7 minute read

This is lightly edited entry from the reflection journals I’m keeping during this project. It’s not meant to be polished, grammatical, logical, or a representation of my final thinking. I’m posting these as a way to help me stay somewhat accountable for staying-with-the-trouble I’ve created for myself as I work through aspects of this project. Please keep that in mind as you read this.

I’m learning that struggling with questions is, for me, maybe the point of a research-creation project.

Right now I’m asking people to let me interview them, but I keep wondering: why should they talk to me? This morning I read an article about Indigenous approaches to working with Artificial Intelligence. I want to interview the authors, but why should they agree? I’m not a peer in their field. I haven’t gone through the rigour of a Masters and PhD program. I’m not one of their students.

The even bigger question: why am I the person doing this project? What am I bringing to this conversation that is unique?

I worry that I am being parasitical on others scholarship and practice. Or worse, that I am playing at scholarship. A kid wearing a big hat.

I also worry that I am wasting my precious and short six-month sabbatical when I could be doing something easier and taking more time for sleeping, reading, and going for walks.

And yet I wake up at 3am knowing I will not be sleeping again tonight because there is work to be done.

“To work interdisciplinarily has always carried with it certain risks, such as the revelation of incompetence possible when the skills of one discipline prove insufficient in another context. While research-creation carries these same risks, it raises the stakes significantly. […] It is to allow oneself to take on the risk of insufficiency without letting oneself off the hook for accountability.” Natalie Loveless - How to Make Art at the End of the World A Manifesto for Research-Creation - annotations

This project has many threads: art, design, craft, pedagogy, history and philosophy of science, anthropology, Indigenous ways of knowing, culture studies, science and technology studies, etc.

There is so much room to feel insufficient.

One lesson I learned when I was a health science librarian was to not try to pretend to an expert in whatever health science or practice I was working with at the time. It was far more effective to openly admit that I wasn’t an expert, that I would be relying on their expertise, and then explain what I was interested in in my area of expertise. Acknowledging others’ expertise, and even making a little fun of myself in the process, seemed to loosen up others’ willingness to accept my expertise as valuable.

Anyway, what am I not? (or maybe: what isn’t in my bag?)

  • I’m not a disciplinary researcher
  • I’m not a designer or artist
  • I’m not, really, a maker

What am I then?

  • I’m an academic librarian
  • I’m someone who has always loved exploring technology while also having a lot of complicated feelings about the politics of technology
  • I’m someone who feels reborn after spending time in nature
  • I’m someone who runs a technology learning space with very specific pedagogies and values, but most importantly (for me) autonomy, play, and experimentation.

And maybe here, between these, is a good place to find the answer to what I bring to this work that is unique.

Starting with the negative list:

  • I’m not a disciplinary researcher:
    • I don’t have a specific disciplinary perspective, approach, lens, etc.
    • I do not need to respect disciplinary boundaries. I can be open to ideas, students, collaborators from anywhere.
    • I do not see my job as adjudicating users’ disciplinary approaches or conclusions.
    • I’m also not particularly interested in spending my career writing papers or doing research.
  • I’m not a designer or artist:
    • I’m not a designer or an artist. I really respect what artists and designers do and I know that even when I do things that look like they are trying to be art or design, I’m doing them without the intent, practices, and rigour of professional designers and artists. That is true even though I’m a) influenced by what I learn from them, and b) sometimes proud of what I have made.
  • I’m not a maker
    • I’ve always been more interested in the pedagogical aspects of making than making itself. When I do make things, I tend to do them poorly and just to prove that I can.
    • Objects are not really the point to me, what people learn and the stories they create about themselves and the future are what I am mostly interested in.
    • Because I am not object focused, the technologies themselves are not really important to me. I do not get bogged down in the specifics. I am not an enthusiast for any tools or technology specifically.

The positive list:

  • I’m an academic librarian
    • My interests are in helping people access and use information to learn and achieve their goals.
    • I believe in access to information and technology for everyone. Without being able to really justify it, I think information and technology use are pretty essential qualities of all humans throughout time and should be generally accessible to everyone with very few restrictions.
    • I’m intellectually promiscuous and pragmatic: I do not care where my tools, stories, rhetorical devices, pedagogies, ideas, etc. come from as long as they work.
  • I’m someone who has always loved exploring technology
    • Following Le Guin, I believe that technology is “the active human interface with the material world” and a fundamental part of being human. Technology is not just fancy expensive equipment, technology is cooking and beading and gardening.
    • A critical and applied ability to understand and use technology is important for our ability to be free, especially as technologies of control/domination become omnipresent.
  • I’m someone who feels reborn after spending time in nature (with caveats)
    • Though I grew up in nature, I do not come naturally to being in nature. In many ways due to health I felt alienated from nature for most of my adult life.
    • I increasingly feel that the disconnections between my work with technology and the time I spend in nature are artificially disconnected.
    • My general interest and undergraduate education in Science and Technology Studies has always made me question the divides we create between us and nature, as well as the “cleanliness” of the stories we tell about nature and technology.
  • I run a technology learning space with very specific pedagogies and values
    • All the usual things apply about learning by doing, etc. etc. etc.
    • One of the things I value the most is autonomy: that what learners do in our space is based on their interests and that they are free to choose what to do and how to learn with as few constraints as possible.
    • I value play, experimentation, and a little silliness. I want care and personality. I want to see lots of thinking and lots of creation.

Synthesis

==Research-creation, understood in this way, is a practice of love. It is an erotic, driven, invested practice.== And, as such, it fails to fit into those models that see interdisciplinarity as a way to streamline and multiply research productivities. It is too disruptive for that. Research-creation follows desire, and builds spaces and contexts that allow the time and space to experiment in unpredictable directions. Natalie Loveless - How to Make Art at the End of the World A Manifesto for Research-Creation

Silly to call this a synthesis, but whatever:

  • Like a lot of librarians I stand on threshold(s) between different disciplines and interests. Information science, science and technology studies, critical theory, design, art, ecology, philosophy, etc. (I’m also a carrier bag/carried).
  • What I do bring is an orientation towards the alignment of these domains / a specific arangement of connections/strings between areas.
  • My lack of disciplinary focus and my belief in the value of autonomy in pedagogical spaces means I am not necessarily interested in imposing a stance on anyone. Like the carrier bag itself, the goal is to create space for others to determine what they want to gather and carry as technology-makers, kin-makers, etc.
  • The fact that I keep waking up at 3 am to work as well as the excruciating feeling of insufficiency I have is maybe a signal that I’m working in the right space to bring about what Natalie Loveless refers to as the erotic, driven, invested practice of love that underlies the value of research-creation.

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