The X-Factor

Abstract

This article addresses practices of reflexivity, drawing on a number of stimuli, including Zizek’s formulation of Lacan’s “prisoners game,” whereby different circumstances generate a typology of reflexive responses from the prisoners in their competitive efforts to win freedom. The article also draws on reflexive performances based on literature and in history, and more extensively on the art of Rene Magritte. These various reflexive performances are then related to the reflexive “praxes” of the authors’ doctoral study. We conclude that reflexivity is always part of a necessary uncertainty, whose “remainder” between the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, generates an inescapably qualitative symbolon.

Deconstructing the Intercultural Learning of a Doctoral Group Undertaking Qualitative Research—Or how not to do a ‘White PhD’

“…Knowing English but not well enough to feel competent at doctoral-level intellectual tasks; there is a flavour of the French/Flemish incomprehension there. Third, there is the remedy of a sort of 'radical equality': The doctoral group is, I think, the only one in the country (in education at least) where the group publishes before its members complete their doctorates (Frankham et al, 2014;Stronach et al, 2013) and which acts together as a thinking group, rather than stays in its 'doctoral silo'. Fourth, there is an attempt at breaking the hierarchies of institutionalised knowledge that Jacotot and Rancière criticised, which takes us back to the business of calling the 'Professor', 'Mark'.…”

“Hello Central, Give Me Doctor Jazz”: Auto/Ethnographic Improvisation as Educational Event in Doctoral Supervision

“…The group was not the first to note that improvisation is important in the research supervision process (Frankham et al, 2013;Grant, 2010;I. Stronach et al, 2013).…”

“…Concerned much more with the educational in 'educational research', we strive for invention instead of patterned repetition. Through our reflexive negotiations we have given recognition to our thinking, breathing, erring selves involved in the process of research (Frankham et al, 2013) and what these selves might contribute to our learning. As a result our "technique" was conversational and interactiveimprovised.…”

“…The group was not the first to note that improvisation is important in the research supervision process (Frankham et al, 2013; Grant, 2010; Stronach et al, 2013). Our (non-)method is also an attempt to do something different from other more accepted approaches to qualitative/interpretive research that are more procedural in their search of categories and themes.…”