Objects and artefacts

in the home include computers, we are finding in our research project on artefacts in the homes of the Ferham families.
Here is Molly's image of a computer, which we found amongst our miscellaneous piles on the kitchen table.
You can see on the right hand side she has written

bloger

also

intanet Molly School Friends

down the side of her computer.
On the bottom left hand side she has put

Gamrer

On the top left hand side is a drawing of a dog.
I wonder why?

We are thinking about

space place and identity on this course
and so I have just bought this book
and this book
to help me think this though.

Tracing

the epistemological unconscious is one of my favourite things to do.
The phrase comes from Bourdieu, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology and it means that you have to interrogate what is within your own epistemological unconscious in order to encounter others' works.
Therefore, I need to look at my own arty ways in order to situate myself in research projects.
Tracing social practices in texts is something Jennifer and I like to do and we are writing about it at the moment together
(this requires obviously an urgent trip to New York).
Tracing is also what we are doing in our wonderful new Women's Art project
for our website and we are tracing photos of ourselves and then
sewing them onto material for the backdrop to the exhibition here.
it is all very material.

I have just ordered my cards

from here as ofcourse I have to be like Dr Joolz who has some and also other senior members of our department which is v. fab.
I was going to give them out when I went to Chicago but alas our symposium was rejected which is strange as it was on Bourdieu and Literacy Education and had lots of wonderful people in it and our discussant was Allan Luke.
AERA do not know what they have missed.
Nover mind, I can read Clarice Bean with Molly in Dorset
Clarice Bean is utterly my favourite ever person right now.

Coding

data is about creating patterns, looking across multiple interviews to find ways of understanding the links between objects and narratives.
This post also honours Clifford Geertz who died on October 30th and was the anthropologist who wrote about thick description and that 'man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.' (Geertz 1993;5)
Every Tuesday I am doing the fieldwork for this project, as well as coding and analyzing and it is Geertz who cheers me up.
He tells me that,
'Culture is public because meaning is.' (Geertz 1993:12) and that,
'Doing ethnography is like trying to read.... a manuscript - foreign, faded, full of elipses, incoherences, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalised graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behaviour. (Geertz 1993:10)
At the moment, I am reading transcripts and trying to turn them into other kinds of texts, ones that link across different texts and have different kind of headings and organisation.
My focus is on the objects and the creative patterns they make over time, and how their traces can be followed across diasporas and time frames.
So here are some of my patterned objects:

shoes


sewing machines



China



elephants....

The domestic space

is one that continually fascinates me.
When we went to this exhibition the images of the interior of people's houses, their mess, cats and unmade beds were as powerful as the barricades of Paris and the images of streets.
I also like seeing people's mess in images.
We spent the whole of yesterday tidying up and there are still miscellaneous piles in place.
Dr Joolz is writing about Flickr as a site of images of domesticity, like here.
This is Molly's image of our house.
Lots of stairs.
Here is a book about the home.