Post Panel Pause

So it has been two weeks since my Progress Panel which, due to fantastic timing, fell on my birthday. The chicken is in the oven, the Archers is on the radio, coffee is poured and the small people are settled and calm. Therefore it seems like a good time to reflect upon all that had gone on. 

Last year, my first PP, I felt totally under prepared but I was not worried. It was an unknown situation, I had no preconceptions. I had not written a word of my thesis and was, instead, coming to the end of a years worth of ethnographic research. My lasting memory from that hour was 'methodology'. So, for this year, I felt confident. Methodology. Tick. Presentation. Tick. Submission of chapter. Tick.

I ended up arriving early and sat on a rather sad looking chair in a corridor where the previous incarnation of my department as a hospital could clearly be seen. Growing bored I had pondered what had gone on in these offices in the past, the gurneys and the porters, life and death. My supervisor had spoken with me earlier in the week and I had boldly asked, "do people fail?" Her resounding answer was: yes. A PP is an exam, a verbal examination of what your research is, how you envisage it progressing and who you are as a researcher. Although they approached then with the 'critical friend' hat on, people do fail. I wasn't worried about failing. My supervisor was happy with me, I had a plan, I was able to speak about my research. Yet I had one concern: quotes.

As a teenager growing up split between Anglo Catholicism and an evangelical youth church, quoting the bible became something of a minefield. My Anglo Catholic roots had not drummed verses into me. Rather I was very good at knowing which Saint was associated with which areas and could tell you the correct colours, candels and vestments for the occassion. But I could not argue the bible with you. I knew that it 'roughly' said or 'some where' in a book something happened, but I could not dig out book, chaper and verse nor offer you a quote in both King James or the NIV. This used to frustrate me a lot for any argument I had to offer, no matter how well thought out, was doomed as I could not back it up.

This fear returned before my PP. I know that Vygotsky said 'something' about kinaesthetic activities during play but I cannot recall in which book it was; I am aware that Anderson 'roughly' said that autoethnography can be analytical in 2006 but what made up his five stages I do not know. So as I sat outside waiting in the bland corridor I felt slightly anxious as if I was 15 again standing my ground on beliefs I held which were verging on heretical to some of my bible quoting peers.

 I was the final candidate. This was fortuitous as it meant my hour slot became an hour and a half. At the end I felt like I had run a race, the pain and growing tears that I begged to stay hidden, were forgotten to a degree. Was it hard? Yes. Sitting with two people, one a stranger, who have read your work and have formed questions that you are not prepared for, is hard. When the stranger specialises in Action Research when your thesis is about the limitations of it, when the familiar face is a specialist in quantitative research when you are as qualitative as they come, when you know by the glint in his eye that he is prepared to enjoy this hour. That is hard. 

So the questions came thick and fast after my presentation and they all focused on one area: ontology and epistemology. How I view the world and therefore how I believe I can gain knowledge of it. At the end, after the inquisition had ended, the debrief began. The points were:

- you know what you believe but you are not specific enough

- feeling that you need to have a person to quote held you back from just saying what you felt

- your quotes were in your text, there would have been no shame in pointing out a page

- you survived and are on track 

In the past few weeks I have thought a lot about what happened. Firstly, I was expecting a debate over my methodology and writing style ( I mean, I write stories and I was facing a positivist who likes numerical data) but there was not one. Secondly, to survive a PP run as a viva and get through was a very positive out come. If I can defend and stick to my argument with the subtle sways and pulls to drag you of course and expose your weakness, that is good. What has been harder is trying to write exactly how I see the world. How I view reality and consciousness. Where I place humanity in the spectrum of life. How we learn. What we learn. And the PP staff were right. I knew that I was a social constructivist where we draw meaning from the world around us but to relate that to my whole world view and the choices I have made or not made was powerful. I realised I had come about things in an unnatural order, I had written about my world view without stating it. Back tracking and filling that in has been a lot of fun. 

If nothing else comes from a thesis, the chance to spend time looking at who you are, understanding your actions and reactions, how you relate to people you know and do not know, is worth it. I may never be good at quoting text. I may always struggle to see my research as being valid. Yet I hope that, at the end, I am a different version of me. One with more self awareness.

Who owns a story?

This past fortnight I have been pondering what stories are ours to tell and if there are ever any that can be said to belong to someone else entirely. On Friday I sat in my garden talking with a friend about everything under the sun. Some of my stories were mine to tell as they had happened to me; they were part of my life and I could pick and choose when I would share them. Yet other stories I told were not from my own experience but ones that had been told to me and I was now sharing. These stories were  nothing secret or private instead they were examples of innocuous topics such as the tale of the Smurf tattoo or the story of the abandoned holiday. 

Did I have any right to tell someone else's story? Would it have been immoral for me to have passed them off as my own? Could I fully recall if any part of them had been confidential? Who had originally told them? What would they think of the version I had heard? To whom did my story now belong? Could my friend retell it to someone else? Would she?

Our stories are only truly our own when they exist in our minds. The moment we share them we have to give up certain ownership rights to them. I certainly cannot police my friend and control if and when she decides to share 'my' story. I cannot control how she tells it, the tone of voice she will use, the details she will omit or expand upon. In one sense, she will make my story her own. It will be added to her repertoire and dragged out when the occassion suits. 

Narratives are a central part of our lives, both positive and negative. Stories influence all of our actions from morals to beliefs; from how we learn to bake a cake to what career we take. We learn through stories and we impart our knowledge and life through stories. I recently helped a 9 year old bake a cake. As we were working through the method we both told stories linked to cooking and cakes. One of my stories to her was about eating banana cake on holiday as a child whilst watching my brother's ship sail of to the Gulf War on the Spanish news; every time I eat a banana cake I recall that moment of panic and the frantic call home to find out if it was really true. I cannot think of when I would ever have felt the need to tell her that story but our joint action of baking allowed for associated stories to arise. 

If we live in a narrative world, can stories be protected and kept safely controlled? One cannot fully retract a story once it is told even, I would suggest, if we are conducting research and the story is requested to be removed. The physical words of the story may leave the page but that does not remove the influence of the story from the person who has heard it. Some stories are so powerful that the soft tendrils of their telling can last a life time and can influence even in their apparent absence. Even confidential stories do not remain so. One can be told and then retell a story so that any obvious facts are protected; names and settings are easy to change. So they can be retold in such a way that their essence is passed on even if the specifics are not. It is important to look at why we pass on stories that are not freely given but the ethics of this is for another day and something I am still grappling with in my research (for how can a child give consent to share a story if the story grows away from their control and becomes a faded image of their original telling? In fact, is there a point when it stops being their story? Is it truly their story if the subsequent retelling bears little relationship to the original?).

Trying to claim ownership of a story is like trying to own the wind: you may try but your chances of success are likely to be slim. Instead we need to accept that, once told, a story takes on a life of its own and will travel beyond our single telling. I do not believe we can judge the rightness or wrongness of this but must try and accept that this is just the nature of narrative.