Situated Writing as Theory and Method

The Untimely Academic Novella

Mona Livholts

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367787738
• eBook ISBN: 9781000692617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This creative and original book develops a framework for situated writing as theory and method, and presents a trilogy of untimely academic novellas as exemplars of the uses of situated writing.

It is an inter- and trans-disciplinary book in which a diversity of forms are used to create a set of interwoven novellas, inspired by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory and literary fiction, along with narrative life writing genres such as diaries and letters, memory work, poetic writing, and photography. The book makes use of a politics of location, situated knowledges, diffraction, and intersectionality theories to promote situated writing as a theory and method for exploring the complexity of social life through gender, whiteness, class, and spatial location.

It addresses writing as an inter- and trans-disciplinary form of scholarship in its own right, with emancipatory potential, emphasising the role of writing in shaping creative, critical, and reflexive approaches to research, education, and professional practice. It is useful for researchers, teachers, postgraduate and PhD students in feminist and intersectionality studies, narrative studies, and pursuing interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities, social sciences, design, and the arts to inspire a theory and method for situated writing.

Read the December 2019 issue of Reading Writing Quarterly, where Mona Livholts reads Hélène Frichot and Hélène Frichot reads Mona Livholts: https://site-readingwritingquarterly.co.uk/december-2019

Part I

Situated writing as theory and method

1 The whys and hows of situated writing as theory and method

Why was this book written? What previous writings made it possible, and what are the main points of departure for situated writing as theory and method? In the introduction to the edited book, Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies (Livholts 2012a: 1), I write that it seems timely that it is published during springwinter, vårvinter,¹ a seasonal shift in the geographical space of the mid-Sweden area that blurs the contours of two established seasons, winter and spring. I thought of this as an in-between-ness that also characterised the contribution of that book, written by members of the network for Reflexive Academic Writing (RAW) that I founded and led during the years 2008–2017. My own experiences of being untimely/out of place in academic life led me to create that space for collaboration, performances, and networking, together with academics, professionals, and activists. In line with Richardson’s (1994: 927) argument: ‘How we are expected to write affects what we can write about’, I argued that creativity and analytical reflexivity fall flat under the pen of the dry, distanced author in research and academic writing. The potential to create new knowledge that opens up space for multiple voices, that opens up opportunities for diversity and promoting critical and analytical reflexivity, is greater if diverse languages and genres are brought into use. In the RAW network, we connected voicing, narration, gender and intersections of power with writing as an inventive force to promote sustainable academic futures. I conceptualise the reshaping of knowledge as post/academic writing, characterised by inclusivity, untimeliness, and intersectionality (Livholts 2008, 2012a, 2012b; see also Livholts 2009).

The term situated writing was first introduced in the book Discourse and Narrative Methods where we, Livholts and Tamboukou (2015: 194–195), defined it as ‘[…] a methodological strategy that combines feminist theorising of situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) and writing as a methodological tool (Livholts 2012)’. Thus, we proposed that situated writing is grounded in feminist philosophies and theories of situated knowledges, but replaced the concept of knowledge with writing to encourage a diversity of ways to theorise and practise methods of situated writing. We argued that diffraction is very useful as a strategy to promote reflexivity, and in Part III of our book, we write about how diaries and letters, memories and images, and the untimely academic novella are all useful as forms of situated writing. Against this background, this book Situated Writing as Theory and Method: The Untimely Academic Novella is both a forerunner and a successor to Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies (Livholts 2012) and Discourse and Narrative Methods: Theoretical Departures, Analytical Strategies and Situated Writing (Livholts & Tamboukou 2015).

Questions relating to theory are important in relation to writing, because the transformative power of textual shaping tends to actualise a critique of what ‘counts’ as (feminist) theory (hooks 1989; Stanley & Wise 2000; Grosz 2010; Ahmed 2017). In the above-mentioned book (Livholts 2012a: 6), I argued for the importance of acknowledging: ‘the intimate relationship between academic life and writing as a practice that theorizes and promotes agency and an ethics for change’. Feminist and postcolonial writers have paved the way for a field of writing in which theorising is embodied and writing is formative and border-crossing, emotional, analytically reflective, and open to a multitude of stories (Anzaldúa 1987; Williams 1991; hooks 1997; Richardson 1997; Lykke 2014; Gordon 2015; Ahmed 2017). In her book Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed (2017: 7) suggests that we should think about feminist theory as ‘homework’. She argues that theory is not primarily created in the academy and says: ‘I want to suggest that feminist theory is something we do at home’. The experiences of living a feminist life and theory are intertwined, which means that theorising happens in many different places and relations, at a kitchen table, at a meeting, or in a seminar room. As I show through my untimely academic novellas, situated writing is an artistic practice that takes artefacts as pieces of text as well as visual images, creating mo(ve)ments for change through writing the professor’s chair, the snow angel, and water (cf. Livholts 2018). Ahmed (2017: 3) elaborates upon feminism as movement and writes: ‘We are moved to become feminists’ and ‘Many feminisms mean many movements’. Furthermore, these movements take the shape of water:

I think of feminist action as like ripples in water, a small wave, possibly created by agitation from weather; here, there, each movement making another possible, another ripple, outward, reaching.

