“Some thoughts on Kindness for Christmas”

Human Kindness Overflowing

Lonely, lonely.
Tin can at my feet,
I think I'll kick it down the street.
That's the way to treat a friend.

Bright before me the signs implore me:
Help the needy and show them the way.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it's gonna rain today.

--Randy Newman

  

Some at my University have recently been promoting activities around "Kindness". I am not sure exactly what sort of Kindness they mean. I almost fear investigating, only to find it's about 'being kind to ourselves' (because nobody else will?) and other panaceas for quick fix armchair therapy. I could be wrong about it, and maybe I should explore it, for the following reason.

I hope that “Kindness” is about first how we treat each other in our own environments, not just in some speculative and imagined external space and in interactions with people we've never met ("Bright before me the signs implore me ..."). Yes, there are kind ways to go about that, but let's get back to the crux of the problem, at least as I see it, anyway. Can we heal ourselves?

Former Mary Seacole Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester

When I first came from America to England (now almost 20 years ago) I settled into my then University's lovely former Bishop's property transformed into one of the Schools.  There were walkways through flowerbeds, past a former stable, the mansion, and then a duck pond. Gardeners came often to keep it all in trim.

I remember remarking to another foreign import, a Canadian Admin, "Why do the people walk around (and pass you) looking down at the ground all the time?" I eventually realised this was so that they wouldn't catch the eye of a stranger and have to interact, even just say to 'hello' or 'good morning!’ I found this quite depressing. Being the lone postgrad student on the site, and having given up family and friends in America to come to England to do a PhD, I was starved for human interaction of some sort. I guess it was all just cultural shock, but maybe not. It certainly was depressing.

I now work in a faculty at another University where we are all very much isolated in three or four different buildings and then on many different floors in each building. It is quite easy never to cross paths with many colleagues, even those with whom we work directly, unless we make an effort. For years, faculty begged for what is called a 'common room' for the faculty, a place to meet up by chance, converse, and have a cuppa. “Serendipity”, they wanted to call it. It never happened. Vending machines were installed on a floor of one building instead. We’ve tried using the coffee shops in the undergraduate buildings, but they are usually packed with students (as they should be) and very noisy.  Finally, a commercial coffee shop opened near-by, and it seems to have become the meeting place for faculty confabs now. It has made a major difference.

Nonetheless, I guess I am still just a Yank after all. I still find it really depressing when my colleagues cannot take the time to say hello or good-morning, particularly when they work in close proximity to me or pass me at the copier. I suppose that some think that they are just too busy (or too important) to indulge in such nonsense as "Kindness”. You might say, “If I say hello to everyone I pass, I will never get my job done”. Ah, yes. Your critical role. But what about your supportive one?

When I lived in Paris for some time, I was amazed at a practice there. If the streets were crowded with pedestrians everyone walked on. When you walked alone on a street, however, and a stranger approached from the opposite direction (‘en face’), you both would say, ‘bonjour’ or hello. Civilisation.

The UK has imported several American cultural practices (the ‘away day’, open offices, even Hallowe’en), but perhaps it’s just beyond the pale to expect Brits to start expounding, "Have a nice day!".

Nonetheless, maybe we could start with just “Hello” and see what happens?

Human kindness is overflowing.

And I think it's gonna rain today.

‘I’m her partner, let me in!”

Draft for Sage’s Methodspace, week of 21 August 2017 https://www.methodspace.com/

My colleague at Bournemouth University, Lee-Ann Fenge, and I have collaborated on many qualitative projects over the years, several specifically arts-led, and have then contributed articles to academic journals about these endeavours. We are particularly attracted to the natural story-telling element of qualitative research or a “narrative approach”, and report on it often. Narrative methods contribute greatly to the advances made in qualitative research. In a recent article in Creative Approaches to Research, we suggest that a narrative style can also be promoted by the way that we present our data in academic journal publications.

