Good Morning All, Mutse Atsi, Karibuni, and Ubuntu ngumuntu nagabantu:

'Ubuntu' is more accurately translated from Nguni language systems as 'I
am a person only through other persons'. It is in this spirit of
translation with its emphasis on a diminutive 'i' subordinated to the
extended family context of  'we' that draws out the distinction between my
use of 'Ubuntu' and the Anglo Saxon translation of this term into, 'I am
because of you'. I don't appreciate this use of the term because it
reminds me of colonial appropriation.

1. A Note on Terms, Words, and their Usage in this Posting

'Mutse Atsi' is the now dead linguistic phrase my ancestors used as a
greeting. It literally means 'I See You'. My ancestors language was
extinguished by European colonization.

As a greeting it was a prelude to personal and social relationship and it
required a reciprocal 'Mutse
Atsi' to complete it. This reciprocal gesture would indicate 'I See You',
too. Or it could be taken as a spiritual acknowledgement: 'you are human
as i am, too'.

I think this probably represented a kind of indigenous live theory of
inclusion.

While the Khoikhoin sociocultural space of my ancestors could be
differentiated from Nguni sociocultural practices, the pre-colonial
southern African practice of "I See You" held in the Nguni
word, 'Sawubona', in Ubuntu, and in Muste Atsi was common to all
indigenous southern African cultures.

'Karibuni' (plural form of Karibu, drawn from Arabic)is a wonderful word,
meaning 'Welcome All' in Kiswahili, the language of Asma Hamud, my wife. I
have found this to be a vibrantly inclusive and 'live greeting' in Arab
Swahili society since first encountering it thirty six years ago in
England, of all spaces.

I like the idea of my emergent 'karibu pedagogy' as an alternative theory
of teaching from my alterity.


2. Putting the 'P' Back into Action Research and LET Accounts

Why am I making this posting this morning?  I have been energised by
Brian's off-line email to me, the reply to which I posted on-line because
it asked me about spirituality in AR.

My educative and research project in AR is now focusing on putting the 'P'
into AR having spent some years of my research journey taking the 'p' out
of AR, and some of its 'Panamanian researchers' who fly under an AR flag
of convenience. I don't see any spirituality in my AR practice as such:
but I see spirituality in my Progressive Islam as i transform my embodied
values of Islamic humanity through their emergence in my practice into
living pedagogic standards of judgement.

I want to put the 'P' into Action Research, and into Living Educational
Theory (LET) accounts in particular.

I have two very specific meanings of 'P' in mind. Let me see if I can
explain my meanings.

My first meaning is the 'P' of politics as an expression of global
capitalism and the new imperialism (MacLaren and Farahmandpur, 2004).

This political focus seems to be excluded from many AR accounts, and
particularly Living Educational Theory accounts up to 2004.

Within my meaning of political I would include state violence as racism
(after Joy James), and this could explain how I see the Stephen Lawrence
and Victoria Climbie
tragedies as a failure of a whiteness-centred society such as Britain
(after Jayne Ifekwunigwe) to protect its black citizens.

The second notion of 'P' I have in mind is drawn from a forthcoming book
by Pushkala Prasad (July, 2005), Crafting Qualitative Research.

In this she suggests, and I agree with her, that there is now
a 'tradition' of the
three 'P's' - postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism -
established in mainstream qualitative research.

However, it saddens and intrigues me that this achievement, or influence
of postcolonialism has no parallel in Action Research.

For example, there is some evidence of the presence of the first two 'P's
in
LET accounts up to 2004. But there is  absolutely no evidence of the
third 'P': postcolonialism.

This point should be set against my PhD registration in the department of
education at Bath University since 1997. I make this point because I
believe there is a relationship
between the absence of 'the postcolonial 'P' in Action Research, and the
struggle i've had in my research community relationships to situate my
enquiry in the 'mainstream' of that community with a sense of being valued
and having a legitimate stake.

