lots of pictures today as one of my hard drives with loads of image backups gave up on me last week. I felt like I needed some virtual backup of PhD stuff in the cloud. I'm feeling a lot better from my Covid 19 but not actually better yet. My black fingernail is slowly growing out and also starting to fade. I have two days with a clear dairy to write, then a supervision and then a clear Friday so it is a week of taking stock and deciding where I am.
After this blog I am going to try and enroll for my writing up period at MMU. The graduate school like most other things at the moment seems to be struggling to cope with the demands of our questions and life in general . I can live with this, at least in the short term. I am currently looking for some discipline , I have quite enjoyed the recent spells of writing when I manage to sit down and do it, and time folds. I'm also consistently surprised at how many ideas seem to arise within the writing process rather than emerge in my brain and then get written down. I am not sure if it is an excuse but I only really seem to have a limited amount of writing in me in any given week. Will Self and Coleridge's 500 words a day perhaps. My current writing is nothing spectacular but I have a feeling it is something that hasn't been written about much before. There is a danger it could be romanticizing the joys of manual labor and there is a danger that at the back of some of it there is some sort of male arrogance about shaping the world and bending it to a will. In many ways though this undercurrent that surfaces in manifold ways is what I am writing about and it is probably for this reason that the cut that happens when trying to reshape the world does not get written about very much.
I am writing about something that is not my PhD at the moment. When I say this I am reminded of my friend Johan when he says that things are cooked and raw. I think he is referencing Saussure - the relatively well known story of holding up a carrot in a field and saying' look I have a raw carrot.' In this sentence you are defining the carrot by saying it is not cooked and so defining it by saying what it isn't and in the process pointing to what it could be - cooked and on a plate.
This is the real point of the current phase of my writing. To hold back what is the PhD work by writing about something else yet to keep the text permeable enough for the writing to help shape and define what the thing is by outlining what it isn't.
On another note I went to a different adventure playground last week in Ferrybridge. It was not the same as ours but was also great. They had a bigger building and slightly more risky play equipment. They also had quite young and active staff who had trained in play-work at Leeds Becket Uni. They had a large loose parts area with pallets and junk but it didn't really seem to be in use. A bit like ours there was a pile of stuff that looked great on photos and as it is actually a gold standard for free play the workers there initially said it got used a lot by the kids. When I dug a bit deeper the staff said it didn't really get used that much and they wondered if children actually played differently now. I felt the pull of conventional research, talk to staff, talk to the kids ask a set of semi open interview questions, observe observe observe record, perhaps make an intervention and flow into an action research cycle. Get the staff and kids involved in it. Write up some findings and see if loose play is still relevant and what the best ways to animate it as something young people would go to and explore independantly.
I really think if my PhD was to look at loose parts play then this " bringing of research to the table' would be an effective way of approaching the problem. Some kind of structure we can call method, some kind of epistemological distance, an intervention and close observation and a way of reporting back that seems more than opinion. This isn't my PhD though yet the thinking about it may help in describing the carrot; whether cooked or raw.
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