Please note: this blog first appeared at http://www.steeltrapmind.wordpress.comand was authored by myself, Lou Mycroft. I’m sorry that, in transferring, the thoughtful and thought-provoking comments have been lost.
It was hard to commit to Bootcamp today. Although writing is rarely something that fills me with dread, in fact usually the opposite, I was half wishing that the few people who wanted the opportunity would find something else to do on a sunshiny Spring day. After an emotional and very tense week, I was concerned that the experience would be too bittersweet to bear. But tristesse has long been an effective muse and although the words came a little slower, come they did.
I’ve been focused on self-reflexive processes* which I find myself thinking of as tangential to the main event, but I’ve figured that this is the only way I’ll work through the finer detail of my research methodology. Funnily enough, when I returned to it today it didn’t seem as dreadful as I’d been thinking. Broad, yes, unthinking – and in need of much more work, but each of the five figurations stands up, albeit treading on each other’s toes. I deliberately closed my eyes to the literature review (cartography) and 
scrolled through to the methodology, noting as I did so a slight feeling of impostorship when I tried to mentally explain the difference between ‘methodology’ and ‘method’. One for the homework list, there, and just when I’d tentatively grasped ‘epistemology’ too. My mission was to grapple with the methodology, annotate and interrogate it. I was switched on to nuances of language, after some of the conversations I’d had in class that week. I found myself largely focused on ethics.
I’d got the proposal through with a tiny ethics section which more or less said, posthumanism requires a new ethics and I’ll figure it out as I go along. I’m guessing the reason I wasn’t pulled up on this was because it was true; ethics are part of the self-reflexivity which seems to be playing an increasingly key part in the development of the methodology. Makes sense. Rosi Braidotti describes ethics as:
“…THE EFFECTS OF TRUTH AND POWER THAT HIS/HER ACTIONS ARE LIKELY TO HAVE UPON OTHERS IN THE WORLD.” (2011, P.300)
It feels important to question this. Does it exclude anything that ethics is conventionally defined as, and which is important to keep? BERA (2011) do not, interestingly, define what an ethic is, although many individual ethics are laid out in some detail. A conventional dictionary definition of ‘ethics’ would be:
“…A SET OF MORAL ISSUES AND ASPECTS (AS RIGHTNESS)” OR “…A GUIDING PHILOSOPHY” (MERRIAM-WEBSTER, 2016).
BERA (2011) are clear that “deliberation on these guidelines” is essential, and “compliance [only] where appropriate” (p.4, my parentheses). This leaves open the possibility of operating a new ethics, which may find points of tension with the BERA recommendations. Those points can be fruitfully explored as part of the self-reflexive narrative invited by Braidotti’s definition (2011) and further informed by a reading of others’ work around posthuman ethics, notably Patricia MacCormack, who defines ethics in a dynamic way:
“ETHICS IS A PRACTICE OF ACTIVIST, ADAPTIVE AND CREATIVE INTERACTION WHICH AVOIDS CLAIMS TO OVERARCHING MORAL STRUCTURES.” (MACCORMACK, 2012, P.1).
This resonates and also gives me a little insight into my own thinking. The BERA (2011) guidelines felt terrifying before I’d actually read them. My fear of making a ‘mistake’ against them amplified existing feelings of impostorship, limiting assumptions about consequences. This reflects contemporary happenings in my life, which cannot be written out of the narrative, as Sparkes (1995) would say, only acknowledged. I have fear around anything that is ‘fixed’ and which I might get wrong, and this made me afraid to read the guidelines. Now, with the wriggle-room in BERA (2011) and the invitation from MacCormack (2012) to be dynamic in my thinking, alongside a little help from Brene Brown (2013) to deal with my sense of ‘shame’ and fear, my mind is fizzing with possibilities.
What started all this today, when I had no clear idea of what I’d write, is the annotation process and it’s something I’d like to continue. Revisiting my colleague @cherylren’s original Revision Bootcamp set-up helped me understand that there are two audiences for my writing – me, as I work it all out (with the help of my supervisors) and (ultimately) the reader. This is going to ring alarm bells for version control, but maybe there could be two versions of the work: one which is worked and reworked with annotations and a ‘clean’ copy for outward facing view. And maybe the time for the cleaned-up version has not yet come.
I’m glad Bootcamp happened today. It’s halfway through the day and, although the words are not quite flowing at the rate of previous Bootcamps, the demons in my head have had to step to the side and allow me to think. Today I have only felt sadder when I’m not writing. There’s an imperative that I would like to hold on to.
*At the moment I am very into I-Poems, having heard about them from Jim Reid and Jean Hatton at last week’s @HudCRES day. Based on the work of Mauthner and Doucet, which I’m currently reading about in Edwards and Weller (2012) – why? – the I-Poem works when reflexive accounts are already written. It mines the accounts for all statements beginning with ‘I’ and forms them, edited but not displaced, into lines of poetry. I’ve done two of these from my earliest Steel Trap Mind entries and I’m looking forward to more because they are so evocative of time and even place. It did make me wonder, however, whether now that I know I have a plan to use I-Poems, it would affect the way I wrote this blog, but it genuinely has not been in my head at all.
British Educational Research Association. (2011). Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research. Online https://www.bera.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/BERA-Ethical-Guidelines-2011.pdf?noredirect=1
Brown, B. (2013). Daring Greatly. New York. Vermilion.
Edwards, R. and Weller, S. (2012). Shifting Analytic Ontology: using I-Poems in qualitative longitudinal research. Qualitative Research. 12(2) 202–217.
Merriam-Webster. (2016). Definition of ‘ethics’. Online http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ethic
Sparkes, Andrew (1995) Writing People: reflections on the dual crises of representation and legitimation in qualitative inquiry QUEST (National Association of Physical Education in Higher Education) 1995:47 158-195
Lou Mycroft - writing, thinking, culture changing 