My bias and interest is in influencing AR practitioners and scholars to
consider integrating what they seem to have forgotten from their accounts.

I believe there is a political and sociocultural dimension that materially
mediates
all first and second person accounts even if the authors of these accounts
seem to 'forget'
and evade that external reality.

And I also believe this external reality, call it state violence and
hegemony for now,
warrants analysis. Such analysis provides the backdrop or context in which
first person and second person accounts are being forged.

LET accounts up to 2004 seem to have been written within the shadow of
whiteness.

Whereas, in qualitative research more generally, postcolonial theorising
and analysis
seems to be having an enabling influence on researchers
to interrogate their own commitment to whiteness. This 'move' needs to be
hastened in Action Research, too, if its claims to be democratic,
emancipatory and liberatory are to be fulfilled.

In the emphasis on the priapic 'I' some Action Research, and
especially LET accounts up to 2004, seem to have forgotten the importance
of contextualist, third person propositional analyses.

I know, how, from my experience of life as subjectivity, the value of
propositional
analyses and theories even if they are misguided in being positioned by
their authors as explaining real life as McNiff posits this, have actually
helped me to understand my social context more clearly than any LET
account..

Living Theory accounts that do not interrogate whiteness have been less
helpful for
my 'Live Theorising' than propositional theorising that helps me to see my
experience as part of a historical, contemporary material reality, shared
by others in similar ways, too. In their bias LET accounts do seem to
throw the revelatory baby out with the murky propositional bathwater.
Hopefully, 'Live Theorising' (Murray, 2005) offers an alternate
inclusivity:
by drawing on a notion of  'we~i' in live theorising accounts,
rather than drawing solely from the hubris of a priapic 'I'.

I empathize with Marshall and Reason in their approach to forging links
between first, second and third person action research accounts, as
reflected in the CD-ROM that explores and demonstrates effectively and
engagingly the influence of their integrative AR practices.

My interest in educative practice is in bringing to AR a form of 'live
theorising' account that includes Psycho-Social perspectives of groups and
society (as undertaken by the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies at the
University of the West of England).

I would like to contribute through my educative practice to an inclusion
of the sociocultural context that is pervasive and mediates first and
second person AR accounts.

I would like to engender the resituating of propositional analyses in
first and third person narrative accounts of
hegemony.

I think this can be easily achieved through the analyses of state
violence, of global capitalism, of the new imperialisms, of  the
commodification of higher education.  The  Action Researcher occupies
first and second person spaces where consciousness is mediated by a
social world that pre-exists the private, internal, first world. I am
ushered into  a social world that pre-exists my birth: my parents and
grandparents came before me. Of course i encounter my existence uniquely.
But not all of this encounter is agency.

Material aspects of 'real life' exist beyond me and before me, too.

The pressures of family mores, religion, ideology and history 'press' on
me from some space I call 'outside'. My unique 'i' is being shaped and
mediated by 'we', and
in the southern African milieu we call this 'ubuntu': I am a person only
through other persons'. This is a clear sense of social pre-existence that
i
mean and use to frame my meanings when I refer to putting the 'P' back
into AR.

This is the 'P' of the political, sociocultural and militaristic
arrangements of the Western world.

In integrating third person representations  of sociocultural analysis
into LET accounts
I believe a more realistic exploration of the Agency/Structure debate can
take place. How free in terms of an unfettered agency am I when my 'live
theorising' that I call my postcolonial critical pedagogy is shaped by my
autobiography as it is intersected by social arrangements through time and
spaces?

How is my agency crimped and mediated by structural and material social
arrangements that have history and that have a space beyond the influence
and
direct control of the individual live  theorist?

Integration seems to be directly related to critical interrogation.

In this way, I imagine that the third person significance of much first
and second person AR work could be made more widely accessible,
invitational, and inclusional. I could, of course, be mistaken in this
insight.

