March 2005 Reflection

It is cool in my study: 23C at 9.00am. Outside the sky is a blistering blue and it is already nudging 30C. It is close to silent – my son Berend sleeps on, oblivious to my labour. Thoughts are moving from my head through my fingers to the keyboard at which moment they appear on the screen before me. The only sounds I am aware of are the

hum of the computer, the tap of my fingers striking the keys, and my under-the-breath mutterings as I struggle to capture whatever

it is in my mind that I feel compelled to transform to text. Only a short time ago I arrived in this space having returned from a

morning walk. On this particular morning I departed from my usual route. Instead of

walking along the Barwon River then homewards through suburban streets I took

to a laneway. In Geelong the suburbs are laced with laneways tucked between the major roads and this morning I discovered

laneways close to my home I’d not walked into being before. It was hot and, as I

moved further from the sealed road, I reflected on the risk that I may have to walk some long way to find my way home if I got

lost in these spaces.

As I walked along these little interconnected roads – sometimes grassy, other times paved in one fashion or another yet barely wide enough to accommodate a vehicle – I felt a connection with what has been on my mind this particular week in the final year

of my candidature. How is it I – the most linear of women - came to be rhizomatically

wandering at this point in this thesis? This week I have been reading Elizabeth’s (St.

Pierre 1997) account of her initial movement towards poststructural inquiry by

way of writing and it inspires me to continue wandering my laneways. As did her armchair enthnographer, I have sat at my desk and wandered from Elizabeth’s page to and fro between today’s writing and

my earlier writing to my fieldnotes to a picture of a loom to A Thousand Plateaus

and so on...

I recognise that I am weaving on all my small looms at the same time; I pick up one

loom and weave a few strands. In this weaving/writing my data collection and

analysis proceeds and a transitory connection is made. At some point I realise

this colour is also needed on that loom. I am compelled to reach for another loom and, using the same thread and bobbin I weave a few strands on the second loom, a little bit more of the image appears on both looms. There is now a connection between these two looms and, as I continue, other looms are rhizomatically drawn in with the

haphazard intersection of the threads. Points appear. Now I can step back from

my work and, before me, a temporarily interconnected image of the interconnection

that is SGR LLEN is becoming. It does not form a whole, it is not and will never be

complete.

Like Elizabeth (St. Pierre 1997, p.9), I can no longer believe data must be textualised before it can be analysed; my analysis proceeds as I peer down a laneway, as I

wander-together (Kvale 1996) with my research partner; as I sit on the back porch

with Lee taking computer-based lines of flight over the format of this thesis, as I

write these words. My writing too is palimpsest – it is written and overwritten but unquestionably traces remain of what has gone before. This is a frightening place

to be on certain days of the week. Other doctoral students ask ‘but precisely what steps do you take to do it?’ – ‘it’ being analysis - and I have no easy answer; there

are no linear steps I can list for them to follow as my steps are backwards, sideways

and forwards, always in the middle: the middle of data collection, the middle of the literature review, the middle of analysis, the middle of my life, the middle of write-up, the middle of ethics. These are laneways far from the method-streets I began walking at the commencement of this candidature but, in finding my unique way through them, I

am convinced that I am moving closer to embracing the curiosity that enables one to

Pause

The postmodernist context of doubt distrusts all methods equally … But a postmodernist position does allow us to know “something” without claiming to know everything. Having a partial, local, historical knowledge is still knowing. (Richardson 1994, p.517-18)

This Panel has introduced the research and its positioning within an ARC Linkage Project. It has also provided some perspective of me as author of the thesis and of the metaphor that has informed my understanding of my work: I am weaving on a vertical loom

constructed and dressed with warp threads by others; it has been my task to take up that loom, select the threads and weave wefts into multiple representations to form a case study of the SGR LLEN. I have also used this first Panel of the thesis to outline my design. My pursuit of a poststructural ethnography drew on multiple modes of inquiry to generate data. The multiplicity of the reality evident in that data has been represented by adopting a poststructural

approach to analysis and by weaving the data and analysis on a series of small looms thereby providing a portrayal of events that are always in the middle and fundamentally interconnected.

Context is the ground within which the rhizome expands, sending down its roots and pushing up its shoots. The rhizome is inherently connected to and part of its context, and vice versa. It is to a

concern with weaving the political, social and geographic context of my research that I now turn.