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Giving up and getting lost in Hanoi: playing with creative research methods in transnational contexts
Abstract
In this paper we share our experiences of working with creative research methods to explore HE teacher ‘becomings’ across a transnational education partnership between four universities, three in Vietnam and one in the United Kingdom. The work forms the qualitative phase of a two-year British Council Vietnam funded project. This phase of our research was concerned with HE teachers’ stories about their career trajectories, their concept making about professional learning and the value of post-qualitative research methods to collaborative research across substantially contrasting social, cultural and economic settings. Drawing on ideas from post-qualitative research practices we read, talked, walked and made together in a range of face to face and digitally mediated events that opened up conversations about methodology and generated a common body of shared empirical material about HE teachers ‘becomings’. We ‘followed the contours’ after Brinkman’s concept of ‘abduction’ and Maclure’s notion of ‘hot spots’ to interact with our materials in ways that challenge more orthodox approaches to qualitative research that centre on the primacy of data and coding. This approach encouraged us to relinquish the certainties, the ‘giving up’ in our title, of orthodox qualitative research traditions and disorientate ourselves, getting purposefully “lost„, in ways that foregrounded the socio-cultural and linguistic diversity of our research partnership. We share the outcomes, on-goings and provocations of our work and the significance for both HE workforce development and international teaching and research partnerships.
In this paper, we consider a policy which was part of a larger reform movement in Vietnam, ostensibly designed to define the professional competencies of teacher-educators (TEs), via a draft circular for professional standards. An initial intention to explore the impact of the circular with Vietnamese TEs was reconsidered after the policy was withdrawn. Instead, we became interested in perceptions of TE identity in Vietnam to locate where, within current global and local policy and practice landscapes, a professional standards framework would land. We locate this paper within a global context of policy reform in TE and situated and specific ecologies of contemporary education in Vietnam. As a group of English and Vietnamese academics with a common background in TE, we explore the current views of Vietnamese TEs regarding professional identity and their awareness of reforms in Vietnam around TE professional standards. To this end, we consider the implications, tensions and possibilities engendered by reform around professional competencies through interviews with TEs. We conclude by asking what TE reform in Vietnam is responding to and the implications for the sector in terms of professional identities, professional learning and practices and the status of TE as a profession.
The paper fills a gap in the literature by examining how local dimensions have been demonstrated and fostered in the Vietnamese education system under the differing impacts of imperialism, colonialism, and neo-liberalism of globalization before and after 1986. Thematic analysis of relevant literature and policies reveals that the local dimensions were characterized by local people's responses, such as adaptation, appropriation, creativity, nationalism, and patriotism, in the imperial and colonial times. Under the impetus of the neo-liberalism influences of globalization in the post-colonial period, the local dimensions have been featured by higher education reforms and internationalization policies. Cheng's multiple theories of fostering local knowledge in globalized education were employed to discuss such local dimensions and associated challenges.
This article addresses the problem of writing the posthuman in educational research. Confronted by our own failures as educational researchers within posthuman and new materialist approaches, it seeks a more radical opening to Lather and St Pierre’s question: ‘If we give up “human” as separate from non-human, how do we exist? … Are we willing to take on this question that is so hard to think but that might enable different lives?’ We do this to enable different lives for the planet in all of its manifestations, including its children of the Anthropocene. We begin with the insistent presence of mud in our deep hanging out in an early learning site and ask: what is mud, what does it do, where can mud lead us in its oozing at Grey Gums Preschool. From these explorations we include a scripted dialogue that was performed at a conference against a background of rolling images of the proliferation of mud’s play with children. We consider this scripted dialogue, and its performance, as data read in relation to the recent special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory on ‘Educational epistemologies in a more than human world’ (2017).
In this article, I describe how following the contour of concepts can enable a minor inquiry in which voice might be rethought as what Deleuze and Guattari called a “collective assemblage of enunciation.” Following the contour of Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature” and thinking voice as an assemblage, I both explain the characteristics of a minor literature and provide examples of the conditions for a minor inquiry. Mapping an enactment of a minor inquiry with examples from my previous work on voice, I conclude with what minor inquiry might look like as I experiment further with collective assemblages of enunciation.