3. Taking the priapic 'I' out of Eurocentric and Western Action Research

A note on convention: in my writing I am shifting from the use of the
priapic 'I' to 'i'.

The priapic 'I' reminds me of the colonial, European white 'I' of certain
suzerainty.

While the firm but small 'i' in my writing is reflective of how in my
practice i am being influenced by the 'we~i' of Eastern (Arab Islamic) and
Southern (African and Maori)sociocultural norms for social life, rather
than the atomised, private ways of living favoured in the West. I referred
to this above.

'i' stands as a marker for my postcolonialism in my writing, my Diaspora,
my hybridity, my 'mixed-race'.

'i' is a live eschewing of the despised priapic 'I' of neocolonial Europe
and the bizarre western attachment (as it seems to me when looking through
my lens) to the privacy of 'my space'.

'i' seems to be  a marker for a non-western form of Acton Research that
eschews some of the Euroecentric assumptions of much contemporary AR, and
Living Educational Theory (LET). The European white priapic 'I' does not
migrate terribly well into Eastern and Southern sociocultural contexts.

My use of 'i' is ironic, too: i use it in my consultancy, in my role as
College diversity specialist, in my pedagogic practices and relationships
as well, and, at last, as a final act of defiance, in writing up my
thesis.

The irony i'd like to share with you - though this may not migrate
terribly well, rather like 'jokes' from outside one's culture -  is that
those same Western people who clamour for their much vaunted 'privatised
I' of self are the descendants of those people who crawled all over my
indigenous space, raping,
despoiling, putting wire fences around it: dislocating me from the land.

The 'double irony' is that today's European who asserts their right to
space for their priapic 'I' as
an expression of their individuality, their selfhood, their being is the
same priapic 'I' that was the relentless medium for a European colonial
and imperial hubris.

Thus, 'i' will be used in this posting from here. Be gone, priapic 'I'!

The priapic 'I' is a marker for Eurocentricty, for vestigial colonialism,
for a space before the 'post' in postcolonial.


4. What do I mean by Action Research as a Practice of Live Theorising -
Postcolonial Critical Pedagogy?

Here's my first take.

i coined the term, 'Live Theorising' about four to six weeks ago. i had
not seen the term 'Live Theorising' in any context when i began to
use the term in my writing. By using the convention 'Live Theorising'
(Murray, 2005) i am making clear my claim to a distinctiveness in my
approach to 'Live Theorising' in that when I use this term
i am not informed by the ideas of any other extant written material, not
directly at least, nor to my
knowledge. I am not associating my work with any ideas contained within
the framing, 'Living Theorising', or to a set of published works under
the series title 'Live Theory'. 'Live Theorising' (Murray, 2005) has been
developed from my live subjective experience of being a mixed-race scholar
in the LET Bath Monday group during the period 1998 - 2002. i explore
this fully below.

i have begun the project of outlining my criteria for a framework of 'Live
Theorising' in a
series of emails with Jack Whitehead, Nceku Nyathi and Eden Charles during
the period March-June 2005.

The first and most remarkable feature of 'Live Theorising (Murray, 2005) is
how it decentres whiteness, and re-engages with important propositional
forms of theorising that may not explain 'real life' but certainly help to
unravel, reveal, and explore the sociocultural and material complexity of
hegemony in the way that a tradition of Critical Theory has sustained.

'Live Theorising' seeks to encourage Action Research scholars to include
in their accounts explanations of how their unique portraiture of their
living and live
practice is mediated by the times in which it is crafted. By 'times' I
mean the ideological pressures,
the political and military arrangements of global capitalism and the new
imperialism that mark the epoch in which such portraiture is given shape,
meaning and recognisable body. Thus 'live theorising' is a form of
embodied theorising because it accounts for how our bodies are imbricated
within political spaces. 'Live Theorising' eschews first and second
person accounts that are dislocated from the material realities that crimp
and cramp the agency of my so-called 'real life' through the hegemony of
state violence, after James and Althusser.


i believe 'Live Theorising'(Murray, 2005) also comes from my motivation,
passion and energy for a certain 'ethics and politics of postcolonialism'.

