I have been taking the last few days as a moment of self-care. For me, this has meant to stop pressuring myself to be producing outputs - especially writing and planning - and instead take some time to dive back into reading and learning from other academics that are using arts-based research methodologies, new materialist paradigms, and activism in their work. It is often through engaging with others, whether through talking or reading, that I realised I find myself feeling excited and ready to make and create again.
One article I was reading, Jennifer Greene's (2013, 755) critical response to (post)qualitative scholars, in which she demands more attention to researchers' responsibilities within the (post)qualitative shift to decentring the "I" of the researcher, used the term "ferment":
"The past half-century in social science has been a time of considerable ferment and revolution."
As I was sat reading whilst also sipping on some homemade kombucha, this word really hit me. I began to consider how not only are these movements towards (post)qualitative, new materialist, action-informed, and arts-based methodologies a result of crowds of researchers fermenting ideas and critical disillusionment with concurrent social science, the very act of reading and thinking before attempting to produce was also allowing my own beliefs to ferment.
I considered the process of making kombucha, with its several steps, its time commitment, and its opportunities for variation, and considered that it might be a helpful metaphor for the process I am currently going through in which I hope to develop deeply meaningful and effective health research methodologies. On another level, choosing this metaphor felt like a powerful stance to defend the significance of self-care for academics and anyone conducting research, as kombucha supports our gut microbiome which has been to shown to help multiple forms of health and wellbeing (you can find the research all over the internet). It is too easy to feel pressured into constant productivity - in a traditional sense of writing articles, perhaps - when sometimes it is in allowing ideas to ferment that the best developments grow.
Today I made a new zine. It simultaneously explores the process of making kombucha, that should be easy enough to follow for a beginner, and the process of developing, enacting, and evaluating new methodologies from the perspective of a feminist new materialist zine-maker.
It seeks to remain open for application to multiple contexts and offers one response to Greene's (2013, 754) request for methodologies that
"engage my body, my material positionality, or my values in the daily spaces I occupy."
I hope you enjoy. For physical copies, please contact me to arrange for a printable PDF to be emailed to you.
Reference:
Greene, Jennifer C. 2013. On Rhizomes, Lines of Flight, Mangles, and Other Assemblages. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26(6): 749-758
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