It is a Thursday and I'm supposed to be writing but I'm not really getting very far. This is the longest break from Phd Blogging since I started and I feel a little absent. I have a bad back that is making me a bit fed up and I've been helping to build a giant platform and raft at Highfield adventure playground for what is coming up the three weeks.
The platform is much larger than the one in Pitsmoor and designed more as a stage for performance. I could write a justification to include this new platform in my PhD. It would be easy to draw a line of flight from the one in Pitsmoor to this intensive three week build project. I have thought a lot about my PhD and compared this building process to the building in my playground but this 3 week phase of bad backs and working from plans is clearly not part of my PhD study. It is helpful to say this as it is clear that my in platform in Pitsmoor is a territory and the new platform is a different territory. I should not really mention it here as it is another thing but for the first time in a while apart from doing the odd projection I am active in something that is not connected to my PhD study. It affords an edge to work back from. It is outside the space of the residency and outside the space of the research- it is part of taking a break but I only realise this as I move towards the end of it and it didn't really feel like a break.
I've done a few bits on developing some learning resources for the RISE program, watched a few you tube videos on the history of philosophy and done some reading on play theory. I haven't really written anything or developed my work on Unicorns and Ghosts which I was supposed to do. I did start to write a positional document which is a narrative of my journey into theory this was partly to share with Kate for a book chapter and partly just to find some sort of position as I was in many ways drowning. Even with the bad back it does feel quite nice to escape a circular place of theory to just put all the thoughts to one side for a moment. New materialism, post-philosophy, affect, immanence, speculation have all slipped into the background noise for a while. I have been focused on managing the pain in my back, building on site when I can and coping with a new puppy. I really think that this distance has been helpful and although I am not formally taking a break from my PhD the last three weeks has felt like being off sick which in reality is what has ended up happening.
The gap has made some of the philosophy I've been reading seem a little unnecessary I also felt like it was becoming quasi religious. It is like there is a catalogue of ideas to work through and some of them are sticky and have a certain traction. The idea of queering, the everyday, the dialectic most of the writing of the Frankfurt group, new materialism, vital materialism Tim Ingold following his line and Guattari with his schizo-analysis, the apparatus of Karen Barads agentile realism from OOO to ANT life explored through obscure acronyms. I ended up at Speculative realism but i am sure it will not finish there. All these ideas are so different but all of them are part of a common typology of an alternative way to think about things. Alternative to mainstream science dominated academic western ( can we say that now as a descriptor ?) thought. What I have remembered through having a bit of a break is that I have no obligation to or genuine experience of formal or informal social science methods, I have no axe to grind or hegemony to resist not because I think it is good but because it has until now has had very little affect on me that I'm aware of.
As I work at the playground and try and talk to people about what I'm doing the post philosophies I'm reading don't seem very relevant. This is probably because they are like post-cartesian enquirer approaches set against what has come before, set against patriarchy, set against positivism, set against separatism, dualism and humanism, set against scientism, and other forms of materialism, dialectical ,mechanical and to an extent even cultural materialism. They exist to help try and explain the world in all its expansive flow yet they also exist to set themselves against what came before , the territories that restrict our thinking to what is considered possible.
I started to feel that a simple thing was happening within social science and researchers. The established methods in both qualitative and quantitative on offer either fitted what was needed in terms of enquirey and an accepted common-sense world view or not. If they fit and we are trying to find something out we can formulate a question that the methods can shine some sort of light on then researchers can crack on and find something out.
For example a play worker who wonders why children engage more with one piece of play equipment than another and want to plan some new equipment for the playground can turn to formalized methods to try and work something out. A systematic approach where children's thoughts are recorded, play is observed and as much information as possible can be gathered on how the young people use the equipment the practitioner/researcher collects a body of data. This data is then analyzed and sorted or coded and we can find out information and evidence it with our data.
We can have a research question like
Why do children gravitate towards swings at an adventure playground?
Kids say they like swings and go on them a lot, swings are familiar to young people, heart rates increase when they swing at height suggesting an increase in adrenaline recorded through Fit Bits. When young people draw images of playgrounds 8 out of every ten pictures have images of swings. Playworkers state that on busy days children will wait their turn to go on swings rather than any other piece opf fixed playground equipment.
action - build more swings.
At the playground I am in residence as a visual artist but one of the purposes of my residency is to encourage the playground to establish loose parts play and self build play opportunities for young people. I want to do this in a way that draws on the history and ethos of loose parts play and the adventure play movements but further embeds this approach in the adventure playground now. I'm not that worried about scaling or if this is an approach that can go somewhere else I'm more interested in how we maintain the ethos and character of loose parts and self build that affords opportunities for young people to understand that they can take control of aspects of the spaces they move through. Much of my work of the past 20 years has been about this- people especially children controlling space and having individual and collective control. Perhaps in a minor and temporary way but not necessarily stopping there. It is a practice that questions power through the manipulation and domination of materials, bending them to human will. It is about moments and opportunities that emerge from doing and making. Aesthetics and actions are important but they flow as clouds and shift shape all the time.
After having 3 weeks off and emerging from a warren of philosophical rabbit holes I think some sort of pulling back to a simple ethnography of what is happening might be quite helpful because in reality doing ethnography helpful, my field notes are my research. Thinking more and having some sort of distance from the doing may be as much as I need and as much as I can expect for myself.
I can bend research creation in a direction that may make ethnography more permeable to the notion of residency as we encounter it as artists and find a place to practice differently but today as I need to stand and stretch I think I have bitten off more than I can chew and need to spit something out.
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