In this book, I suggest that we regard theory as homework and as mo(ve)ment; thought, sensed, and practised, through theoretical lenses of situatedness and the diversity of genre forms that narrative life writing offers. Acts of writing and visual images materialise scenes from embodied lives through the writing of memories, poems, letters, diaries, and photography.

A theory and method for situated writing acknowledges the formative character and force of all writing, and resists labelling some writing as alternative or different. To become situated writers, we need to include the whys and hows of writing as part of our practices as engaged researchers and educators. As Coylar (2009: 421) argues, ‘“Why we write” is not often part of our scholarly conversations’. In the book Why I Write, Orwell (1946/2004: 5) suggests that early influences on writing may have something interesting to tell us and that there are all kinds of reasons for writing. These can include egoism, enthusiasm, aesthetic force, sound, beauty, rhythm, a historical impulse of interest in specific events, and a political purpose to ‘push the world in a certain direction’. Situated writers bring with them glimpses of the writers’ rooms and say something about the history, conditions, possibilities and difficulties, the institutional cultures of writing, and the limitations and transgressions that they have faced. With increasing awareness about why we write, we can locate and re-locate the diversity of experiences and forces for writing. Situated writers transgress the science/academic/literary/fiction divides and seek to learn from writers across genres about what writing means to them, about the practices and aesthetics of writing. In a series of public and personal conversations on writing with academic scholars in the fields of gender studies and social work, I learned that writing is contextual, procedural, material, imaginative, hard labour, passionate, and geopolitically framed (Livholts 2009, 2010c).

Situated writers are part of a movement for sustainable futures characterised by creative, dialogical, reflexive, safe, and equal spaces where the research(er) is situated – located, seated, placed, positioned – in mo(ve)ment. I have argued (Livholts 2013: 189) that it is important ‘to employ a situated and passionate writing to awaken the senses and emotions of readers, to “touch” the reader and create engagement for change’. The page is the space where the eye and the vision meet the hands and the words, not merely literally, but also materially and socially in the context of historical memory and contemporary society (Livholts 2018). Neither the writer nor the reader comes to the page with nothing from nothing. In the book On Writing (2000: 106), King writes that ‘you must not come lightly to the blank page’ and makes use of the expression ‘creative sleep’ as a metaphor (King 2000: 156) for writing. Creative sleep illustrates that both writing and sleeping are physical acts ‘encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum of rational thinking of our daily lives’ (ibid.: 157). The message is that writing must be taken seriously, and if we don’t come to writing with feelings, with our imagination, then it is not worth writing at all. This aspect is also emphasised by Stein (1931/1975: IX), who argues that, as writers, what we need to ‘know is that there is no separation between thinking and feeling and the act of writing’. Stein explains that the capability of communicating and understanding what you do has to do with the other person’s capability of doing the same work.

Issues around the multitude of power relations are central to a theory and method of situated writing. It draws on the contributions made by feminist and postcolonial scholarship, which problematised researchers’ locations in relation to intersections such as gender, racialisation, class, heteronormativity, and beyond (hooks 1997; Dahl 2012; Scott 2018). Dahl (2012) illustrates the complexity of writing research when she invites her readers to accompany her on the road to writing, a space where (life) stories unfold, where a search for homecoming occurs, through a writing that emerges from the complexity of locations, through multiple languages in dialogue. From diverse sites of writing, critical explorations of power can be achieved, which in different ways expose the limits of criticism. Rendell (2010: 2) suggests that ‘site-writing’ includes engagement with the material, emotional, political, and conceptual practices of research, ‘asking what is possible for an artist to say about a work, the site of the work and the critic herself and for the writing to still ‘count’ as criticism’. I argue that a situated writer learns about limits and writes to transgress them. Situated writing often exposes the limits of criticism, and at the same time, it can re-situate the work of an author to open up new interactive spaces. If we use writing with creativity and openness to shape knowledge, then it becomes a method of inquiry from which we find out things (Richardson 1994). To be able to reflect analytically upon the levels at work in situated writing as theory and method, I have created a set of questions and concerns in Table 1.1. It is inspired by Harding’s (1987) definitions of epistemology, methodology, and method, and Richardson’s (1994) criteria in ‘Writing – a method of inquiry’. I suggest that this set of analytical questions is helpful in discussing the layers and complexities of situated writing.

