Travelling Light: Journeys in Post-Structuralist Research

Travelling light: journeys in post-structuralist research

Richard Edwards, University of Stirling, Scotland

Julia Clarke, Roger Harrison and Fiona Reeve, Open University, UK Paper presented at SCUTREA, 31st Annual Conference, 3-5 July 2001, University of East London

THIS paper outlines parts of the journey we have travelled in conducting a two year empirical study into flexibility in further education in the UK. Our interest is in the many ways in which flexibility is worked as part of institutional strategies to increase and widen participation in post-compulsory education and contribute to policy goals of lifelong learning. In the doing of the research, we have been as much concerned with what can be learnt about researching (Clarke, et al 2000) as with the focus of the research itself (Edwards, et al 2000). This paper is more concerned with the former than the latter. Our journeys have not been linear, from point A to point B, but represent a complex interweaving of people, things, places and times.

In articulating these journeys, we hope, through unburdening ourselves, to lighten our own loads and make our own travelling lighter. We also hope to throw light on some of the issues raised in attempting empirical research within a broadly defined post-structuralist framing. This is a travelling light rather than a fixed spotlight. We are also cautious of the privilege given to certain senses in research, in particular that of vision. Making sense can involve any number and all of our senses; it can be visceral (Brookfield, 2001). Throwing light on something can illuminate it, but can also inhibit our understanding of it through senses other than the visual - we may sometimes have to get our hands dirty. And, of course, some things are best seen in the dark.

Two sorts of journeying are interwoven in this paper.

First, there are the journeys in space and time. There has been a massive growth of research and scholarship in these areas in recent years (Adam 1990, 1996,Harvey 1989, Giddens 1990, Massey 1994), yet little has been discussed in research in the education of adults (Edwards and Usher 2000). Space and time are taken to be simply the back cloth against which research practices take place rather than also being constructed through such practices; research mobilises certain spaces and times in particular ways through which a project is fashioned. What we wish to do in this paper therefore is explore the time-space dimensions of research.

This takes us on a journey through the framing of the research and designing the methodology, conducting the research, analysing the data and reporting the outcomes.

Here, drawing on Adam (1990, 1996), we engage with notions that time is not simply linear and chronological, but also experiential and recursive, relying on memory as well as planning; both an opportunity and a constraint.

Indeed the writing of this paper relies on memory as much as recorded data, but also anticipates the presentation that will take place in the near future. We also discuss the ways in which movements in time are also movements in space - from the sites of the research, to the settings in which the data was analysed and interpreted, to the international settings (Vancouver, Nottingham, Sydney, London) in which the research is discussed. Different settings call for different representations of practice, which suggest different purposes and meanings.

Related to this journey, we wish to outline a second one that articulates our movements between epistemological positions. We wish to provide a reflective and reflexive account of the conflicts and dilemmas of a post-structuralist to research in which any notion of positioning is problematic. Here we will focus on the 'baggage' that we carry with us, the various items of epistemological or methodological clothing in which our research must be dressed in order to persuade different audiences in different locations of its value. Can we tell the customs official that we packed our own bags, or have we allowed superfluous items to be smuggled in? This baggage -experiential, conceptual - which influences the positions we and others adopt will be examined for the various ways in which it can weigh us down, often determining the moves we make and the turns we take in pursuing our research. Reflexive awareness might help to lighten the load but research can nevertheless prove to be, epistemologically, heavy going.

We live the epistemological dilemmas and indeed have had to be flexible in our movements.

Space, time and epistemology provide the three points around which the story of our journey are woven. However, this is not only a story to be told - a realist narrative of experience. It is also a story to be reflexively conceptualised.

One way of framing this complex web of overlapping journeys linking the different elements is through actor network theory (Callon 1986, Latour 1987). This has been influential in the sociology of science and increasingly in social sciences more generally. Actor-network theory is part ofthe shift from individualised, psychological views of knowledge-building to more social interpretations. It examines the performances through which knowledge comes to be accepted as a description of the natural order.

Knowledge-building is taken to be a joint exercise within a network that is spread acrosss pace and time and includes inanimate - e.g. books, journals, pens, computers, desks, cars, tape-recorders - as well as animate objects. Each is an actor enrolled in the performance of knowledge-building.

Learning and identity are therefore distributed through the range of networks within which we are enmeshed. These networks 'expand, contract and shift configuration over time, and even the most stable and predictable of them are constantly being reappropriated and redefined by the nature of the flows that animate them ...' (Nespor 1994: 12).

