Project: Practices of Acadademic Research and Teaching: Challenging boundaries

Academic research as practice: What do we academic researchers and teachers actually do? Which parts of this are not displayed, talked about, legitimated as part of the formation of scientific statements? What habits of body, mind, & culture, keeps this so?

This research project traces - like the blue lines of old-fashioned tracing paper - some of the boundaries that provide the Academy with a distinctive shape. Or that try to demarcate the Academy.

Academic research as practice: What do we academic researchers actually do? Which parts of this are not displayed, talked about, legitimated as part of the formation of scientific statements? What habits of body, mind, & culture, keeps this so? This research project traces - like the blue lines of old-fashioned tracing paper - some of the boundaries that provide the Academy with a distinctive shape. Or try to demarcate the Academy.

Why study this?
First, to know more about what it is to "know something": because academic research has, at least until recently (and still overwhelmingly does have), a dominant voice in some key discourses on what is knowledge. In particular, in a hierarchy of forms of knowing, "scientific" and other academic ways of knowing (still) serve as an ideal for others to strive towards. It is of vital importance, then, to understand what this culturally-specific approach does and does not speak about.
Second, a normative aim: Academic research and teaching might do well to be aware of the boundaries of our endeavour. Awareness of the limitations of our powerful and power-creating approaches might serve as reminders to be a little humble, thus more truthful, on behalf of what we know and do not know.

Approach:
First, "passive" auto-ethnography (using my own life as empirical material to reflect on). Reflecting on what happens to and in me as I do my work.
Second, deliberate transgressions of some boundaries, thus exposing their existence and challenging their need.

Methods and preliminary findings from them have so far included:
- Inviting focus when relevant on the simple fact of academic embodiment: On tired backs, tired arms, tired families; on being thirsty or hungry; on a body yearning to move more. And also corresponding enjoyment and gratitude when the body works as I wish it to.
- Establishing "Reserves for Meetings of minds and bodies": Attending conferences, giving presentations, the purpose of which is to meet and engage with other people. Not to create documents (papers, etc) to be reported and counted. [This is, in my current employment situation, easy and enjoyable.]
- Inviting colleagues to move together with me.
- Enjoying what goes well in own and others' work, to the extent possible. [This is surprisingly challenging, apparently to others more than to myself.]
- Inviting conversation when relevant with other academics on the limitations of scientific and related approaches. [Inviting is easy, getting a meaningful exchange going has been difficult.]
- Exposing some of my own 'transgressions', such as bringing a fresh flower with me to a talk, or bodily expression of a fieldnote. Or writing this webpage with such detail that an interested reader might be touched by it without having to read a paper.

Conference presentations include:

  • Thundering Silence. Residuality and Theory. Improvised presentation performance at conference to commemorate Leigh Star, San Fransisco 2011 (prezi-slides)
  • Marginalisering i kunnskapssamfunnet. Performed at Partnerkonferansen, Oslo 2011 (prezi).
  • A Body Academic. Presentation at Bodies in Motion. The Politics and Poetics of Silence, Oslo 2012.
  • What (inter)disciplinarity? What do demarcations do? Talk given standing at the rostrum at Academic Demarcations: Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity, Oslo 2012 (prezi)
  • As Sitting is 'Killing' us, How Come Sitting is Not ‘Killing’ the Meditators? (with Mia Keinänen, NIH). Talk at Kroppsøvingsfaget i bevegelse, Oslo 2013.
  • When Walking is Just Walking (or Almost). Talk at Kroppsøvingsfaget i bevegelse, Oslo 2013.
  • Academic Suffering: Teaching and Research from the Heart. Keynote address presented as prepared at the Suffering seminar, Univ. of the Basque Country 2013 (prezi).
  • Auto-Ethnography for Studying Fear and Non-Fear in the Production of Science: Some Challenges. Partly improvised, partly presented as prepared at Bodily Methodologies, Odense 2013.
  • Courage to Dissent as ingredient in Bildung in the professions. Roundtable presentation at EARLI SIG 14, Oslo 2014 (prezi, shown on paper).
By Eevi E. Beck
Published Oct. 28, 2014 12:28 PM