Hi Barry

love the quote!  thank you for that.  I have not had the pleasure of
meeting Jack as yet though I have heard so much about him from other
people (sorry Jack, don't mean to do the 'does he take sugar!') but I do
know how exhilirating life can be when you meet or come across people
who 'unblock' your thoughts - intentionally or otherwise - in ways that
you can never do on your own.  yes the contrasting perspective matters
otherwise we'll all conflate into a mushy nostalgia for the human
subject!  and contemporary professional worlds and politics  are too
important to let that happen without any criticality  and freshness of
perspective.  We have to think anew without abandoning what makes us
human and what makes our research matter.  I, too did an
'unconventional' Phd  but wanted it to also speak to 'academia' 
otherwisee we end up ghettoising ourselves.  Also I have found the
courage to speak in such arenas and that silenced me in my early Phd
days and that can only come from a conviction and a courage that lies
within yourself  or as Balcnhot puts it " a source of power that power
is powerless to exhaust" ! (1982)

Jean, Foucault quote from an interview with Deleuze  and Mullarkey quote
from his recent book Post Continental Philosophy...
you might have guessed that I've  been reading some Deleuzian philosophy
but its not as esoteric as it might seem and it speaks a kind of
geo-political philosophy that values life in ways that I think matters
to research, methodology  and our attempts to theorise.  He
fundamentally values thinking and wants philosophy to be out of its box
in art, politics and academia so he sounds good to me!

For an IT phobic like me, I've very much enjoed this eseminar exchange
and thank you all for such thought provoking exchanges

Cathie





Dr Cathie Pearce 
Research Fellow
ESRI
MMU

tel: 0161 247 2074

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>>> Barry Hymer <[log in to unmask]> 04/11/08 10:53 AM >>>
Cathie - what an inspirational posting!  You give me the confidence to 
do 
what I felt at first unwilling to: to offer a contrasting perspective to
the  
few cautionary voices that have appeared in this thread and to urge
another (in  
this case Louise) to trust to her innermost urgings and give vent to
these in 
 her choice of research methodology/story-telling.  My own experience
has  
many resonances to her own - but in my case I was 'stuck' on my doctoral
 
write-up for three years, with all the data to hand that had been
gathered in an  
easy, traditional, positivistic framework.  These did not, however,
speak  to my 
condition and I found it easy to put off the write-up to another  day. 
A 
chance meeting with Jack led to a transformation of my  research. 
Registered as 
I was at a university with no strong tradition of  familiarity with or 
encouragement of non-traditional forms of scholarship  (albeit with a
few happy 
exceptions within the dept.), I did need to  put my case strongly at the
time of 
the appointment of external examiners, that  I wanted my research story
to be 
examined (rigorously) by scholars with a  back-story of openness to 
non-traditional forms of  knowledge-generation.  I'm delighted to
recount that this is 
indeed what  happened: my viva was simultaneously warm, brutal,
challenging, 
fair,  penetrating, and real.  Above all, I felt that I was given an 
opportunity 
to be heard and understood - which was what I most wanted.  I  can
genuinely 
say that what I got out of my research was acquired through the  process
of 
living it.  The happy secondary gift was that I passed  too.
 
In completing my doctorate the way I felt I most wanted and needed to, 
I 
took comfort from the words of the cyclist Lance Armstrong, "The real 
reward for 
pain is self-knowledge.  When you feel like giving up, you have  to ask 
yourself which you would rather live with.  What the Tour de France 
teaches you is 
that pain is temporary.   Quitting is forwever."
 
Warm regards,
 
Barry
 
Dr Barry  Hymer
Director, still thinking uk ltd
Visiting Fellow,  Centre for Learning and Teaching (CfLaT), Newcastle 
University
_www.barryhymer.co.uk_ (http://www.barryhymer.co.uk/)  

"The truly great advances  of this generation will be made by those who
can 
make outrageous connections,  and only a mind which knows how to play
can do 
that." (Nagle  Jackson)

"I'm a playing boy, not a working boy." (Tom,  5)