The Story of Research

At the end of May I presented at a one-day symposium on reading and writing research at the Sussex Institute at the University of Sussex called ‘The Story of Research’. 

The first keynote ‘Representing Lived Experience: Making Principled Decisions’ by Professor Andrew Sparkes, was interesting and relieving in equal measure. 

The questions he posed which I particularly noted:

• How are you going to write it?
• How are you going to represent it?
• Be explicit about what you are doing and why!
  • Scientific / Realist / Confessional / Autoethnography / Poetic / Ethnodrama / Ethnographic fiction / Creative fiction/mixed genres
• How do you judge them?
• Narrative Poetry – Learning through the power of language
• Who do you want legitimacy from?
• (RAE as farce)
• Think about who we are when we are writing.

The talks were fun, although I regretted attending the second keynote as it resulted in an unfortunate coffee-spilling incident.   (Yes, I knocked it everywhere and over others.)