Introducing my research

My research project is an historical ethnography of working-class women's experiences of education in a former coalmining town. But it's also about more than that. I want to explore what it means to live, learn and work in one place - one place that has its own stories, but which is also talked about in the stories of others. 

I'm an interdisciplinary researcher and I draw on Doreen Massey's work on space and place in my study. For Massey, a place is 'a simultaneity of stories-so-far' (Massey, 2005, p.32). It is these stories - overlapping and contrasting - that I am looking for in my research. Alongside Massey, I use Bourdieu's work to consider how places simultaneously shape and are shaped by the social world. How does the organisation of specific places link to social class or gender? Why are some places seen as 'nicer' than others? How are places shaped by people over time? How are people shaped by places? 

I am shaped by the place where I grew up. Sometimes it feels as though its name is stamped on some hidden part of me. I live on the same road that my great-grandmother is buried on, the same road as my old primary school, the same road I walked down as a child countless times. I've always been obsessed with place - even before I stumbled into postgraduate study. When I was working as a secondary school teacher (at the secondary school I had attended myself - where else!?), I organised a poetry competition on the theme of  'a sense of place'. I arranged for a performance poet to visit the school and felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as his poetry pulled together the threads of his home city, twisted them into something new, and shared them with us in our school theatre. 

When I look backwards at my journey into educational research, things look far neater and tidier than they felt at the time. The patterns I identify, the resonances that I think I feel between past and present, do they really exist or are they part of a story that I tell myself? I have always loved reading and writing. They were my only childhood hobbies - I've never really done anything else. Yet I am painfully shy -  a secretive writer who rarely shares anything for fear of rejections, objections, or repercussions. I'm not sure how I feel about admitting that I am so often frightened.  

I want to use this blog as a place to archive my thoughts and feelings as I carry out this project. A PhD is as much about the process as the product, and it is all too easy to lose our 'stories-so-far' as researchers, recasting them for deadlines and conference papers as a neat set of steps from start to end. I hope that, by writing here regularly, I will be able to remember the different threads of the research process before they become knotted together into something 'finished'. I also hope that I can slowly push back against my fears by sharing some writing in a 'public' space.

  

Photo by K15 Photos on Unsplash