My aim is to express this life affirming energy in my 'Live Theorising' in
ways which LET accounts up
to 2004 have not been able to 'manage'. Of course, i accept the human
parameter that one can only give what one has to give.

i am using 'scares' around 'live theorising' to indicate that this form of
theorising is 'live', mutable, tentative, exploratory, and has a viscous
emergence in my exploration and explanation. i am conveying my meanings
from the grounds of my emergent understanding, not from the stance of
the 'finished article', and would like to be evaluated appropriately.


By a certain 'ethics and politics of postcolonialism (Nyathi and Murray,
email exchange, 2004) I have in mind a quality and focus of ethics and
politics that is missing from Living Educational Theory, though it seems
to be available to some Participatory Action Research (PAR) work.

Therefore, from my perspective as the imaginative and creative force
behind the idea of 'Live Theorising' (Murray, 2005) it seems to me 'live
theorising' provides the motivating energy, values, insights, and
theorising connections that moves forward the development of 'Live
Theorising' accounts that better reflect the politics of state violence as
racism than do LET accounts up to 2004. But 'Live Theorising' is not
solely a vehicle for a postcolonial trope. It is an alternative space for
people of alterity to move into to do their own 'live theorising'. I
imagine people
who value the deconstructionist and contextualist validities provided by
melding live first and second person theorising WITH propositional
theorising and analyses would feel invited into my space of 'Live
Theorising'.
I am unable and unwilling to approach live theorising and propositional
theorising from an 'is'/isn't' binary logic.

But it should also be remembered that 'Live Theorising' is not a subaltern
of
Living Educational Theory: a 'worker ant' or colonial body' to solely
energise the interests of Living Educational Theory through the creative
sweat and life blood of the colonised, and enslaved,

LET is steeped in whiteness as Jack and I agree, and I believe that LET
accounts are tinged by a vestigial colonial expression. This does not
describe me or my interests. And because i am other (Other) 'live
theorising' feels a much more appropriate variegation of LET for my
purposes.

While 'Live Theorising' is most definitely from the 'same rootstock' as
LET it is guided by a different 'ethics and politics of postcolonialism'
represented less as a formal theory as yet (the term 'theorising' gives a
better impression of the emergence of my thinking and practice at this
stage) and is much more likely to deliver emancipatory and liberatory
energies and outcomes aimed at decentering/dismantling whiteness.

This is how i'm making sense of the emergence of 'Live Theorising':

first, as a 'struggle' to pick my way through Jack's whiteness as my
supervisor;

then as an encounter of bitter and spiteful 'struggle' with the whiteness
of the Bath Monday group in the period 1998-2002 (here i failed abjectly
to influence any change;

thirdly, in my 'struggle' to bring the epistemologies of critical race
theory, critical whiteness and
postcolonial theorising to the LET Bath space.

This is how i'm positioning 'Live Theorising in writing up my thesis, and
in four key areas i am experiencing some measured and modest success in my
practice:

Firstly in the project with Jack Whitehead where we visibly explore our
white
and mixed-race identity's as educators, and the influence this has had on
the formation of Jack's 'postcolonial values' as a contribution to the
evolution of postcolonial social formations - to follow this thread please
go to Jack's writing's
section on www.actionresearch.net

Secondly, in the supervision of dissertations in my College that have
included Postcolonial theorising (Nceku Nyathi, 2000), 'Live
Theorising'(James Staples and Debbie Smith, 2005), and Living Educational
Theory approaches - to follow this thread please go to my webpage and
click on 'Action Research
Theses' - http://www.royagcol.ac.uk/~paul_murray/

Thirdly, in my appointment in my College as Diversity officer responsible
for Race, Ethnicity, Religion and Beliefs. This appointment counts for me
as evidence of my educative practice as a form of resistance, as a force
of positive energy for development and transformation in the third person
context of my organization (an HEI) as i am now able to extend the
influence of my Ubuntu inclusion and postcolonial theorising within those
parts of my College where decisions are made about structure and culture.
This seems to me to be a form of non-western Organization Development
activism.