A study on older LGBT citizens in rural Britain funded by Research Councils UK (Fenge, Jones & Read 2011) is highlighted by means of a report on one part of that study—a focus group, which provided an opportunity for participants to share a common history and identify individual experiences. The journal article reflecting this published in Creative Approaches to Research is entitled, “Gifted Stories: How well do we retell the stories that research participants give us?” (Jones & Fenge 2017)

In the process of reporting about this particular focus group we reached a specific frustration. Although Lee-Ann and I have produced several innovative outputs in disseminating our research (film, poetry, drama, and so forth), we still are often compelled to produce the more traditional academic journal article as well. We passionately now believe, however, that as narrative researchers and storytellers we should be promoting narrative in the content and styles of our publications too.

When we revert to a style of publication that is counter to this, we do a disservice to our commitments as narrativists. We can no longer afford to ignore the great advances made in representation of qualitative data. These have been overwhelmingly demonstrated by the successes achieved in auto-ethnography, poetic enquiry, ethno drama, film, Performative Social Science (Jones 2017) and/or other arts-based efforts in research and dissemination (Leavy 2015).

Our frustration on this occasion, therefore, led us to try something new.

Suddenly, we thought, “Perhaps we can put aside a reporting system and a language that is imitative of quantitative reporting, strip off the lab coats of clichéd rigor and pseudo-analyses, and finally take up a unique language and style of publication that we can truly claim as our own”. We propose that the inspiration for this language and style is frequently found in the arts and humanities (Jones 2012)

Lee-Ann and I produced a paper, therefore, that demonstrates two possible ways of writing up focus group material for publication. We began by reporting on the findings from the focus group transcript in the fashion that has by now become routine in qualitative interview reports, i.e., breaking up the responses into categorised data chunks. We extracted quotations from the initial conversations and then reorganised them in a very familiar way. We sorted responses by grouping them together with others that fit into similar niches.  For those with a fondness for order, this is often justified as taking “messy” data and making it “neat”; in short, “data management”. We gave them our own particular interpretive “spin” by delineating a “category” for each grouping, often reformatting them within our own interpretive “bracketing”.

This is where our frustration took over. We asked ourselves, “How did this come about? Isn’t it time to shift our approach and report these experiences in a different way? Was this not a story of the interactions of strangers and a growing social group cohesion that was taking place on this very day by means of this research exercise? Where is that story?” Where are the storytellers’ “stories”?  How did they unfold on this particular occasion?  Are we missing the point that the real “interpretation”, the “action” if you will, was the interactions between the narrators themselves within the storytelling setting?

We then thought, “Let’s try something else, something perhaps even somewhat daring. We will present a large extract from the focus group transcript verbatim and at length, including nuances such as breaks, demonstrating how one person’s thoughts follows another’s, and the energy created when several people talk at once.” We did this without comment or interruption, in part to bring the reader closer to the group experience itself. By doing this, we hoped to give the reader a sense of how the gathered participants interacted with one another and the researcher and began to coalesce by forming a new group dynamic through the very focus group process itself. This also allows the reader to engage more directly with the participants’ stories and begin to make interpretations of her/his own—also becoming a participant in the dialogic. By honouring the (tran)script in its fullness, we reaffirm our positions as narrativists, dramaturgists and authors, as well as acknowledging potential readers as active audience members.

As narrative researchers, we are natural storytellers and need to keep this in the foreground when reporting studies, particularly in publications. As enlightened qualitative researchers, we must insist that qualitative research is always about story reporting and story making, and that narrative research (listening to and retelling stories) is a key democratising factor in social science research. Not only what research participants say, but also how they say it—both are equally important to report.

Adopting a narrative rather than an empirical mode of inquiry allows investigators to get closer to the phenomena studied in several ways.  First, the narrative provides access to the specific rather than the abstract; secondly, narratives allow experience to unfold in a temporal way; thirdly, everyday language and its nuances are encouraged; finally, narrative permits dynamics to reveal themselves in the actions and relationships presented.

 

We strain to hear the story, almost whispered.  We strain because, as human beings we love stories, particularly when they are told to us …or narrated.  There is a magical quality in listening to a story.  We listen because we want to know how a life can be different from our own, or how it can be exactly the same.  Stories compel us to compare. (Jones 2010)

“Gifted Stories …” is available here and here.

