Coping with Complexity in Social Research: An Organic Experience: Dr. Merryn Smith Plymouth University

1. Coping with Complexity in Social Research: An Organic Experience: Dr. Merryn Smith Plymouth University My ‘organic’ experiential journey Study 1) The Hindmarsh Island Affair The powerful place of emotions Emotion: ‘Product’ of historical processes: short and yes and long answer yes with a very big but Study 2) The fertile subject Kate and Jenny A supple approach Conclusion Warning: interview accounts are emotional and may be upsetting for some people to hear

2. View of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge from the Goolwa wharf South Australia .

3. ‘Actor Network Theory, Coping with Complexity and the Hindmarsh Island Affair (Kumarangk)’ 2002 Honours Thesis (Wikipedia) The Hindmarsh Island bridge controversy(ITALICS MINE) Australian legal & political controversy (racial/cultural/emotional/human rights?) involving the clash of Indigenous Australianreligious beliefs & property rights. A proposed bridge to Hindmarsh Island was intended to replace an existing ferry service so a marina could be developed (joining the Island with the mainland) this attracted opposition from many local residents, environmental groups and indigenous leaders. In 1994, women Elders of the Ngarrindjeri tribe claimed the site was sacred to them for reasons that could not be revealed (spoken ). (For the Ngarrindjeri women the Island and the main land should never be joined) "Secret Women's Business", as the group's claims became known, became the subject of intense legal battles. Some Ngarrindjeri women came forward to dispute the veracity of the claims (‘Hybrid’ Identities – women who many Ngarrindjeri said no longer spoke the secrets). The Hindmarsh Island Royal Commission found that "secret women's business" had been fabricated (no ‘evidence’ could be produced on behalf of the Ngarrindjeri women from anthropological archives ‘documenting’ the existence of women’s secrets...) . Subsequently, the Howard Government passed the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Act (1997), which allowed construction to go ahead. The bridge was completed in March 2001.

4. Problems With Analysis: What to do with emotion? ‘Actors’ in a complex network: Yes, but an emotional network! Australian ‘govt’: calling on racist discourse to produce emotion (positioned as truth/fact) – as a power strategy to undermine other forms of knowing (they’re hopeless and can’t be trusted, they’re irrational and emotional) The importance of emotion in the social, in the network Emotion bound up with power coursing through the body politic The power of emotion? Emotional power? Powerful emotion?

5. Rationality and Emotion Theory and research often relies on a rational unitary construction of subjectivity (cogito/person – ‘I’ think therefore I am). Producing binary logic (Cartesian legacy Mind/Body (the body is not ‘I’ – ‘I’ do not feel therefore I am) The production of separate expertise Biology & Psychiatry – Sociology & Psychology Sensation and sensations are divided according to a dichotomous logic’, such as ‘active/passive, masculine/feminine, along with other dichotomies which exile the body from its organisation in a whole and from its incarnation through words’ (Irigaray, 2004, p. 18). Ngarrindjeri bodies are not separate from the land, universe or whole nor are they separate from words. Koori ‘dreamtime’ connects the incarnation of all things with the creation of naming – place and name are the same ‘existing in harmony’

6. Emotions: products of historical processes (the extra discursive ‘stuff’)? Rose’s (1999) understanding of Foucault’s ‘care of the self’ offers a very contained account of how the autonomous unitary ‘I’ subject is a ‘fiction’ embedded in a complex of historical material and discursive processes. Any mention or reference to the ‘experience’ of an unconscious or ‘interiority’ then is ‘counter-productive’ (at best). Where does this leave us with emotion? What does this offer us in relation to the Hindmarsh Island Affair? A by product of historical processes – the internalisation of external social ‘discourse’

7. The Affectual Turn Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody (2001): While the experience of an unconscious or interiority is often thought to be ‘one of the significant psychological fictions of the twentieth century in the Foucauldian sense, this fiction non-the-less functions as truth. Further, this fiction operates in ways that are central to the complex social, cultural and psychological dynamics of people today as: “[w]e are created as modern subjects with an interiority and it is through that interiority that we live our emotions. [The] aim here, then, is to recognise the powerful place of those emotions in producing the very practices and subjects we are talking about. Such emotionality is completely absent from the hyper-rationality of Foucault and his ‘Other’,” (Walkerdine et al, 2001, p. 176).