Finally, I am now an AUT activist, I subscribe to the AUT activist e-list,
and I am
training as a race officer within the AUT. In this I am making a very
clear connection between my first and second person educational narrative
as Action Research, and my third person organizational and societal
responsibilities for action and activism. I see this as an extension of my
third-
person organizational development work through diversity.

So 'Live Theorising' has a practice through which i gives my live
theorising life and focus. I think is most important in my life.

Jack sees the importance of 'Live Theorising' in this way,

"This is also how I'm seeing the development of living educational theories
> in a process of live theorising, as they begin to include an explicit
> understanding of a postcolonial critical pedagogy at work in the
> educational influence in one's own learning, in the learning of others
and  in the evolution of social formations"
(email exchange with Jack Whitehead , 15th June 2005)

While i'm delighted with Jack's insight, i go along with it as long as LET
does not seek to 'colonise' or 'appropriate' the creative, independent,
different (differential) energies of 'Live Theorising,  as if Live
Theorising is a subset of LET in some way, or a necessary 'energy' to
sustain LET.

'Live Theorising' must have its very own independent Postcolonial
status in order to be viable, legitimate, and above all else credible.

Of course 'Live Theorising' and Living Educational theory are
closely 'related', complementary even, and derived from the same
rootstock, and both approaches share similar standards of judgement
concerning evidence of the influence of one's practice and so on.

But 'live theorising' is also different and distinctive, distinguishable
from LET without being at all discrete.

'Live Theorising' (Murray, 2005) seems to be a non-racist form of LET.
That is a key developmental difference. By non-racist I mean that 'live
theorising' is whiteness aware, alive to the pernicious and pervasive
valence of whiteness in ways that LET accounts up to 2004 have not shown
themselves to be.

'Live Theorising' emerged from my outrage, anger, and gradual emancipation
from my 'subalternity' within the Bath Monday group's whiteness during the
period 1998-2002 as i performatively transformed my mixed-race,
white~brown identity.

As my consciousness awoke to the whiteness of the space enclosing me I
more than ever became able to articulate my sense of the destructively and
excludingly powerful valence of whiteness in LET accounts (and the
accountants, let's not reify the 'accounts' as if they do not have people
who are white and whiteness that gives them their 'unique living quality')
up to 2004.

Powered by my creative and passionate postcolonial and emancipatory
energy, through my expression of a certain 'ethics and politics of
postcolonialism' as a mixed-race person I have been able to realize 'Live
Theorising' as a powerful aspect of my performative identity as a mixed-
race educator embroiled and crimped by whiteness, liberal or ugly.

'Live Theorising' is my inclusive name for the kind of political,
postcolonial, anti-racist, whiteness dismantling and decentering account
of my educative practice that is more appropriate for my educative project
than is LET. Yet Live theorising is more besides; it is a form of live
theorising that keeps in mind, in analytic ways, the value and valence of
much propositional theorising. So it would include feminist epistemology,
theories of globalization, and macro-political analyses of the kind
produced by Castells, Hardt and Negri, Urry, and Rodney Wallace.

'Live Theorising' must not to be ghettoised in its representation as
a 'postcolonial living
theorising'. Live Theorising can embrace any account that wanted to meld
and fuse first, second and third person narratives through an interaction
with the propositional ideas and theorising of others.

In this sense 'Live Theorising' is influenced by Psycho-Social
perspectives, and the
Sociocultural.