References

Fenge, L., Jones, K., and Read, R.  (2011) “Connecting participatory methods in a study of older lesbian and gay citizens in rural areas”. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Available at: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/IJQM/article/view/8652

Jones, K. (2010) “Strengths of Narrative Research”. Unpublished script for Narrative Research podcast, Bournemouth University.

Jones, K. (2012) “Connecting Research with Communities through Performative Social Science”. The Qualitative Report, 17(Rev. 18), 1-8. Available at: http://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol17/iss41/3/

Jones, K. (2017) “Performative Social Science”. Ch. in: The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, J. Matthes, Ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/22126458/Performative_Social_Science

Jones, K., Fenge, L.-A. (2017) “Gifted Stories: How well do we retell the stories that research participants give us?” Creative Approaches to Research. Vol. 10, No. 1: 33-49. Available at: http://creativeapproachestoresearch.net/wp-content/uploads/CAR10_1_Jones_Fenge.pdf

Leavy, P. (2015). Method Meets Art Arts-Based Research Practice (Second Edition). New York: Guilford Press.

Ground-breaking article by Jones and Fenge

 Note: blog now also available on Methodspace as

‘I’m Her Partner, Let Me In!’ Bringing the Narrative to Academic Papers

 "We passionately believe that as narrative researchers and storytellers we must promote narrative in the content and styles of our publications. To revert to a style of publication or presentation that is counter to this does a disservice to our commitments as narrativists".

Lee-Ann Fenge & Kip Jones

Kip Jones and Lee-Ann Fenge are pleased to announce that our article now appearing in Creative Approaches to Research, a peer-reviewed open-access journal, “Gift Stories How Do We Retell the Stories that Research Participants Give Us?” is now available.

 

We can no longer afford to ignore the great advances made in representation of qualitative data. These have been overwhelmingly demonstrated by the successes achieved in auto-ethnography, poetic enquiry, ethno-drama, film, Performative Social Science and/or other arts-based efforts in research and dissemination.

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Narrative methods contribute greatly to the advances made in qualitative research. A narrative style should also be promoted in publications and presentations. A study on older LGBT citizens in rural Britain highlights this by means of a report on one part of that study—a Focus Group.  

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Narrative researchers are natural storytellers and need to foreground this when reporting studies for publication. Qualitative research is always about story reporting and story making, and narrative research (listening to and retelling stories) is a key democratising factor in qualitative social science research. 

 

Also available on Academia.edu.

"Peformative Social Science: What it is, What it isn't" Revisited

University academics and managerial types alike seem to be awash these days with ideas of 'creativity' as some new miracle tool, and play as a key component to engagement. They bring together academics and convince them that playing with toys, colouring in, and tickling their toes with mud will somehow produce what has been lacking in their scholarship. New buzz words are shared. Everyone goes home happy.

Wrong.  

What is sometimes called 'arts-based research' is none of these. If anything (and those who have really engaged with using tools from the arts to discover knowledge and to disseminate their findings are well aware), an approach using the arts in research takes about twice the time and effort.

Performative Social Science (PSS) is an arts-led approach that has been developed over more than ten years at Bournemouth University, It has been written about in journals and books, and demonstrated in a variety of examples such as online graphic publication, film production, and new fiction writing.  PSS in philosophically grounded in Relational Aesthetics and Relational Art which take into account the viewer/participant as key to its approach.  (I have written at length on the development of Performative Social Science.) 

What follows is a much earlier piece that was developed for a seminar at Bournemouth University. I was beginning to grapple at the time with both the joys and problems thrown up by my turn to the creative, the arts, and the fictive in representing social science research.  I present that essay here as a alternative to the buzz words and play dates becoming common place in academic circles these days.

“Performative Social Science: What it is, What it isn't”

Seminar script

Kip Jones

Seminar presented at Bournemouth University, 13 October, 2010

Publish or perish drives much of academic life. It has its origins in hard science
where the first to get an experiment, finding or theory into publication won the prize.
Other academic disciplines followed suit by imitating this system. This structure has
developed a style of academic writing and a vetting process that are both by now
antiquated and suspect.

