Abstract
This is a live world writing story about my stay as visiting scholar at the Department of Communications, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign with Professor Norman Denzin during the Fall of 2012. It is a story about open-science economy safespaces otherplace learning and benefiting from uncertainty and confusion and the love of adventure and jazz. It is a story about the bike with the pink tires leaning calmly against the wall of the ROTC building, guarding the gate against invaders, and growing deeper shades of red as the weather shifts.
The building is called the Armory and you can go to the south-eastern entrance. The campus area is a fairly easy grid so you’ll find your way. I’ll wait for you in my room 209. Outside is the bike that you can use during your stay. The last scholar who used it is from Chile. It has pink tires. I have the keys to the lock with me.
Strange name on the building I thought, but I guess I did not really. I was going to spend Fall 2012 as visiting scholar at the Department of Communications, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign with Professor Norman Denzin. Also I was going to attend his course in Advanced Interpretive Methods. Upon arrival he told me how to find him. I did, but I did not. No easy grid at least in my head. I went to the entrance, I saw the bike but I did not. What I saw was the U.S. Army ROTC sign above the entrance and it overpowered every other perception that I might have had. The ROTC is the Reserve Officers Training Corps and a part of the U.S. armed forces that gives college students financial help in exchange for military service later.
Can you see the gate, bike and me starting strong?
I decided that I had gone wrong. It could not be the correct entrance, but it was. I went around the building twice. No result. I went back to the ROTC entrance and went in:“Leadership Excellence Starts Here” the sign said. I passed it. I passed the pictures of the RIFLE TEAM. Could it really be here? Room 207: Assistant Professor of Military Science. Room 208: Military Education Council. Really? Room 209: College of Communications and a poster for the next International Congress in May. Finally! I found it and even room 210 for graduate students. I felt relieved but still bewildered. I knocked on the door and there he was. I was safe. There was jazz; the rather young, traditionalist, Diana Krall-type, soft, gentle. And James, Ted, Chantel, Bryce, Natalie, and Katherine too.
A few months before I left for the United States I interviewed a brain researcher and professor of biology about information processing and learning. He argued that the way the brain functions we seem to learn different things in different and/or other places. Therefore he further argued for having special classrooms for teaching special subjects at school: Special science laboratories and special rooms for language training, and so on. The rooms in themselves could this way scaffold students’ learning (Interview, October 28th, 2011). So called grid cells collaborate with other specialized nerve cells with complementary roles in the sense of place/space and direction. Together they build a map in the brain. And the brain uses this map to orient itself in both familiar and unfamiliar environments. Signals create a coordination system in which positions can be registered. They register our movements and are closely linked to our memory. The grid cells, however, do not reflect signals that come in from the outside from any of our senses. The grid patterns are made by the brain itself. Therefore we can use the grid cells as a way of understanding how activity patterns emerge in the brain (Moser & Moser, in Jacobsen, 2012).
I guess I am my own example and so are the special open classroom scaffolding safespaces for science and research created in rooms 209 and 210. And again/other in the methods course. They are open-science economy safespaces in a broad sense of the term and wells of- and gateways for other possibilities always, or what I call otherplace learning helping creating knowledges and perspectives through opening up bifurcations and ruptures forcing me to approach collapse and construction simultaneously. It entails addressing the multiple forces at play, in this case, in the daily peaceful workings of the Communications Department in a U.S. Military ROTC context that I passed by—was in—every day. And late evenings when there were military exercises, marching and drills all around inside the building.
And I studied books and listened to stories on reflexive (auto)ethnography, materialist feminism, writing as method, performances on social class, political economy, democratic theory, race, gender, education, social welfare, health care, violence, social inquiry, art and indigenous traditions, and fates. And the Advanced Interpretive Methods course every Wednesday at Gregory Hall 3rd floor: Fuelling a critical progressive social science to make a difference. A new politics of possibilities toward a transgressing militant pedagogy of love, jazz and justice empowered citizenship, fulfilling a proactive positive combat scholar-activist agenda. The ROTC secretary is nice and hard working. We smiled to each other every day and talked about the weather:Sunny rainy windy warm cold . . . And I was saluted by polite men and women in uniform ever so often.
War/s . . . cold/warm . . . I am in it/part of it/affected/affecting it/me and me . . . Mystory (Denzin, 2008). “Yesterday it rained, then it snowed, then the wind blew, and then the sun came out, through it all the bike with the pink tires leaned calmly against the wall of the ROTC building, guarding the gate against invaders” (Denzin email, 03-14-2013). Leadership . . . Excellence . . . 209/210/Gregory Hall 3rd. floor . . .Starts here . . . I did invade but to guard as in opening up together and benefitting from it.