'Live Theorising' is a colour-full space, in which people who are colour-
sighted rather than 'colour blind' have begun to move towards a
multiracial form of theorising, which LET hasn't yet adjusted for. It is
inherently inclusive of those with brown glasses, white glasses and jazzy
colourful glasses to paraphrase McNiff et al (2002); and only (self-)
excludes those whose critical gaze is clouded over by the glaucoma of
whiteness.

i can now imagine my response when asked by an external of my
thesis...'What kind of theorising is 'Live Theorising'?

'Live Theorising' is the kind of theorising that LET hasn't yet become,
may become, and in the meanwhile
may provide another way, not in competition, but as complement.

i say this because Living Educational Theory has the powerful valence of
whiteness 'living' within it, still. It is, in part, this powerful valence
that has disenabled me from writing my thesis. Having to be 'self
supervising' as i have had to be in terms of literature and epistemology
has meant that i had to do my own scholarship for my thesis, and
then 'explain' the significance of this scholarship to my supervisor, and
the Bath Monday group. Until 2002 that is, when i gave up on the latter
challenge as beyond my faculty and desire. The powerful valence of
whiteness becomes apparent  when looking at twenty
years of LET accounts, and i'm confident Jack Whitehead would agree with
my observation.

My own live research enquiry and identity was undermined by a form
of 'living exclusion', a pervasive 'living whiteness' that i encountered
in the bath Monday group.
Out of this 'struggle in adversity' within what i perceived and
experienced as a
colonial space (the Bath Monday group, 1998-2002) i began to emerge and
birth 'Live Theorising'. In one very clear and truthful sense it has
emerged as an explicitly multiracial form of theorising, 'alive' to the
importance of linking 'vital' first and second person narrative accounts
to third person contextualist, propositional analyses and accounts,
through which an awareness of 'whiteness as hegemonic' can be addressed in
ways it cannot be addressed in LET accounts because of their predilection
for first and second person hermeneutic and dialogic validities.

'Live Theorising' is a theorising of resistance and in this has a very
clear Marxian thread, however unfashionable this may seem today.

'Live Theorising' also translates through 'live theorising' (lower case)
into my
educative practice, my pedagogy. In this sense 'Live Theorising' is a
process in which I am learning to 'pedagogise' my teaching practices,
after Basil Bernstein's meanings (see www.actionresearch.net, Jack's
writings for an account of Jack's appreciation of Bernstein's work for his
living educational theory).

While 'Live Theorising', like its close cousin LET, echoes the
significance of hermeneutic and dialogic validities (Saukko, 2003), 'live
theorising' also seeks to include in viable live theorising accounts what
Saukko refers to as deconstructive and contextualist validities, too.
These latter forms of validation rely significantly on the researchers
or live theorists 'respect' for recognising and accounting for how
the propositional theories of others is helping their understanding of
their context, and their practice within a wider social system or context.
Imagining that one can influence wider social systems from within the
narrative base of one's self-referential first person account is naive,
and mistaken.

In my live theorising account I refer to Saukko's creative ideas from
methodological approaches to Cultural Studies.

i try to integrate with her ideas my own originality of mind and critical
judgement as i meld my nomadic methodological creativity as a border-
crossing, transgressive practice. In this way i include 'Mutse Atse'
validity (I See You, an inclusional form of validity), 'Indaba validity'
from southern Africa ( with its sociocultural emphasis on dialogue between
parties towards understanding and agreement), and 'Convivencia validity', a
form of validity grounded in the practice of the Caliphate of Granada
expressed as an
inclusion Jewish and Christian scholars within the safety, and protective
embrace of a sovereign Islamic state in Medieval Europe.

This is one of the ways i bring my spirituality of Progressive Islam into
my day to
day live practice of a postcolonial critical pedagogy, that includes love,
care, responsibility, and my willingness to abandon the Islamic precept
of 'conversion' for 'convivencia' with my supervised students. I think it
is my realization of this dimension of my practice that has enabled me to
supervise Polis Pantiledes Action Masters in which he explored the
tensions in managing resources and his spiritual management as an ordained
Salvation Army minister. Otherwise why would a devout Christian be
motivated to
choose my supervision for such a journey when there are many Christian
supervisors available?