We are all caught up in this bind from time to time, me included. Fortunately,
publishing is evolving and, more and more, supplementary multi-media are requested
as part of the publication procedure. Audience share and economics drives most of
these changes, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a good time to take advantage of this
expansion of the opportunities for academic outputs.

Qikipedia recently cautioned on Twitter: “About 200,000 academic journals are
published in English. The average number of readers per article is five. Funders are
now looking for outcomes from their investments that demonstrate how we will affect
change in the wider world, i.e., the world beyond the very few other academics who
happen to read a journal article. This climate of flux presents opportunities to get the
products of our alternative methods of dissemination of social science data to wider
audiences—to popularize research. This is why I now revisit one of my early cracks at
audio/visual script writing and production, “The One about Princess Margaret” here
today.

Why popularize research?

Personally, one result of the current academic climate is that I am less interested
in writing that does not communicate directly with an audience and include my “self”
in that narrative. Somewhat reluctantly at first, therefore, I began to explore auto-
ethnography and its potential for more personal communication with an audience and
the platforms that I might use in order to reach that audience. I realized that all I
really have to share with anyone else is my own experience. It may be flawed and/or
of little value to anyone else. For these reasons, I try to write and produce for various
media in a way that will be of some use to others in their own work. I attempt to
accomplish this with some skill and craft—to “popularize it” at the same time. The
natural follow-up for me was to revisit the arts and humanities for potential tools that
might enrich this transition.

Filmmaker, Jean Luc Godard is often credited with having once said, "It's not
where you take things from—it's where you take them to” (BoingBoing 2010). In my
best auto-ethnography, I am actually a minor character and/or a conduit to a time,
place and other people. I become fictionalized through writing. I am the sorcerer who
reminds audiences of their selves. In terms of visual representation of such stories, I
become a keen observer of lives, allowing cultural images to become private and
iconic. These remembered images twist and turn and eventually morph in various
ways to be included as my own graphic memories. These visual ‘mash-ups’ are truly
Ethno-Graphic. Indeed, our visual memories can become imbued with both intense
cultural and personal meaning. This is the visual auto-ethnography that I hope to
represent in my work.

Along with exploring visualizations of research data over the past ten years or
so, I have also experimented with writing performatively, or rather, representing in
text what I am trying to accomplish imaginatively. Several examples include the
results of an interview with Mary Gergen; the script for an audio/visual production
about Klaus Riegel and Kenneth Gergen; a very early piece about Akira Kurosawa
and Gerotranscendence; and, of course, the script for “The One about Princess
Margaret”.

I think it is important to revisit the initial motivations behind these early efforts
and even try to recapture a bit of their naïveté and my initial enthusiasm for finding
innovative ways of expressing my scholarship. As I labor to become more
sophisticated and skillful in my productions, it is important for me not to forget the
initial struggles and uncertainties that are documented by those earlier attempts. This
is the reason behind another screening of “The One about Princess Margaret” here
today.

Why was this particular medium chosen?

“The One about Princess Margaret”, like many of my early pieces, involved
being presented with a particular puzzle or challenge and then finding the tools from
the arts to respond to such questions. In the case of “The One about Princess
Margaret”, it is important to recall that the production was built in PowerPoint—
testing the software’s potential to its limits, then converted to video. My initial query
was: How can humor be used to capture time/place and culture and how will the
results measure up to scrutiny as auto-ethnography? Thus my personal leap into
auto-ethnography and the development of Performative Social Science (PSS) began
with a research question.

I did not suddenly decide to transform into a graphic illustrator, scriptwriter or
filmmaker. I remain a social scientist with a particular story to tell or message to get
across by exploring which media will best help me to accomplish that. I don't worry
about whether I am exceptionally good at the use of a specific medium but rather,
wonder if that means will serve the purpose at hand. I then begin the struggle with the
specific new means of communicating. This process itself holds many of the joys and
frustrations of each project, but also the opportunities to really explore the creative
process.