8. Study: The Fertile Subject: A Psycho-social Exploration of Professional Femininities Qualitative study, interviews with 12 Australian women (32 – 45), self identified as ‘professional’ single, married, de-facto, mothers, childless/free, working class, middle class, IVF, various ethnic backgrounds, all identified as hetero-sexual Critical Psychology, Feminist Post-structuralism, Governmentality Studies Narrative & Discourse Analysis, New Femininities, Subjectivity

9. Kate M: “Would you eventually go back to work?” KATE: “Um, well I don’t know. I dream about resigning everyday. I wish I could - because I like being at home and um, you know, I have friends who don’t like being at home but I actually do like being at home and they’ve got kids and they stay at home because they like - They are financially in a position where they can stay at home, okay it is a bit tough from time to time, but they enjoy that and that’s what they want to do. And I have other friends who um, who have had kids and they just think they’ve got to get back to work because they don’t enjoy the staying at home parts”. (note: Kate became sad here, she seemed to struggle and stop) M: “Yeah (said in tone to offer an end to the discussion)”. KATE: “Yeah, they need the social interaction you know, all those sorts of things from work as well, I mean it’s you know, I often think about people who work from home, how isolating that would be. You know, if you want to have a cup of coffee who do you talk to? Like the dog or something”. (note: Kate seemed flustered and upset here, we sat and I felt a bit useless as I could only offer her a smile)

10. Jenny Jenny: “The reason I will only work three days is mainly because of how it builds up at home, by the end of my three days, I work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Thursday night we have got soccer training as well, ... it is pay day and the fridge is getting empty and you want to go and do your shopping, you know, the kids want to get videos the next night. So yeah, you just end up on catch up with all the washing. It is mainly the washing. Because you know it starts getting dark early by the time you get home. It is dewy and damp again. I don’t believe in hanging washing out in the dark I think that is oppressive. Yeah. It’s a um an indicator, life is you know not as relaxed as it should be. Doing the washing in the dark. It’s just one of my personal indicators. I used to have a neighbour, there was only her and husband, the others had left home. They both worked full time and she would be there hanging out the washing in the dark and I would think why? You know, …You shouldn’t have to. It is cold. Wet washing on your fingers in the dark, it is horrible. It is just oppressed. Well I am sure she had her reasons but yeah. So I try and keep a check on yeah how organised I am”. (note: Jenny became quite angry during this account and teary eyed, I reached over to offer her my hand and she smiled but did not take it)

11. Kate and Jenny For Kate and Jenny, motherhood is associated with a loss of individuality, selfhood and autonomy. Importantly, practices associated with the normative role of mothering, i.e. housework and at home childcare, are constituted as potentially emotionally damaging. It is through fantasies of isolation that the women in this study made their fears of such a loss intelligible. We are thus able to appreciate how imagining what it would feel like having coffee with your dog or hanging out the washing at night is a way of coping with the fear of being ‘other’ and isolated. Here we can see the complex ways emotional experience is connected with the effects of political power

12. A Supple Approach Unstructured Interviews, resisting the urge to heavily code: Emotions need to remain located within stories where ‘variable daily actions, fantasies and narrations’ (Driver, 2005) and where ‘the social, cultural and psychological are so strongly entwined with each other that a disciplinary teasing apart does violence to the actual mechanism’ (Walkerdine et al, 2001). It is the fantasies and desires - the transformations (the fears, the guarding against) experienced by Kate and Jenny and the femininities produced through these that is central here. Participants’ narrative statements are treated here as instances of discourse whilst paying careful attention to the patterns of fantasy and defence, hope and longing of what people longed to be and what they guarded against being

13. Supple Approach cont: The focus here is on the chronological and temporal aspects within the subjects’ narratives, mapping out how each participant tells her story during each interview, emphasising the location of events, places and utilisation of anecdote and metaphor to do so (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000). Substantial sections of participant’s narrative accounts show the connective points within and between women’s accounts -fore-grounding connection as well as locating contradiction. The researched and the researcher are viewed to mutually constitute the ‘data’ within this framework, in a relational and dynamic process that seeks to ‘de-centre and disperse the knowing one’ (Spillers, 2003, p. 427).

14. Conclusion As both of these accounts demonstrate; we must ‘open up the fantasies, the meaning structures and psychic consequences of people’s needs and strivings’ if we are to appreciate the complexity of their lives (Harris, 1997). Adopting a supple approach can encompass the delicate interplay in which subjects’ complex emotions (desires, fears, defences, investments and resistance) are arranged within a biography and are bound up with the complex positions participants ‘take up’ in the production of narrative accounts (Hollway and Jefferson, 2000).