that the more i appeal to what i believe,
the less i care about who acknowledges my work
-
- why publish? what do you have to say? say it: if they can't accept what
you say,
accept that they (traditionalists) cannot move/change beyond what
conformity provides - conformity is
excessively rewarding - the more you digress from the traditions of your
community, the more you will be rejected,
by the same token, the more you write honestly, the more you write from
what you know,
the more terrifying you will seem - wot? what literature prompted you to
this thought???? what LIFE prompts
knowledge, or, traditionally, what are we expected to seek in similar
academic accounts? how do we speak new thoughts from the traditions that
provide the genre from which to speak? -
holy crap. how can anyone say anything if the assumption is that every
thought ought to be connected
to/referenced to previous thoughts? how futile is that? the problem with
academic text is the profound insecurity - novelists can explore the same
theme and not feel obliged to "cite" other novelists,
but the "academic" is reponsible for "citing" every aspect of every piece
of what might be written -
i think the foundational problem with traditional writing for the
university lies in the pre-structured demand
that academics write - even if most of them hate to write - you must =-
well fuck that.,
write what you love. say what you know, account for how you know, and
write as if you were a person
who is learning -
speak! say what you feel - believe in what you know, reflect on what you
do, and yes, you can scientize the information, but it is no less true
than the personal account -
writing what you feel matters: if it is refused, then that means something
different - it means that what matters to you doesn't matter to the
publishers - don't personalize innovation, persist.
for gawdsake,'differentiate academic talents!!!!
indeed.
diane
**********************************************************************
:point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
university of colorado, denver, school of education
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