I believe that, on the whole, the writing up of our projects should be ancillary to
this new performative work; the text should never be the main output. For me, more
interesting as documents are the scripts themselves, the notes or the diagrammatic
evidence that our projects leave behind as a kind of trail, trace or map. When we do
publish, these sorts of records certainly hold more relevance for me. I am more and
more convinced these days that any academic written texts reporting our efforts at
popularizing research should be supporting ancillary documents to our productions,
not the other way round and certainly not the final results or raison d’êtres of our
investigative efforts.

Many who have turned to PSS have shifted to the arts for both inspiration and
practical assistance in answer to our own frustrations with more standard research
4practices. Perhaps typical qualitative academic methods have become shop worn
(routinely slotting vast amounts of data into themes and then banging on about “rigor”
comes to mind as an example)? Possibly the problem lies within our diffusion of
data? Do we write too routinely about the “evocative” without knowing what it is that
is being evoked and how or, better yet, what our work might provoke instead? Yes,
we turn elsewhere, aptly so. The arts encourage us to be at the forefront of change and
innovation in academia, challenging the status quo and moving our fields forward—
the rightful place of scholarship.

What is Performative Social Science?

Is Performative Social Science art or social science? It isn’t either. It is a fusion
of both, creating a new model where tools from the arts and humanities are explored
for their utility in enriching the ways in which we research social science subjects
and/or disseminate or present our research to our audiences. This does not mean that
we simply put on a play or make a film (and I need to constantly be wary of that
pitfall myself these days in lieu of the increasing amount of my own cinematic
output).

It certainly isn’t taking interview transcriptions, leaving out a line or two here
and there, rearranging it on the page in stanza format mimicking poetry, and then
passing it off as poetic inquiry. (Even worse: then calling ourselves poets.) It isn’t
thinking that our lives are so precious and unique (the “snowflake” phenomenon) that
surely the world wants us to dramatize them—too often through embarrassingly
intimate performances of over-cooked angst. Typically to a captured conference
audience, academics present these hysterics by crawling around the floor for half an
hour and calling it dance or by producing a monologue that seems never to have a
narrative arc or conclusion. As audience members, we often wish we had chosen the
parallel book launch with complimentary sherry instead.

In its place, let us return to what we already know quite well: academic research.
I recall the standard rule-of-thumb suggestion that we make to postgraduate students
all of the time: “Find a research method that best fits the research question(s).” This
imperative applies to PSS as well. Within the vast richness of the arts and humanities,
which lens, device, technique or tradition might deepen our research process or
expand our dissemination plan? Is it a good fit (to the question[s])? Do we
automatically put on a play or make a film from our research data because we are so
many frustrated actors or film directors, without ever asking which art form best fits
the research question or the data that it has produced?

What lessons have been learned so far?

Funders are currently encouraging researchers to find ways to reach wider
audiences with their findings (“impact factor”) and, because of this, we are beginning
to look beyond academic journals or narrow academic subject groups (e.g., delegates
at specialists’ conferences—or “preaching to the choir”). Funders now want to know
the benefits of our research to society and how it might affect the social order–the
potential outcomes of our efforts.

Performative Social Science, when it is at its best and humming along, is a
synthesis that provides answers to many of these very requirements. Ideally, our
audiences should be almost unaware of the seams where we have cobbled together indepth,
substantial scholarship with artistic endeavor. In my estimation, part of doing
PSS is not only in the breaking down of the old boundaries, but also in discarding the
old expectations and frameworks of what research is supposed to resemble after it is
finished.

Nonetheless, we are researchers. We are not actors, directors, filmmakers,
dancers or poets. There are many opportunities and outlets (and frustrations and
roadblocks) for those who wish to pursue those professions. We can learn a great deal
from these folks who often find it necessary to wait tables and do other menial jobs in
order to pursue their dream profession. They may help us look at our own field
through new lenses, but let’s not insult them by falsely assuming their hard-earned
mantles.

In return, a word of caution to artists who might be drawn to working with
researchers: the world of academia is not simply a new venue for you to put on a play,
dance a dance or publish a poem. There are both constraints and opportunities in the
academic world as well, which we are happy to share with you through our
collaborations.