Open-Science Economy and Live World Methods
An open-science economy is about interactive creativity, user-generated innovation, collaboration and genuine participation. It encourages a radical nonpropertarian sharing of content, cloud data computing (electronic or not) and the leveraging of cross-border exchanges.
It is a growing sector of the global knowledge economy utilizing open-source models and its multiple applications in distributed knowledge and learning systems and thought of as a means for revitalizing public institutions involving the wider public and amateur scientists along with experts in the social mode of open knowledge production (News Letter, 2013). On one hand, the term open refers to open access, open archiving, open publishing and open repositories. On the other hand, it refers to a science and research that is diffuse, never completed and open-ended, decentralized, and serendipitous. A science that is open to self and social reflection, and hopefully therefore capable of pushing further boundaries of both our personal and collective imaginations and struggles against injustices, wars . . . wherever they might be. And live world research methods “able to attend the fleeting, distributed, multiple and sensory aspects of sociality through research techniques that are mobile, sensuous and operate from multiple vantage points” (Back, 2013, p. 18).
Increasingly, portal-based knowledge environments and global science gateways support such collaborative science. Open-source informatics enables knowledge grids that interconnect science communities, databases, and new computational tools. All however possibilized, at least the way I see this, by a nonbinary human/non human, man/machine, mind/technology inter/intra relations of people inter/intra acting together and/thus minds touching minds: Minds acting as gateways entangled in “grace” (Weil, 2002). The concept of open-science economy, its dimensions and significance extended into infinity and immanent if we want to. I bow my head and I raise my hand. I want it all, and just how important these safespaces are. Going places also unknown and uncertain I do I dare.
A politics of “life itself” as a form of active bioethical citizenship (Braidotti, Colebrook, & Hanafin, 2009) taking life itself as the point of reference tuned always toward respect for diversity, peace, and sustainable growth. A performance ethics; an “ethics of entanglement” (Barad, 2010) respecting vulnerability while actively constructing social horizons of hope. In my case this means a material live world autoethnographic politics and self portraits in the third person. I might not be me. Discover things in the making. All my texts are preliminary. Rupture of rationality as a way of understanding the world. Im/possibilities are happening all the time. I try representing myself allowing a redoing of myself to get ahead and pro-act. Nonplanning is leading to ideas. Sometimes I think with my hands and I knit. I thus try making critical performative discursive ethnographic spaces of justice rooms to move in. Here are nine—IAC—I learned about by Professor Denzin, and as I use/move/think/unthink, the unthinking the thinking is becoming the doing in me.
And the three stages and levels of discourse my vulnerability:
I try carry theory lightly, enacting agency in history. I try writing my narratives sensitive to language and my material practices and/or material nine rooms/spaces and levels as they collide and mash. Data have agency and when I produce something I am. I need to think about what I am going to do about being her. Being/doing me I am/I do Mymethods (Reinertsen, 2013). And you yours: Both of us performing thinking/doing before after moves. I love this picture. It is from the aquarium in Chicago. And Chicago and people in the shining globe. Going places always going places. Breaking, crying not and interpretive movements . . . There is value in revising stories: Reading differently always.
Going West
Urbana/Champaign, Illinois Midwest, and also tourist in Chicago and visiting the Arch of St Louis, Missouri. The Frontier Museum: Imagine the prairie a long time ago and just moving on west: How it happened. Brave people I say, when I stand at the top, and also the Hudson River Carpet as gift-spreading disease. Lewis & Clark, transcontinental railroad, Indian mascots, democracy, voting rights . . . and other stories striking to the essence of the American dream and the shattered dreams of the peoples it subjugated . . . “Searching for Yellowstone”(Denzin, 2008). And Buffalo Bill; in Paris Disney they are now hiring Indians who can use bow and arrow still at display . . . a sad sad story I think told to me again by Norman Denzin: Will appear in his new book. About 25% of the U. S. cowboys were Afro-American. They seem all to be John Wayne White in Hollywood. There is, however, glamour shining spectacular fantastic lights . . . What to think do? A human being only I am my activity patterns emerging and my personal dramaturgy.
Here is a going west recipe (not) poem from the Wednesdays. It is about troubling traditional modes of analytic practice, including coding, data analysis and interpretive strategies.
