what I remember

I'm participating in a pilot research study on the PhD writing experience. I was interviewed today and as a result of this process I was forced to think back on my PhD. Funny how having just submitted already it feels like it was all such a long, long time ago. Another interesting coincidence - September marks a year since my return from the UK, so lots of significance to having been asked to talk about, reflect on my PhD experience at this point.

At the close of the interview I commented how I felt I hadn't really 'covered everything', hinting at a sense noted in the literature on interviews as data collection method that participants find it hard not to want to please their interviewers and provide good, relevant data. I was given a suggestion to use the prompt 'I remember' to drive my subsequent thinking about the PhD for possible future interaction with the researcher. So here is a short list of things I remember at this moment - I'm aware of course that at another moment this list might take a very different shape.

I remember
- the walks from my house in Bardsey Court to the OU especially in Autumn and the warm colours of the leaves
- my office in Jeffrey Cowther Building where my desk sat in front of the window and I could look out across the green lawn and watch people enter and leave The Hub
- going to a conference in Lille in the Autumn of 2010 with my colleagues and one of my supervisors - I did a really good presentation of my MRes research and bonded with my colleagues at a very personal level for the first time. I see this time together as forming the basis of our now enduring friendship
- the tea and biscuit conversation breaks in the Jenny Lee Building with SB all through 3rd year
- the data workshops run by JM and DA where I was really forced to think really critically about data analysis in their various forms - because of these workshops I developed a great respect for linguistically focuses analysis tools and methodologies
- listening to Martyn Hammersley talk methodology and the time I kept bumping into him at the book check-out terminal at the OU library (something like three times in a row over a three to six month period)
- missing Cape Town
- the Academic Literacies Forum when it was an informal discussion group that took place during a lunchtime over your sandwiches and tea but where the essence of debates in the field were discussed and reflected on by expert and novice alike - where 'silly' questions were tolerated and celebrated
- walking home after supervision and crying, unable to fathom why things had seemingly gone so horribly wrong

the art and science of ethnography

I think science is probably the wrong word - but I don't have anything more apt at this point to give expression to my current sense of awe and respect for the field and practice of ethnography. This statement I also have to qualify with 'particular branches of the field of ethnography'. Last night I was reading around the topic of fieldwork, fieldnotes and critical ethnography and was once again struck by the detailed and meticulous manner in which ethnographer collect, reflect and consider their research practices.

There are so many ways to write a fieldnote and I don't a mean personalised, anything-goes suite of techniques, these are documented, carefully theorised and empirically verified approaches that then provide the ethnographer with particular kinds of records of their fieldwork experiences. Ethnography is often dismissed as a 'soft science' - a easy option for qualitative researcher to take who don't want to attend to methodological rigour, and just hang about in a particular setting for a long, long time to soak up the atmosphere - but people who make these kinds of assumptions don't have a clue what they are taking about. The good ethnographers are so closely aware of what they are doing and pay such careful attention to the impact of their research, their presence, their interpretations, their positionality, their ontologies and epistemologies on who and what they are researching. I don't think other kinds of researcher get to, or are encouraged to pay this amount of attention to these aspects when conducting research. Qualitative researchers are sometimes encouraged to pay attention to reflexivity and reactively - but usually this is done mostly to ensure that we adhere to validity concerns - but we don't necessarily take it on board in the same way. To be clear I'm not suggesting a hierarchy of research approaches, with ethnography at the top. I'm not that naive to make such a statement, I'm just trying to articulate my deep respect for the kind of work ethnographers do.

I also don't for one moment want to suggest that I'm the kind of quasi-ethnographer or researcher that has taken on the all the principles of ethnography that I'm talking about above - I know I haven't. But I think the point I'm trying to make is that I am really drawn to this kind of research and being critical about my practices - as researcher or teacher. As a result of my time in the UK I've been introduced to and have in many ways taken on board the philosophy of conducting research for the sole purpose of the pursuit of knowledge, influenced rather strongly by the teachings of MH. But through the writings of critical ethnographers I see another agenda that is equally compelling - research that clearly has a political or policy agenda, because it has to. The kind of partisan approach my adult education and feminist professor friend talked about almost two years ago. I can only hope that in the future my path and these more critical methodologies will cross.

An expert on qualitative data analysis

I had the privilege of listening to Martyn Hammersley talk about qualitative data analysis yesterday. Ok so it was about two months too late, but that didn't detract from the sheer quality and brilliance of the presentation. I think he is just such a good teacher - he is clear, comprehensive, knowledgeable, approachable, gentle, unassuming, open. While sitting in the room listening to him I kept thinking to me myself - I want to be able to talk like that about my research, about my research methodology - simple, clear English underpinned by a deep understanding of all the complexity that does into qualitative data analysis. It was such an inspiration. He was able to unpack the actual process of data analysis - in concrete, discrete, practical steps - without diminishing the complexity of the task. Some other interesting things he mentioned yesterday

- In planning a qualitative PhD research project (and more so for an ethnographic study) his estimation is that you need at least 1 1/2 years after all your data collection to finish the thesis (this means I'm about 3 months off)
- for an ethnographic project you cannot under estimate the amount of time required to 'process' your raw data and get it into a format where you can start to use it (again this took me roughly 3 months and I think I was super speedy)
- grounded theory is really an approach to research design, not a data analysis approach
- analysis software can't do the analysis for you, such software is most productively used for the storage, categorisation and retrieval of large sets of data

An excellent session and of course he invited us to e-mail him if we had any major questions which couldn't be addressed during the short time allocated to the session. Guess what I'm going to be doing?

whooooosh days

I feel like the broadband speed Trevor Noah so beautifully advertisers - the periods of the day all blend into one as I wish I could be in England simply to have an extra two hours per day to fit in all the 'stuff' I need to do. I never seem to have enough time to write my fieldnotes. And I constantly feel as if my fieldnotes are hopeless inadequate in the depth and breath of their descriptions. I'm using written notes while in class, but last night I decided I would capture my analytical memo's (see Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007) using my computer. I can write these faster on computer anyway and at the moment I feel I need to get down as much of what I remember as soon as possible, before I forget and just in case that one 'bit' of info becomes a crucial piece of insight about my research site.

I submitted my article last night - and what a nail biting experience that was - I kept thinking I had misspelt something  or uploaded the wrong file, did the word count incorrectly, had missing references in my bibliography. Writing what a gloriously soul searching (maybe even destroying), upheavaling, nerve  wreaking, energy depleting and draining experience. Sorry I can only focus on the challenging aspects of the process today. Of course it has its positive and uplifting moments and experiences - but that's not what I want to focus on today. I could easily have sat another couple of days refining and reworking sentences and paragraphs - but hey it was taking up too much of my time and I had to let it go into the world.

And so onward to many more whooosh-like days