Post/graduate Network Webinar: 'Desire in the Field', 2011

The webinar for this workshop is downloadable below.

'Desire in the Field'

By Amanda Thomas (PhD candidate), Gradon Diprose (PhD candidate), and Renee Rushton (MDS candidate) – Victoria University

Abstract: A lot has been written within geography about the need to reflexively consider one’s own position when undertaking research. This is linked to the increasingly prevalent view that ‘research’ is a co-constituted process which involves the respondent and researcher participating in the construction of meaning. Yet, curiously there has been relatively limited discussion around the role of the erotic and emotions in the research process. In this presentation we each share an experience to illustrate the complex ways in which sexual encounters with research participants can affect the research process. Through a discussion of these stories we show how sexual and erotic encounters both shaped the research process and unsettled the way we understood and performed our own gendered sexuality and how these ideas intersect with our understandings of what it means to be a ‘good researchers’. Through this presentation we hope to initiate a wider discussion around how as researchers we uncertainly embody and perpetuate specific discourses through our gendered performances which have implications for how we understand ourselves as researchers and how others understand us.

Post/graduate Network Webinar: 'Methodologies and the Production of Knowledge', May 2011

The three webinars delivered to the workshop are downloadable below.

“Using autobiography to examine the spaces and politics of weight loss”

By Professor Robyn Longhurst

Abstract: Autobiography involves the researcher narrating his or her own life. It shares much in common with biography, ethnography, and autoethnography. All three aim to provide a rich account of human experience. Despite this autobiography has not yet gained widespread respect in the discipline of geography. This seems to be an opportunity missed since an autobiographical methodology can produce powerful writing. In this presentation I discuss my use of autobiography as a methodology for examining my experience of weight loss dieting. Weight gain and loss is something that has had a dramatic effect on my life. I use it therefore to think critically about the intersection between my personal and academic selves, selves which are not separable.

“The space in between: refocusing the ‘focus group’ through Kaupapa Māori”

By Naomi Simmonds

Abstract: In this paper, I discuss the use of wānanga (translated as a space to meet, share and discuss) as a method used as part of my PhD research. The wananga falls into a space of betweeness in a number of ways. It neither entirely fits the conventions of a focus group nor of more participatory ‘group’ methods. Those who participated did not always fit the criteria for participants who engaged in the research as individuals. My involvement was fluid as I moved in and through my roles as researcher, participant, mother, daughter, and descendant of the Marae at which it was held. It is this betweeness then that I want to discuss and argue that it is through this in between space that the traditional researcher/researched relationship, and the inherent power within these relationships, can be transformed.

“Emotion, affect and digital storytelling methodology”

By Elaine Bliss

Abstract: Digital stories have been described AS ‘audiovisual anecdotes’ and ‘multimedia sonnets’ due to the dual emphasis on digital technologies and traditions of oral storytelling. They are a mix of the storyteller’s own voice (narration) and still and moving images taken from personal collections and/or ac

cessed from the Internet. Digital stories, as I define them, and are normally created through a workshop process. In my PhD thesis I argue that emotion and affect in digital storytelling are relational, performative and transformative, and describe how this shapes subjectivity in digital storytelling workshops. For this presentation I will briefly illustrate my argument using an example from one of my case studies.

NZGS Post/graduate Network Workshop, NZGS National Conference, Christchurch 2010.

Two of the postgraduate workshop presentations at the 2010 event are available to download below.

Peyman Zawar-Reza, Few but ripe, NZ Geographical Society Conference -Postgraduate Workshop 2010

M Riley, The PhD and after... some personal reflections, NZ Geographical Society Conference -Postgraduate Workshop 2010