Start with an event related to a here and now Crack it open Confront it Perform it Impose an interpretive narrative response to it Bring other voices and use voice to critique it Create a counter narrative and add utopian visions to it Your agenda is a moral act counter critiquing and my/your stands Embody (Body) Statements Becomings Policy Subjectivity Sculpting a dance in a presence We are universal singulars you and I And about universal solidarity and/in becomings Create multiple timelines, levels and voices Play with temporality and movement, place/space, body, lines Create ongoing narratives Make cause—effect disappear through moving freely back and forth Problems and resolutions:Move both/al/ways Choose a monolog or a dialog Manipulate concepts Start your history 1-2-3-4-5-6 . . . times Be concerned with HOW things happen, not why; HOW people express, articulate, act their own feelings. Move from the particular to confronting the structures . . . the discourse apparatus—that has perhaps harmed you. Expose Interrogate Heal Advice: Economy of texts in expanded ambiguity frameworks. Question: How much verisimilitude to be effective? Question: Who speaks for the subaltern? Can we speak for the subaltern? Lifting up marginalized voices Increase conscience about x Try What if we don’t?
Make it visible. What is there is as important as what is not: go search. Write from a place of mind and heart. Move through memory. It is an evocative form of writing. Simultaneously slow and fast. There are reflections of time, place, experiences and things no longer there.
Staging of research is about destabilizing, mourning, remembering, and forgetting. We want more from life than from existing power structures and discourses. And the logic of counter hegemonic discourse is about staging alternatives contesting the very notion of reenactment of reality. The goal is to expose contradictions in ideological constructs. Such truths are warranting this move to counter hegemonic spaces.
Use theory to explore only no explanations Embrace the audience and write so other people can write Create speaking/sparkling texts speaking/sparkling for/through themselves Accept to be taken into particular texts Enact as it describes There is no context/just context/all context and everyday experience writing Totally reflexive and not reflexive at all Contextual Concrete Individual Is my personal biography
There are many interpretive communities. This is one and these materials are valid. There might be a momentum in the field right now as we are rethinking the philosophical foundation and the methodological techniques of qualitative research. Perhaps materiality and data is not necessary to write about at all. I am my own and my will to knowledge. The start is represented as X that has had a consequence for someone. For me that is data: The start is data: Is there then other data than me and what I enact together with you?
A historical moment is a historical document No capital letters It is lived history No blame no shame: I will not hurt anybody Singular/universal sharing Sharing is performing/articulating my position That is the project Sharing is solidifying is claiming this identity Not turning my back to and difficult research Ambiguity is why we need it This confusion And what different say not Going in where we want to end Histories, politics, documents, economy . . . articulated through actors: If it did not have to happen then, it does not have to happen again.
It is a publically orientated research fuelling opportunities and capacities to always do the craft of research differently. Providing a solid basis for many-side interventions overcoming fragmentation, endlessly it must have felt this prairie.
View From St Louis Arch
The Bike and Home Again
Queen and Country (2007-2009) was created by Steve McQueen in response to a visit he made to Iraq in 2003 following his appointment by the Imperial War Museum’s Art Commissions Committee as an official U.K. war artist. It is a cabinet containing a series of facsimile postage sheets, each one dedicated to a deceased soldier. During the 6 days McQueen spent in Iraq, he was moved and inspired by the camaraderie of the servicemen and women that he met. Viewers are invited to pull out the double-sided panels bearing the sheets from a wooden box and thereby create an intimate space to contemplate the imagery. This is my private amateur photo taken in the Art Institute of Chicago and some words spoken by a little woman a long time ago. And remember it does not have to happen again.
Dear Anne,
“The well” (Gustavsen, 2012): James & I very much enjoy this new addition to the international jazz library in 209 Armory!!!! Thanks much, the snow has melted off the seat of the bike with pink tires.
Email: February 28, 2013
Dear Anne,
yesterday it rained, then it snowed, then the wind blew, and then the sun came out, through it all the bike with the pink tires leaned calmly against the wall of the ROTC building, guarding the gate against invaders.
Email: March 14, 2013
Dear Norman,
I’m going to write something about the bike with the pink tires 1 day guarding the gates. You? Pink red militant activist research . . . ROTC . . . shifting weather . . . complexity reality hunger . . . paradoxes. The two offices 209-10 as islands of—wells of—other possibilities always :) Jazz.
Email: March 14, 2013
Dear Norman,
minus 10—Sunny—Toward midnight sun. Ten years since the invasion and war in Iraq, and nobody knows why it started. That fact might however be the only positive outcome.
Email: March 20, 2013
Dear Anne,
the tragedy of the war lingers, 24 degrees and sunny
Email: March 20, 2013
Footnotes
Author Note
All images provided by the author.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.