I have invited several students to post
their critical appreciation of my claim to this list. Let's see,
inshallah. I believe at this most fragile and delicate time in human
encounter that my practice of convivencia held within the scarifying
potential of my postcolonial critical pedagogy indicates how my first
person practice can hold out hope for 'our third person future spaces',
together, and not in a head on clash of civilizations. It is an Islamic
history of inclusive spaces that makes such a divine mockery of the
neoconservative flirtation with Huntington's 'clash of civilisations'
thesis.

'Live Theorising' is emerging, for me, from the foment and moment of such
insights.

While Living Educational Theory as a perspective, as an approach to Action
Research, as a way of creating knowledge of our racist society and state
violence seems to have been missing this point over the past twenty years,
sadly.

However, i do agree with Jack Whitehead when he claims in an email today
that there is evidence of change on the immediate horizon. And of what i
know of Jack's supervisions of Marian Naidoo, Eden Charles, Cathy Aymer,
Ian Phillips and me, the evidence is amassing on the border! I think this
wave of supervisions will finally tip the scales against the accumulation
of exclusive (and in my experience, excluding of me) LET accounts that
make no mention of the state violence of racism, of whiteness and
Postcolonialism, of new forms of global capitalism, and the new
imperialisms. i become heated and volcanic when i read LET accounts that
are written within a first person narrative that is not mediated by third
person account that shows awareness, through analysis, of the material
constraints of hegemonic sociocultural arrangements. The artists canvas,
however unique, is also a product of the zeitgeist, of the social milieu,
of a weltanschauung. I delight in 'Live Theorising' accounts that locate a
person's realization of self within questions of the kind, 'How am I
influenced by whiteness?''(Staples, 2005)

Perhaps it is as Nceku Nyathi my doctoral colleague in Postcolonial
Organizational Theory at Leicester University Management School (an ex-
supervised undergrad student, "Why is Management Theory White and
Eurocentric? - Toward an Afro-Centric management Theory") suggests to me,

"What if this is the meaning of the so called 'Postcolonial condition',
Paulus? This struggle that we have as Diaspora, and Postcolonial people,to
conduct our own research while also teaching into the 'heart of whiteness'
that is the Academy, your bit at Bath, and my bit at Leicester. To eke out
the space to work in with black creativity, and in a spirit of freedom, we
have to first winkle out the racists, the 'colour blind' liberal white do-
gooders, and all those folks...so we can find white and black colleagues
who have a Critical Theory awareness, and are prepared to use it, to speak
it, to write it in order to support our claims to space. Notice how these
people show their postcolonial credential's by citing all the conferences
and workshops they've done in African countries and India and Latin
American countries....while neglecting to mention how they've actually
turned their backs on wrestling with the 'postcolonial condition' as it
presents itself in a whiteness-centred society such as Britain. Such
hypocrisy driven by RAE criteria and imperatives......We are living our
theses now, we live them through this kind of shit, and when we talk about
Postcolonialism we are living it day to day in our universities as our
working and research spaces. This is what we do, this is who we are, this
is what makes our work different, and we are shaped by this, and
contribute to it, and we can try to change it too. But above all else we
must write about it... how i'm treated here at Leicester, how you are
treated at the Royal and Bath, this IS out research, this is our
postcolonial activism, this is our research stuff, we don;t have to go
looking  for it out there...whiteness is in here, and all around us...:
just letting them know it is our primary task. This is where our
decolonization continues.....by researching our theses and simultaneously
teaching into the whiteness of our university faculty'(Notes of phone chat
with Nceku Nyathi, May
2005, UK)


