Telling tales (The Unconventional Doing of a Doctorate)

If you haven't heard of 'complexity theory', this may not make sense. Check out the fabulous Noreen Blanuet and Dr Toby Lowe for versions that may make sense to you.

If you haven't heard of Wittgenstein, and French philosophy isn't your thing, skip the bit in italics. You don't need to read it to make sense of the rest!

So rarely have I lived out the truth that the language and conceptual framework are the story and not just a vehicle for communicating a story. I have told many stories of the last five years. This no more true or false than the other stories I have told about doing my doctorate. This telling of the story does not falsify other tellings, nor does it mean I am lying now by changing 'the truth' of what has happened in the last five years. What I have done is try for size different language and conceptual frameworks as I try to make sense of the story for myself. I have finally found one that fits me.  

  

Starting point 

Start with a real world problem that is ‘wicked’, where it feels as if there is something missing from my real world understanding of the problem which – if only I could lay my finger on the 'something' – would deepen my understanding of ‘the problem’ in a way that would enable real world people to reframe what the problem is and in so doing either solutions become self-evident to those involved, or the reframing opens new avenues for exploring possible solutions.  

My starting problem: public involvement in policy making excludes so many people, either because they choose not to get involved or because the way it's done excludes them. 

  

Complicated 

The usual doctoral approach would be classed as ‘complicated’. I would pick an academic lens from within one or possible two academic disciplines through which to inspect the problem. 

I tried that. It was called trying to use social policy ideas and standard social research methods to create a new method or technique that would deal with the problem of exclusion. 

It failed. 

Restarting

I restarted, having realised it was a bit more complex and would need some sociological thinking to work out a way to understand and explain why just producing a better method wouldn't solve the problem.

That didn't work fantastically well either. 

Chaos 

Instead my approach became to pluck ideas, facts, research findings and language from across academia as they seem relevant or potentially relevant to informing my understanding of a real world problem. 

This has led to my sitting in an uncomfortable but essential extended chaotic phase, as the fragments grew from multiple branches of academia as apparently disparate as quantum physics, socio-linguistics, creative media studies and social policy. Each attempt to grasp and organise the fragments into something recognisable as a complex system failed, until I was stopped in my tracks by an expression of complexity theory that made sense to me and gave me a vocabulary to communicate with those inside and outside academic. I found I could use complexity theory to make sense of the original real world problem and the academic problems I had created for myself by trying to made academia revolve around the ‘real world’ whilst being located within the academic world.   

  

Complexity 

And thus, as predicted by complexity theory (and physical chemistry!), my chaotic fragments of knowledge are beginning to align and self-organised themselves into something approximating a complex system. 

In other words, I am at a stage of assembling everything into a form that makes sense (in my mind) of the original problem, and which I think I can use to explain the original problem in a way that will make sense to at least some of those involved in the practical tasks of policy making.

One principle with qualitative data analysis is checking that the participants, or an advisory group of those sharing characteristics with the participants, can recognise the academic’s interpretation of their knowledge as being a valid way of interpreting the phenomenon. It does not require the participants to agree with the interpretation, merely to be able to recognise their knowledge of the phenomenon after their knowledge has been analysed and written.   For me, this approach is currently providing an essential check for how I have used the academic knowledge plucked from across disciplines. I need to ask myself “Do academics from within those disciplines I have ‘raided’ recognise that my interpretation of their knowledge has legitimacy?”. 

Receiving the answer 'No' was a significant personal fear - until I added the work of Deleuze and Guattari into my complex system.  They took from what is rightly the academic property of botany (a rhizome and a tree) and used what they took in a way that would never be recognised as legitimate by an academic botanist. I acknowledge to fellow academics that I may have done the same in the course of my doctorate. By going broad, I have not been able to go as deep as I would have wished in relation to some of the concepts I have assimilated. It may be that I have mis-used them in relation to their original academic discipline. However what I have done with them all is doing great service in making sense a problem in a way that makes sense to the people who are living with the problem.

  

End point 

(or, as Deleuze might call it, the InterMezzo, a kind of pause where things are sufficiently in place to attempt to communicate them)The end of a doctorate is a thesis that meets the assessment criteria required to earn the writer a doctorate and the right to be known as Dr Collis.
What I will seek to present as my thesis is an example of what can be done when the deeply significant and vital expert work of academics within their specialised disciplines is laid out and put at the disposal of a real world approach to solving a real world wicked problem.  

And to underline that, the right hand page of my printed thesis will be written for an academic audience. The left hand page will be a version of what it says on the right hand side that is written for that proverbial 'man on the street' - in my case, for my colleagues at Barod, for The Women (four lovely middle aged women who gamely got involved in my research) and for all those people who might get roped into the public involvement activities of universities and policy makers. 

Oh, and there's a modern art assemblage too. But that's a story for another day.