Through interfaces with both practitioners and practices from the arts and
humanities, opportunities are presented to work with social science material and
expand its means of production and popularization to novel and creative levels. This
requires the fusion mentioned earlier. This necessitates cooperation and collaboration.
Communication and common ground are central to successful partnership and union.
The intuitive aspects of shared culture, coupled with a more universal response
to life’s tribulations and injustices (and, therefore, artistic expressions of these
emotive components), compete for resolution with the more rigid academic ethical
frameworks and methodological constraints under discussion. By developing a trust in
instinct and intuition and the naturally expressive and moral potential of these
personal resources, social science research can become richer and more human, if we
only are willing to jettison some of the baggage of the old academic rigor and dry
procedural ethics.

A few closing words of caution: Some academics would rather incorporate the
language of what we are doing into their own outputs without ever challenging either
their own thinking or outputs. They subsume the language of PSS, but never really reexamine their own routine techniques or dissemination methods. Our developing
terminology is, in this way, incorporated within standard academic journal texts rather
than through any meaningful reinvention of research methods or diffusion.
Most of all, however, let’s be careful not to implode PSS through an overblown
sense of what we are about. In our enthusiasm, let’s not be too quick to anoint
ourselves as poets, actors, dancers or magicians. If we do eventually earn those titles,
I am sure that others more qualified to judge will be sure to let us know.

  See also: Kip Jones’ Ten ‘Rules’ for Being Creative in Producing Research

Lisbon Folly

Lisbon Folly

 His name was Pedro, a 6' 2" surfer with grey/green eyes from Cascais living in my favorite Lisbon neighbourhood now. He drove me hard in his TukTuk to the top of the hill with gorgeous views of the city.
We said good-bye in front of the train station like in a movie.

The end.

Recent Writing Available on the Internet

“Kyle’s photo-montage of black and white clippings, mostly from fashion magazines, Bailey and Avedon, etc., glued to the walls surrounding his bed”. 

 Kip Jones is pleased to announce that the tripartite story, “True confessions: why I left a traditional liberal arts college for the sins of the big city”, first published in Qualitative Research Journal, is available on Academia.edu.  Jones is particularly pleased that what is now called ‘auto-fiction’ has been accepted for publication by such a major qualitative journal. The three stories in the article conclude with a scene from Jones’ ongoing development of the feature film script for “Copacetica”. All three stories portray aspects of the sexual fumbling and romantic insecurities typical in youth.

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"Dirty Frank's" bar, Philadelphia, where the main 
characters of “Copacetica” frequently meet.

The second piece of writing consists of the bar scene for “Copacetica”. This is the scene in which all the major characters are introduced and the story sets up the conundrum that the main character will face in the film.

“Copacetica” tells the tale of a gullible youth on a roller coaster ride of loss of innocence and coming out in the flux and instability of 1960s hippy America. Often seen as a period of revolution in social norms, Copacetica’s themes include being different, the celebration of being an outsider, seeing oneself from outside of the “norm”, and the interior conflicts of “coming out” within a continuum as a (gay) male in a straight world. These observations are set within the flux and instability of a period of great social change, but which are often viewed in retrospect as consistent and definable. Being straight or being gay can also be viewed in a similar way within the wider culture’s need to set up a sexual binary and force sexual “choice” decision-making for the benefit of the majority culture, or ‘heteronormativity’.  Through the device of the fleeting moment, the story interrogates the certainties and uncertainties of the “norms” of modernity.
In the later gallery scene, a minor character explains the meaning of the word, “copacetic”:

VISITOR TWO

What d’he say?

VISTOR ONE

“Everything’s copacetic”! (Beat) What does that mean, anyway?

VISITOR THREE

Everything’s cool. Everything’s okay. Or “Groovy” as they like to say.

Asked what he enjoyed about writing the script for this film, Jones said, “Definitely revisiting the slang used by youth of the 1960s! It’s virtually its own language. And writing the sex scenes. Exciting and very tiring. Almost like the real thing”.

You can read the opening scene planned for the film on KIPWORLD: "Copacetica" Scene 1. EXT SUBURBAN HOUSE POOL NIGHT