Having tried to craft a doctoral thesis in the shadow of the LET space in
Bath University and encountered the space Nceku describes, i have
acknowledged that i found myself both failing and flailing. However, in
the early months of 2005, i began to radically express my originality of
mind, and critical judgement from an understanding of the ground of
my 'ontological security'. i began  to develop an altogether more amenable
and 'karibu' form of live theorising that would have no room for whiteness
within it, or more realistically would recognise the pervasiveness of
whiteness in all holomovements (Bohm). In this recognition of my need for
a 'Live Theorising' i can see now how i have been realizing my personhood
in a postcolonial way. Live Theorising is a form of 'postcolonial politics
or action' in differentiating from Living Educational theory while not
creating a separate space.

'Live Theorising' is a theory of alterity, a theorising of hybridity more
appropriate to Diaspora but is not an alternative theory to LET.  Through
Live Theorising, through which the postcolonial values of Post-Race
vitally flow in a visible, specific, and explicit decentering of
whiteness, in ways that nearly 20 years of white LET accounts have not yet
developed, i have evidence for the robustness of my ideation for live
theorising in the generous acknowledgements of my supervisor, if not other
LET accountants, in respect of how i've influenced his education through
my mutual availability to the sharing of my nomadic epistemological
journeys with him, and the subsequent shifts in his consciousness.

Thus, Live Theorising includes accounts of the lives of people largely
excluded from much Action Research work, and in LET accounts up to 2004:
and is inclusive of those white people who want to be included
as 'traitors to whiteness' and 'race traitors' as a loyalty to a
multiracial, 'Post-Race' (Ali, 2002) humanity of the future.

5. Summary:
In this posting I hope you come away with a clear appreciation of my
purpose to embed the two 'P's in Action Research. i hope i've clearly
conveyed the productive thinking, action, reflection and existential
meaning i've been able to draw out of what i experienced as the
humiliating pain of racism i've encountered in the Bath Monday LET group
during the period 1998-2002.  i believe i've begun to show how my practice
of crafting 'Live Theorising' (Murray, 2005) could be a productive and
hopeful contribution to a form of Action Research that is 'political'
within my first meaning of 'P', and 'Postcolonial' within Prasad's third
meaning of 'Post', too. I hope Live Theorising' will be a 'darker space'
for the objectification, and dismantling of whiteness as a guiding beacon
of my educational project. Please note, because of my heritage as 'once
were slaves/once were masters' i invert the terms 'light' and 'dark'. For
me, the lightness of whiteness in colonialism was an unmitigated disaster,
a holocaust, and so i associate 'lightness' with something that is not
good for dark-skinned people. Please note, therefore, my southern
hemisphere and non-western inversion of the terms light and dark.

Above all, i hope i have shown in this account a radical shift in my
demeanour, in my angry attitude, my agonised disposition and my tendency
to severance and rather than using the space of this posting for taking
the 'p' out of Action Research, i have shown a peaceful, accepting
maturity in my educative practice as i patiently strive to put the 'P'
back into Living Educational Theory.

If i can make this tiny contribution to Jack Whitehead's educational
project through my crafting of 'Live Theorising 'alongside' his Living
Educational Theory influence in the Academy,  then i will believe i'm
doing something worthwhile for a wonderful friend who is a brilliant and
timeless educator, and whose singularly remarkable Living Educational
Theory transforms exponentially, unlike that of others, to opened its
eyes, ears and heart to my plea from 'live theorising' for LET accounts to
bring a 'critical gaze' to whiteness. Jack has done this.

With this sense of accompaniment provided to me by Jack, i continue to
draw on the ideas and practices of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, W. E. Du
Bois, Peter MacLaren, and Jack Whitehead, and i continue to grow happily
into my intellect as a mixed-race person.  Yes, I am happy in my mixed-
race!

"Songa Mbele", as my dear and loving father in law, Mzee Hamud Issa Al-
Kindy puts it in his beloved Kiswahili language.


Yaqub Paul Murray