Seriously? Taking Pleasure in Being a Resident Researcher
By David Skinner 19/11/24
This project has been unlike any other I have been involved in. This is in part because it is so close to home; I am rooted in Cambridge and live close to the campus. The sociologist Nirmal Puwar discussing her work in her hometown of Coventry makes sense of this position by distinguishing between being a ‘writer in residence’ and ‘the writer as resident’. Being a Writer as Resident “is simultaneously both a grounded and privileged point of being in space which can lend itself to independent thinking, without swallowing the fantasy of an outer-space viewer.” In my experience being a resident researcher is a privilege, but it also comes with a particular sense of responsibility. The usual requirements on social scientists to do no harm, to acknowledge all voices, and ensure a good participant experience take on a new immediacy.
Alongside this responsibility has also come enjoyment. While we approached the project with our own priorities and prejudices, our intention has been to sustain an attitude of open-mindedness. In this we hope that our work is critical but also constructive. I was struck by Olivia Laing’s discussion (in her 2020 collection Funny Weather) of Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s distinction between ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ readings of a situation. The paranoid reader is driven by the “the need to predict and prepare for disaster” and puts their faith in exposing hidden injustices and forms of violence “believing if the awful truth is only reached, it will automatically be transformed”. Laing suggests that this position can be both cynical and “weirdly naïve” and instead asserts the potential of a reparative approach which seeks possibilities and connections even in the most unpromising of circumstances.
“[A reparative reading] might be engaged in resistance, or concerned with producing some other reality altogether, but it’s driven by a seeking of pleasure rather than an avoidance of pain – which isn’t to say that it’s any less attentive to the grim realities of loss and oppression” (p115).
Our project explores many things, but one is what such a reparative stance might entail. Laing’s reference to pleasure might seem frivolous but gels with our experience. A Sense of Place embraces topics of deadly seriousness but has also generated and, at points, required enjoyment and playfulness.
The notion of research as repair resonates with me on a personal level. The project came to life following a period of serious ill-health and professional soul searching. In its design I deliberately sought an experience that allowed me to do things that I wanted to do more of - being out in the fresh air, walking and cycling, collaborating with other academics, communicating social science to new audiences, participating in my local community, using different kinds of reading material, and meeting new people. The project has been hard work and challenging at points, but it has also been a lot of fun. I am not sure why I feel somewhat embarrassed to admit this. Will and I have particularly enjoyed the active ‘making and doing’ aspects of the project that have stretched our conventional social researcher skill sets: developing, rehearsing, and perfecting our guided walks; the construction of posters and the website; collecting and making props and visual aids to be used during the walks. For these walks to be successful they have to be an engaging experience, and we hope that the fun we have had is shared by our fellow walkers.
Much of the enjoyment we derive from the project comes from its companionability. Rebecca Solnit described her ground-breaking history of walking Wanderlust (2000) as “… in part an exploration of the circumstances on which culture, contemplation and community are possible and of the embodied and geographically grounded basis of thinking and imagining” (p34). Many of the benefits of on the move methods come not just through an enhanced relationship to place but also by developing this through the sharing of experience and knowledge. The sociologist Paul Atkinson in Thinking Ethnographically (2017) suggests that “the greatest (perhaps the only) pleasure of being a social scientist is to explore and investigate the social world at first hand” (p.16). The pleasure (that word again) that Atkinson identifies lies in curiosity, but also in sociability and the ‘randomness’ of social connections and experiences. Walking and talking with others generate results that were the antithesis of the internal monologue of the lone intellectual flaneur: conviviality and conversation are (returning to Laing) often counters to the unreliable or paranoid judgements of the lonely.