Networks constitute objects where 'an object is an effect of an array of relations, the effect, in short, of a network' (Law 2000: 1). Actor-network theory itself therefore draws heavily on post-strucuturalism and takes objects to be 'immutable mobiles' (Latour 1990) - moving around yet holding together. In a sense then, actor-network theory reflexively provides us with a fluid theory of flows through which to represent our own movements. For us, research practices can be evaluated as actor networks in which participants and participation are choreographed in time and space. We therefore take our research project as an object that has travelled, yet held together, however unstably. There are four moments to networking practices: problematisation; interessement, enrolment and mobilisation (Callon 1986). Problematisation is about what identities and interests are allowable within specific networks. It establishes the grounds in which inclusion and exclusion are built. Interessement are the practices through which barriers are built between those who are part of the network and those who are not. 'These can be material barriers ..., material organisations of space and time that restrict contact with outsiders ..., discursive barriers ..., or barriers constituted through differences of taste, style and language' (Nespor 1994: 14). While interessment sets the barriers to participation, enrolment fashions the alliances - the relations, peformances and processes - within the network.Enrolment ensures that the network holds together. Mobilisations are the practices through which enrolled networks are stabilised.'Techniques can range from mobilisation in the flesh - assembling strikers for a mass rally, for example, or translating students into mobile practitioners for a discipline - to the representation of previously dispersed entities in stable, mobile, and combinable forms (textual or electronic)' (Nespor1994: 14).

These moments are non-sequential, but through them objects are given some stability.

We cannot attempt a full analysis of our research journey in a short conference paper; indeed we are insufficiently enrolled by actor-network theory to provide such an analysis.

What we do is outline some of the space-time configurations and epistemological baggage with which we engaged in particular attempts to network our research - a further example of which we are manifesting in this conference.

What we suggest points to the instability of the research project as an object and the ongoing flexibility required to conduct such a project.

Getting into it Here we focus on the conceptual paper we prepared as a background to our research and as a way of identifying issues and questions to be pursued in the empirical research. This paper arose from our various readings of different literatures around flexibility, which we organised into four overlapping areas - context, organisation, pedagogy and people. It grew and developed as each of us added to it. Inevitably, it also became contentious as we worked through our attempts to define what was to be included and what excluded.

However, the 'we' is a difficulty here also. The paper began as a background to the research bid put together by Richard. The success of that bid enabled Julia to be employed to work on the project. At a later stage, Roger became involved and six months after the start of the project Fiona began her participation. Each had to write themselves into the conceptual framework and help fashion it. As such the alliances within the research 'team' began to be fashioned or enrolled. The extension of the network involved in this project was only partly about the nature of the project itself.

It was also about building a team among the small group of researchers in lifelong learning in our institution. This meant we excluded some colleagues who might have added to the conceptual framing because of their greater knowledge of, for instance, management. But given that the paper grew to almost 20,000 words, at a certain point, we decided no more could or should be added to it, as the focus of the research - flexibility in further education - was becoming increasingly opaque. We decided to secure our borders.

But not for long. The press for publications meant that we sought to extend the network for this research by writing papers. We therefore worked to provide a condensed version of the conceptual framework for publication in the academic journals concerned with further education. Both attempts were rebuffed - the first out of hand, the second more conditionally. The actor-network we were creating through our research project ran into the interessement of the academic publishing networks. What interested us was that our research was rejected by the journals concerned precisely for being conceptual, suggesting that the criteria for acceptance by the audience for research in further education was the empirical, the practical and the relevant.

Enrolment by our academic peers relied on criteria of entry that we had not addressed. Different actor- networks were being mobilised.

Getting in/out there

We took a step back and decided to concentrate on the empirical side of the research. However, this in itself was not without its difficulties. The project had initially been conceived within a broadly post- structuralist philosophy with a focus on mapping the meanings of flexibility. To gain funding the methodology was reconfigured to be broadly interpretive - still concerned with meanings but with a different understanding of their significance. We returned to our initial framing in taking the empirical work forward.

However, our concern was for those we wished to enrol as participants in the research to feel there was something to be obtained from it. Our academic interest in the ways in which discourses of flexibility are worked in further education seemed somewhat distant from the day to day concerns about how to be more flexible and the positive and negative effects of this. In extending into the empirical phase of the project - documentary analysis and semistructured interviews with fifty managers, lecturers, ancillary staff and students - the problematisation of the research became an issue, as did our attempts to negotiate entry into the actor-networks within the two case study colleges. Our problematisation became about how much data we could gather and handle and whether or not we were trying to be representative in our selection of colleges and people within them. Entry to our case study sites involved representing ourselves and the research in ways that appeared to resonate with initially senior managers and later those to whom we were referred to arrange the interviews within the colleges. There was very much the sense that while alliances were loosely fashioned, the actor-network of this project - the groups and processes within the colleges - was never fully mobilised or stabilised. The temporary nature of the encounters and the lack of a shared problematisation left us with the sense of disjunction between what we said our research was about and what participants may have thought it was about. This in part reflected the concern to be practical and relevant arising from the response to the conceptual framework, but it meant there was a tension over the interests and identities allowable within the project.

There was thus a tension between what we were trying to mobilise as a research group and alternative actor networks in and around further education in the UK. Yet we were reluctant to merely fit into that which existed, as we are interested in research and research practices and how they are represented, so decided to present our interests elsewhere. One year into the project this took us to the AERC in Vancouver where we presented and performed three different ways of writing our research project to an adult education academic audience. We wanted to extend our actor-network for this research in both the sense of having an international audience, but also in the sense of making explicit the methodological issues we were engaging with in taking the project forward. Yet we also faced the suggestion we should 'give the money back' given the perceived lack of relevance of what we were representing.

