I find that I am continuously needing to remind myself that what I am doing as a researcher is creative work. It sounds utterly ridiculous– seeing as I am doing a Practice-As-Research PhD– but the hours of reading and writing sometimes send me into a square academic hole that I have trouble getting myself out of. This blog post and Lynda Barry’s video at the end was just the reminder I needed to really explore and simply notice.
Today, as this post publishes, I’m giving a talk to postgraduate researchers. One of the things I will talk about is why it’s important for all researchers to practice seeing things differently.
We already have ways of describing this imperative in research literatures. We talk about reflexivity. We talk about criticality. We talk about challenging our taken for granted assumptions. We talk about making the familiar strange.
We stress the need for seeing differently because it is integral to the creation of knowledge. If we are to make step changes in our understandings, then we can’t just reproduce and replicate our existing lines of thought.
I can’t imagine a research methods courses which doesn’t talk about ‘de-familiarisation’ as a necessary practice. However, we generally don’t spend a lot of time on discussing what this means, beyond keeping a researcher journal, or interrogating some of the language and definitions that we…
View original post 829 more words
Dr. Mamalegato 