I have been thinking of trying to write something about Post -Qualtative research using the metaphor of a camping trip. I was doing this in my head to try and work out what the differences are between approaches. I know this is going to be a very lame attempt but thought if I put it here and share it perhaps it would become a document people could add to and correct and eventually become a teaching tool for post grads. This is an aspiration and not a prediction.
The camping trip is a metonym. I have only just learnt what this means and although it sounds clever it is really just calling your vacuum cleaner a Hoover, or national government, Westminster. I present the camping trip as metonym in the spirit of Lacans points de capiton the notion of the quilting button or tie that holds things close together but allows for separation. This is important as the camping trip as Metonym stands for a set of ideas that are similar but not the same. These are specifically, new materialism, the ontological turn, post-Cartesian and mostly anything with a flat ontology where the idea of the human is re-imagined. To those of us who watch Gavin and Stacy its also a reference to uncle Brin's notorious fishing trip.
a general new materialist camping trip.
You pack the car but then decide to camp in your garden as it doesn't make much difference where you go. There is no inside or outside of the tent but the tent is as important as anything else. The people inside the tent and the people outside the tent are the same as is everything else. This includes camping equipment and a moth that flutters around the gas lamp. At night when we go to sleep even our dreams are part of the camping trip as thoughts even subconscious ones are things. Deleuze and Guattari are inside the tent, they are talking about all sorts of crap as they have smoked a splith and they say that drugs are flaky so they are like dandruff. They like camping because it reminds them nomads. Guattari reminds Deleuze to keep passing the open windows but he is sure to forget.
a new materilist camping trip with Karen Barad.
You pack the car all your equipment is an apparatus that is completely entangled with all other aspects life, the fact you are going camping is entangled in the apparatus everything is apparatus which doesn't have any edges. The inside of the tent is the same as the outside of the tent. If you perform an agential cut by dividing the tent inside with an internal bedroom it doesn't really make any difference everything including the moth is complicit in what is going on. Deleuze and Guattari are invited but decide not to come as the trip is really a science school outing and they do not wear the white coats of a royal science on the inside or the outside.
a new materilist camping trip with Jane Bennet.
You pack the car and drive in a circle and come back to your garden but you experience it differently. You notice a worm and see its Jiz which is like its life force and how it helps to turn the soil. Your tent does not separate the inside from the outside but a life force that we can't say is god but looks a little bit like god flows between both. The moth and the lamp are sort of the same but you have a sneaky feeling that the moth is actually a bit more important than the lamp or for that matter a tent peg. Deleuze and Guattari are in the tent they are pissing in a pan because they have one and carefully pouring it out of the door flap so nobody can see them. They secretly like been invited on the camping trip but know that Jane doesn't really like them unless they are talking about worms and Jizz and they are keen not to be seen out with her.
A camping trip with actor network theory.
This camp is very organised the tent exists and it has an inside and an outside and everybody and everything are all part of the trip and they all support each other . Without the camping trip nothing would really exist in any way shape or form that would make it worth talking about. There are some big personalities on the trip its just unusual that one happens to be a moth and the other a match head.
A speculative realist camping trip.
Nobody gets in the car because they can't decide if it exists or not. The tent can have an inside or an outside and it can exist anywhere. Deleuze and Guattari are invited and even though they are both dead they turn up in the flesh not as spirits. Harman forgets his rucksack and has to borrow a sleeping bag and a camping kettle. Loads of people turn up with high expectations but they don't know where to go or pitch their tent as it feels a bit like tomorrow could be cancelled due to lack of interest.
A research creation camping trip.
Everyone decides to sleep under the stars and that a tent is a structuralist imposition of the envelope that could only be felt as global capitalism. Someone starts to whittle a stick with a penknife but half the group is concerned they are making a spear. The other half think its the emergence of a nomadic war machine that will eventually change the state. At 10.30 it gets cold and everyone decides to go home to their centrally heated houses in the suburbs because lighting a fire would make them part of the problem and not the solution.
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