Rather than do this, we have explored the issues raised by the suggestion in the framing of certain of our publications for journals with more of a methodological than a content focus.

However, we need to go back in time and space to Richard's office at the Open University in the spring of 2000, where we began what is still an ongoing data analysis.

Back to our place

Julia, Roger and Fiona had conducted the interviews that had been transcribed. We now began what we termed our data munching sessions. Here we began with a cross-section of transcripts that we each read separately, from which a number of jointly identified themes emerged. Flexibility was associated with: the intensification of work; changes in working identities; a contrast between the good flexibility of the past and the bad flexibility of the present; and a flexible use of spaces and places. In relation to our conceptual framework flexibility was articulated by our participants as primarily an organisation issue. There was a relative lack of engagement with the contextual, people and perhaps more surprisingly pedagogic issues surrounding discourses of flexibility. In other words, while colleges were being encouraged to become more flexible in order to contribute to policy goals of lifelong learning, people in them had a relatively restricted view of what that entailed. It also became clear that it was a stronger managerial than educational discourse. Managers and active trade unionists spoke most forcefully about flexibility and thus it is unsurprising that the focus was on organisational issues.

As we extended our analysis, these themes continued to be the most pronounced and became the focus for our thinking and writing. These were the empirical findings from our project and we now felt that perhaps we ourselves might be enrolled by the academic journals that had rejected our earlier conceptual papers.

However, as we worked our way to these conclusions through a series of meetings and many separate sessions with the transcripts, we struggled with a fundamental philosophical and methodological issue - what was this research about? What type of claims were we making? Did our findings prove something or not? Was the data evidence or was it stories of flexibility to be told? Here we engaged with interpetivism, post-stucturalism and linguistics and the ways in which the same data could be rearticulated in different ways on the basis of the wider actor-networks of research to which we related it and to which we are ourselves related. Our epistemological struggles were in part about who we are and who we want to be, about our identities as researchers and the actor-networks of which we are a part and to which we wish to belong - those we wish to mobilise and those by whom we are mobilised. Our solution was not to look for a solution to these issues, but to represent the research in different ways for different audiences and tailor aspects of our methodology as required. In other words, rather than methodology securing the truth of the claims made in research, we draw eclectically on methodology to make different types of claims for different audiences - the empirical and relevant for more practice focused publications and audiences, the conceptual elsewhere. We therefore addressed the instability of our project as object not by attempting to secure the boundaries or problematisation, but by opening ourselves to the multiple mobilisations that began to emerge. Our mobilisations are temporary, although their existence as published texts or as memories of presentations in people's minds may have a greater permanence in other senses.

Brief encounters

Representing our research has therefore taken a variety of forms in a number of places over the last year. We attempted to refashion our alliances with the participants in the two colleges to provide feedback to them on our findings. With memories of the response from the journals, we were concerned to present this as relevant. We also wished to be able to claim respondent validity for those working within certain methodological framings and for some of us as well, given the strength of such traditions within research. The perceived relevance of the research might be seen by the small attendance at one college and the attendance of only one manager at the other. The mobilisation of our research participants therefore had been temporary and had not developed sufficient interest to motivate them some months later to find out more. Their networking took them elsewhere.

We also engaged in the nomadic practices of the research conference. As well as Vancouver, we have attended conferences in Nottingham, Sydney and now here in London. As stated, the Vancouver paper explored an aspect of the methodological issues that have engaged us in doing this research, something to which we have returned here.

We feel somewhat comfortable that these issues are part of the problematisation of such conferences. Thus we have continued our explorations here at this conference, which mobilises a similar audience to that we (en)countered in Vancouver. This was not the case for the Working Knowledge conference in Sydney, where Fiona and Roger presented the never to be finalised findings of the project to an audience of academics and TAFE practitioners, with diverse responses. Here we again experienced a disjunction between the problematisation of the research as we pursued it and that of part of our audience. For the latter, there was an expectation that we would provide empirically based answers to the question, 'how flexible is further education?' and that the session would help them in working through the difficulties of encouraging or making people more flexible. In contrast, our paper attempted to fashion an alliance or enrol our audience in the problematisation built around an exploration ofthe meanings of flexibility deployed by interviewees and worked in the interview data.

We have also submitted articles to various journals, the focus for each being constructed for the perceived audience and the possible academic peers who will review them.All of this is part of the performance and performativity of research, something that is not methodologically secure, nor witha single audience. In our project we have attempted to mobilise space, time and epistemology but we have also been mobilised b ythe various actor-networks of which we are part. The journey therefore is not entirely of our own making.

Mobilising a research project?

This paper represents a short break rather than a long summer holiday. It is a short excursion into the terrain that we have been mobilising and that has been mobilising us.

We have attempted to throw light on some of the methodological aspects of research, as well as leavesome baggage behind in order to travel lightly over the terrain.

We wish to suggest there is no 'destination' for research - in space-time, nor epistemologically, no route to a final and definitive position - but more a nomadic and (dis)located sort of existence. It is in the practices of research that specific configurations of space, time and epistemology are produced. The project continues to be a never fully stabilised actor-network, itself enmeshed in the diverse and powerful relations of education and educational research.

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