While the theme of this special issue is concept as/instead of method, my contribution is to provide an account of Deleuze's " thought without image " in which the production of concepts takes place. Deleuze (1994) claims that concept creation does not occur in the dogmatic image of thought, for " the object of the concept, in itself or in relation to other objects, relies upon resemblance as a requirement of perceptual continuity " (p. 138). For Deleuze, this reliance on recognition renders thought bound to representation and stranded in a striated, universal space that crucifies difference. Thus, my intent is to take readers out of the dogmatic image of thought and into the conditions under which concepts are created and expressed. The descriptive force of my approach here is to emphasize rhythmic movement within an open system: what I'm naming thinking without method. Thinking without method relieves qualitative inquiry from the twin forms of epistemological imperatives of knowledge production and a conventional dependency on procedural method. Freedom from this reliance gives us a new starting place: the outside of method. The outside is an important concept in Deleuzian thought and undergirds my argument for thinking without method in qualitative inquiry. In his book Foucault, Deleuze (1988) reads his own concept of the outside through Foucault's theory of power, so ideas about relations, forces, and resistances are crucial to constitute the outside of both method and thought. In this section, I take up these intersections in an introductory manner because in qualitative inquiry, method has taken on normalizing forms. Giving prominence to relations that compose the outside is a radical shift that takes qualitative research into the new. In the social sciences, and qualitative research in particular , method reigns supreme to provide normative forms to our thinking in research. In other words, method supposedly , somehow, saves us from criticisms of credibility and reliability. A fixed image of method (i.e., a method that precedes inquiry) takes on a stratified form of trustworthiness that validates research. For example, qualitative fieldwork methods are recognizable: those of us trained in method know what it means to collect valid interview data. " Formed substances are revealed by visibility, " writes Deleuze (1988, p. 77), and method's visibility has been captured and insti-tutionalized by qualitative textbooks, coursework, publication standards, and so on. Method, as a " molar agency " (Deleuze, 1988, p. 76) of stratification, takes on functions of stabilization and reproduction (i.e., doing the same thing, or starting in the same place). Method, as strata, governs our inquiry. When we are caught in a dogmatic image of method, one option to escape capture is an oppositional turn to deny method altogether—which may trap us in a binary system of staunch procedure versus anything goes. However, we can rely on Deleuze to refuse that dichotomy and start elsewhere: the outside of method. Deleuze (1988) insists that any dualism opens up to a " multiplicity of relations between forces. .. free of any dualizable form " (pp. 83-84); these relations between forces " do not lie outside strata but form the outside of strata " (p. 84). The outside of method, then, Abstract The author relies on Deleuze's critique of the dogmatic image of thought to produce the conditions under which new concepts are created. Putting together a network of concepts such as the outside, the encounter, and force, the author invents thinking without method, an emergent, fragmented strategy that forms the outside of stratified qualitative research methods. The author draws upon some of her previous work to experiment with a new starting place for inquiry.
This article examines how one first-year physics teacher translated his inquiry-based, socially just pre-professional learning into classroom practice in his first several months of teaching, using rhizomatics, a non-linear theory of social activity, as a theoretical and methodological frame. This case highlights the complexity of enacting a social justice-oriented pedagogical practice as a new teacher in a constrained school environment. Although the participant experienced positive interactions with his students, he faced multiple external challenges as well as his own internal conflicts about teaching methods. These conditions influenced him to adopt more traditional practices than those that were espoused in the participant’s teacher education programme, although some evidence of progressive teaching surfaced inconsistently. Authors provide recommendations for teacher educators and policy makers to better support new teachers as they transition into the first year of teaching, and call on researchers to explore methodologies and theories that can account for nonlinearity, complexity and multiplicity in investigating teaching and learning.
I chose my critics well. All of their comments are helpful. From Lenore Langsdorf, I get a clearer sense of what I did. From Rachel Falmagne, I get a sense of where I might go next in terms of questions that remain. And especially from Adele Clarke, perhaps most difficultly, I get a sense of what I might have done differently to make this book stronger.
Getting Lost is an experiment in and of method against the normative critical framework of much feminist methodology in order to ask: if it is what it does, in a nominalist vein, what then is feminist methodology? The answers the book puts forward include: effaced, abjected, uncertain, engaged, reflex-ive (perhaps to a fault), and deeply invested in a sustained ethical engagement with those we study, particularly those with less power, while troubling what Adele terms “confession, testimonial and the intrusiveness of much research.” Situated as an index of more general tensions in the human sciences, I focus on how feminist methodology engages with a problematic of loss in taking fuller account of the fall into language and the loss of pure presence.
The book’s sensibility is toward that which shakes any assured ontology of the “real,” of presence and absence, a post-critical logic of haunting and undecidables. In this, it is important to remember that my methodological musings collected in the book are grounded in Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS,1 a study that preceded the “new” anti-retroviral treatments of the mid-1990s. Hence this was, in many senses, a study of living with dying. Not-knowing was not difficult in such a space and I felt keenly how not wanting to not know is a violence that subsumes the Other into the Same. Abstracting a philosophy of inquiry from an archive of such work set me up well to explore the enablements that might be imagined from loss.
The genealogical period of Getting Lost, the questions that permeate it, its location in a political history of truth, is surely part of broader and deeper shifts in the doing of science, informed by arguments across a host of disciplines and interdisciplines, including my own position in educational research with its repositivization.2 Here many “qualitative researchers” are caught in paradigm wars we had dared to dream long over.
