Doing what it said on the tin

I'm still trying to write my RD2.  I want to write a front end as a list but I don't think it will go down well so I will do it here.  The process of trying to write has brought me to a set of conclusions most of which if unpicked are positive and lay some groundwork.

1. There is an aesthetic turn within social science research.  This is at a practical and theoretical level.

2. Aesthetic thinking is slippery and often gets conflated with other types of thinking- it nests with phenomenology yet also refutes it.

3. The coin has many sides but the two that really count are the idea that aesthetics exist externally to human experience (within the object sometimes called Kantian aesthetics) or that they are constructed by things outside it ( often human actors thoughts , networks or event).  One road leads to relativism the other awakens all types of gods and her functions. 

4. Artists are involved because they historically have the reputation of living closer to an aesthetic world as Ruskin says they learn to see what is really there. If we flip the coin they help construct all that can possibly be constructed.

5. ESRI is known for cutting edge social research that embraces the turn towards speculation and questions the value of any existing methods.

6.  The only real point in progressing this PhD is to be able to work from within the idea of what artists can bring to research and invest in the relations that construct this network.

7. Theory of this sort can sit next to practise yet when we work it through practise or as I suggest worldize it,  it is not  helpful to split the two. ( hence the pull of totalising ontologies- Dialectics - phenomenology new and old materialism the Event and the move towards flatness)

8. The systems at the university are not set up to enable the kind of artistic approaches to research that people are keen to explore.

9.  There is a lot of cherry picking of thoughts and ideas from different fields and an attempt to work with them out of context.  This can find low hanging fruit but becomes problematic when it turns to fundamentally different ontologies and world views - you can't just sit where you like.

10. I am doing real work and getting somewhere with a complex set of thoughts but it is fragile- the temptation to go through the motions is difficult as going through the motions in the past had a rational that I understood or felt in terms of a wider practice.  Going through the motions now has no point and more importantly would disenchant my world.