Pete and Glenda

 I was up on a ladder trying to mend the Zip wire yesterday.  Patrick asked me how my PhD was going and I said that it wasn't really. It is and it isn't, I started back doing field notes and observing what was happening in the loose parts area and did 3 sessions with extensive notes.   This was just before I went away to Dorset and the bank holiday.  I have started to make a film at the playground, Sarah asked me if I could use it for my PhD and I explained that there was no way I could make something like that that could fit into the ethics of the University.  After lots of engagements with ethical process I have become more sympathetic to the process and why we need it.  Research can and does do harm, research harvests data from people without their informed consent and this in turn can shape peoples lives through policy and perception.

The simple answer to the question of ethics is don't make any films within research as the two forms are not compatible.  It is possible to work with stills that capture something without showing children faces, for the images to work with text to act as memory triggers. I think film is slightly different as it unfolds in time and carries its own rhetoric.  I know that the still image has its complex rhetoric but these can often be mitigated within the writing process. To film a playground and think about play and have all children absent is pointless and has its own message. Yes it is possible and there are nice examples of films where objects are juxtaposed with dialogue but these films are made with this in mind they are often reflective and soft and insightful and full of memory.  They can't capture the affective buzz of the playground, this is the essence that I would strive to hold within the frame of a film.  I will make a film for the playground and her funders and I may even write about it as an artifact that sits on the boundary between what is and isn't research that perhaps marks an edge.  Too many of these edges seems to be set through process and protocol rather than an emerging and felt relationship to practice and place which is what we always put at the center of residency as method.

Perhaps the next process to to sift through all the things I can write about that actually are about an affective relationship to place that are not compromised by research protocols and then I can begin a journey of hope that I will call the long revolution.