Getting Lost is informed also by the fieldwork of Troubling the Angels and the responsibility of being invited in to tell other people’s stories. Perhaps too clever by far in refusing to tell the “tidy tale” of these women’s struggles, I was in over my head. “This work is beyond me” was my mantra throughout the writing of Troubling the Angels.3
Part of this dizziness in writing Getting Lost was that it is of the future pluperfect tense of “what will have been said.”4 In one of the endless books on Nietzsche, I read of his “striking discovery” that in Sunrise and The Gay Science he may have “‘already provided the commentary [to Zarathustra]—before writing the text.’”5 Nietzsche viewed it as both a masterstroke and an act of folly on his part to compose the commentaries before the actual text. And so it was with the somewhat strange time of Getting Lost. Written before, during, and after Troubling the Angels, a sort of “folding forward” into a-book-that-was-not-yet inhabited the first text, Troubling the Angels. This strange time resulted in a poly-temporal dialogue across texts, time, and researching selves where I functioned as both author and (auto)critic of books that did not yet exist. Getting Lost, then, is a palimpsest where primary and secondary texts collapse into trace structures of one another that fold both backward and forward into books full of concealments and not knowings in an uncanny time of what “will always have already taken place.”
In sum, putting what Spivak terms an “identification crisis” around decol-onization front and center,6Getting Lost situates feminist ethnography as a seismograph of cultural shifts and intellectual movements in asking how research based knowledge remains possible after so much...
Responding to recent calls for the invention of research approaches that move away from traditional humanist notions of research to more situated, performative, and material ways of enacting research, this chapter foregrounds the authors' performative surveillance data practices and shows how disappointing, failing, or malfunctioning data productively helps them to reconsider the notion of 'inadequate' data that might open up new directions for methodology and qualitative research practices. Using a wearable camera called the Autographer as a sur/sousveilling device, Banerjee and Blaise attempt to generate data by walking through a popular shopping district in Hong Kong, hoping to capture 'nativist' attitudes of resentment toward mainland (Chinese) shoppers, thereby enabling the authors to comment on the peculiar nature of postcoloniality in Hong Kong. They show what is possible when surrendering to being out-of-control and resisting the researcher impulse to give life and meaning to data, yields new insights into the paradoxical productiveness of disappointing, failing, and malfunctioning data.
Vietnam’s higher education sector, which has expanded dramatically over the past 20 years, has now reached a point where it is ready to become more research-oriented and better networked internationally. There are, however, aspects of the sector that remain desperately in need of further reform. This paper provides a contemporary review of the state of the higher education sector in Vietnam. It is written from the perspective of the sector’s need to become more research-focused and more internationally engaged. The paper identifies specific challenges for the sector. It also presents a glimpse of what the future of the sector might entail.
This paper focuses on an innovative transdisciplinary educational arts-based learning project, LangScape Curators, which links to and leads from research conducted for the AHRC-funded ‘Translation and Translanguaging’ project. Here, we describe how we work collaboratively with creative practitioners to use a variety of creative arts methods with young people to explore the linguistic landscapes of Leeds. We propose a theoretical framework for collaborative research activity of this nature, and we use one of the creative arts activities – collage – to exemplify visual understandings of how communicative repertoires and linguistic landscapes are explored through co-produced pedagogical workshops. The programme and its associated research make an original contribution to linguistic landscape-based collaborative ethnographic research. We conclude by setting out directions for the future of these activities and their application in applied linguistics research and practice.
Coding and data are conceptual twins. This article focuses on the latter concept in particular and opens with a dilemma: We can either follow the root meaning of "data" and say that they are the "givens" that we "collect" and code. In this case, however, data turn out to be mythological, for they are always produced, constructed, or "taken" as the pragmatists said. Or we can say, like some qualitative researchers, that "everything is data," which rests on a more sophisticated philosophical position but which easily renders the concept empty. The article describes a way out of this dilemma by presenting a way to think about (and teach) qualitative analysis that is neither data-driven (induction) nor hypothesis-driven (deduction) but driven by astonishment, mystery, and breakdowns in one's understanding (abduction). Materials are "taken" and produced to describe or resolve a mystery, which, to me, is " analysis after coding."
The article imagines a materially informed post-qualitative research. Focusing upon issues of language and representation, under the influence of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, it argues for research practices capable of engaging the materiality of language itself. It proposes the development of non- or post-representational research practices, drawing on contemporary materialist work that rejects the static, hierarchical logic of representation, and practices such as interpretation and analysis as conventionally understood. The article explores the ontological and the practical implications of this state of affairs, via a re-reading of a fragment of what would have been called data. Offering relief from the ressentiment and piety that have characterised qualitative methodologists’ engagements with scientific method, the ‘post’ could therefore be read as signalling the demise of qualitative research. Or at least, as inaugurating a qualitative research that would be unrepresentable to itself.
This essay seeks to give philosophical expression to the vitality, willfullness, and recalcitrance possessed by nonhuman entities and forces. It also considers the ethico-political import of an enhanced awareness of “thing-power.” Drawing from Lucretius, Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and others, it describes a materialism of lively matter, to be placed in conversation with the historical materialism of Marx and the body materialism of feminist and cultural studies. Thing-power materialism is a speculative onto-story, an admittedly presumptuous attempt to depict the nonhumanity that flows around and through humans. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of the ecological implications of thing-power.
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