Down the rabbit hole

Yesterday I was sat quietly in a beautiful eatery trying to explain what I'd been up to in Cardiff.


The All Wales People First conference was easy enough - it was fantastic being there as people with learning difficulties from all over Wales got into radical politics, or rather got into Welsh politics in radical ways.


But Gov Camp Cymru? That was harder to explain. I still feel a little as if I fell down a rabbit hole and haven't quite emerged. It wasn't the 10-5 part of the Gov Camp. That part was huge fun, with some amazing conversations and everything you could hope to get when an unconference brings together people from radically different worlds but a shared interest in improving public services.


What I need to think through is the source of the rabbit hole experience - the socialising pre-camp and after-camp (and the after-after-camp - I slunk off when people headed for the after-after-after-camp).


The rabbit hole experience was being in conversation - admittedly well lubricated conversation - with people who I'd never usually meet, who talked of things I'd never heard, who socialised in ways I'd heard about but never really experienced, and who had no barriers to my being part of conversation and conversed with me as if I fully belonged with them.


Now, I'm used to being a hanger-on in environments where I don't belong, because that's how I observe, learn and form new connections between parts of my thinking/knowledge. In ethnographic terms, I'm great at being a participant-observer when I'm in unfamiliar settings and being an observant-participator in familiar everyday life. I have neat pigeon holes for those kind of social relationships, learning and reflecting.


It feels like going down the rabbit hole because my nice pigeon holes were disrupted. I'm sat here even as I blog, with head on one side, trying to work out what was so pleasantly but disorientatingly disruptive about the pre- and after-camp socialising.


I guess it felt a bit like being in an ethnomethodological breaching experiment. These where you deliberately act 'out of role', for example by going home to your family but acting as if you were a total stranger meeting them for the first time. [I wouldn't recommend trying it, but here's a description]. Breaching works because of something called Membership Categorisation Analysis. We automatically make people members of different categories, and we interact with them based on whether they are members or not of the same category. Now, whatever way we look at categorising people (and therefore who is a member of that category), we were not in the same category. And yet, they interacted with me as if I was. That is where the disorientation and disruption began.


I think I'm safe to assume that people weren't taking part in a breaching experiment without telling me.


So where does that leave me? I guess it leaves me wondering what category we share, a category that I didn't recognise but they did.


Or perhaps they were simply operating within a different Deleuzian paradigm where there are no categories. A sociology lecturer did warn me once that it was possible to get lost down an every-deepening vortex - a rabbit hole - unless I kept some kind of external bearings when contemplating work by Delueze, Derrida and other post* thinkers. He didn't warn me that some people actually live this way. A Deleuzian way of being would definitely fit with the snippets of conversation I actually understood and the style of conversing and relating with each other. Certainly that's far more probable than the chance we share a category that I didn't recognise.


And that's fascinating to me. Usually I'm the one pushing the boundaries for saying things aren't fixed and binary. But I hadn't realised until thinking & writing this blog how bound I am to using membership categorisation to make everyday sense of the world. For all that I think I'm post-structural, really I just peek down the rabbit hole while keeping my feet firmly in the garden.


And so I emerge from the rabbit hole. I've found a pigeon hole for the experience. And I will reflect, from my nice safe orderly garden, on whether the Alice-in-Wonderland world down the rabbit hole or the garden world above is the world that will lead to the radical social changes that I think are needed if Wales is to become truly inclusive for all.