Ken Friedman wrote:
> I'm still grateful for the fact that my PhD supervisor explained why I could not write my PhD thesis in blank verse.
That's right...but
I was lucky enough to take part in a debate in Dublin earlier this year,
about research in the creative and performing arts. One of the speakers
was Jools Gilson-Ellis, who read some passages from her PhD thesis (She
is a performer based in Cork, did her PhD at University of Surrey).
Another speaker at the event had talked rather loosely about the idea
that artists should be free to write in an ironic or allusive style,
even in research, I found this very difficult to take on because in
research you are responsible for explaining what you have done. Irony
and allusion are exacting tools and require a degree of complicity
between writer and audience which is not appropriate for a PhD thesis.
(I don't want to confuse this with the shared disciplinary knowledge and
vocabulary that might be appropriate to a particular thesis)
I felt that Jools had solved this problem very well. She wanted to
include what I would call "poetic" writing in her thesis where she was
seeking to convey experience directly, as somebody else might do by
using images or other media. In doing that she might have separated such
writing very explicitly from the argumentative part of the thesis but
instead she took the riskier path, at least as far as I, the listener,
could tell without seeing the page, of combining the two kinds of
writing in a single text. The clever part was that it was immediately
clear which style of writing you were listening to - I could easily
distinguish between passages where I was being offered an experience and
others where I was given an explanation.
Which makes it clear to me why the artefacts of research are so
important and they cannot be dealt with simply by cursory descriptions.
It is only by experiencing them that we can be confident of
understanding what is being addressed in the arguments. In many fields
this can be done by reference to shared experience, if a laboratory
technique is widely used a researcher will assume that readers have the
experience to interpret the thesis. But in a "wicked" field, where we
might have the same description for wildly different artefacts or
experiences, there is no reliable touchstone and we must reveal the
particular nature of our research material as best we can.
Now I must wrestle with the problem of revealing to our neighbours the
particular nature of the brunch we are offering next Sunday. Last year I
found a perfect image of waffles and fresh fruit on the internet, sadly
I've deleted the file and now Google can't find it for me. Always hold
on to the raw data, you never know when you'll need it again.
Chris
|