Table 1.1 Translations of Situated Writing as Epistemology, Methodology, and Method

A politics of location and translation: diffraktionsskrivande

This book is theoretically grounded in a politics of location and translation to promote situated writing, ‘situerat skrivande’. Inspired by making links between Haraway’s (1988) politics of location, ‘politisk lokalisering’, diffraction (see also Barad 2014), and Spivak’s (1993) politics of translation, ‘översättningspolitik’, I make use of feminist and postcolonial scholarship to promote diffractive writing, ‘diffraktionsskrivande’. Textual and visual compositions shape such writing through language, ‘språk’, embodiment, ‘kroppslighet’, power, ‘makt’, and place, ‘plats’, and promote ways of seeing, ‘sätt att se’. A politics of location contains a complex set of ideas and points of departure and has been the source of inspiration for scholars in feminist, gender, and intersectionality studies for decades. In this book on situated writing, the textual and the visual are intertwined in a politics of location. Situated writing, as it is developed in this book, extends the notion of sustainability to include writing as an embodied and living inquiry contextually tuned in to the geopolitics of institutions, inequalities, autobiographies, languages, and places (Livholts 2015c, 2017). It argues for slow writing to acknowledge unexpected situations, difficulties and failures, as well as creativity and euphoric moments in writing (cf. Bränström Öhman 2010; Ulmer 2017). The untimely academic novellas make use of a politics of location and translation by sitting/seating (in a professor’s chair, a visiting chair, a sofa, on a concrete floor), position/posture (cultural and institutional embodied language, power, and knowledge), spatial location and dis-location (exclusion and inclusion socially and spatially), and un/timeliness (acting outside of the spaces where recognition and position are possible, spaces of misunderstanding and slow death). In untimely academic novella writing, the writer’s narrativity is textually and visually tuned to see and feel specific situations in a process that involves thinking-writing-seeing-reading-feeling as a flow that moves from the furniture of the chair of solid materiality through white corridors and office spaces, to the snow angel with its dissolvable character set in a seasonal and historical landscape of three generations of women’s lives (Livholts 2010a, 2010b, 2013).

One of Haraway’s (1988) key points is the obligation to take responsibility for limiting our knowledge claims and not to speak from privileged positions in a generalising way (see also Mohanty 2003). Situated knowledge demands that the subject of the study is seen as an actor, an agent, and problematises the binary divisions of sex/gender, body/intellect, and so on. Knowledge is always situated and embodied, and it forms the foundations for the argument against unlocalised and irresponsible knowledge that does not account for the knower’s position and ways of seeing. Haraway (1988: 583) talks about embodied vision and ‘specific ways of seeing’, asserting that there should be no invisible positions from which privileged subjects can speak. Thus, vision is used to create critical spaces that challenge dichotomies in language and research. Feminist objectivity is based on how visual systems work – technically, socially, and psychologically – and builds on situational and situated conversation. No subject or seeing position is non-problematic and whole, merely partial. As a narrative reflexive strategy, Haraway (2000: 102) argues that the metaphor of diffraction is useful to avoid a simplistic form for reflexivity that produces more of the same. She writes:

I am interested in the way diffraction patterns record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference. In this sense “diffraction” is a narrative, graphic, psychological, spiritual and political technology for making consequential meanings.

Inspired by Haraway, Barad (2014) elaborates upon diffraction as a theory and method that is both optical and organic, and as such can be used in a multiplicity of ways. It does not cut the world into two, or separate us from them, this from that, but works through intra-action, difference within difference, and Barad (2014: 168) writes: ‘cut together-apart (one move)’. Importantly, diffraction is a phenomenon that troubles dichotomies, rather than erasing them, and Barad (2014: 168) pays attention to the meaning of language:

Diffract – dif-frange ̆re – to break apart, in different directions (as in classical optics)

Diffraction/intra-action – cutting together-apart (one move) in the (re)configuring of spacetimemattering; differencing/differing/ diffe’rancing

Diffraction works in and through memories that Barad calls ‘thick moments’. This way of understanding the moment is different from zooming in on a moment following a determined sequence of events (cf. memory work in Chapter 2). Instead, diffraction challenges narrative coherence and works through time and space in a dynamic way, characterised by the untimely.

Diffractions are untimely. Time is out of joint; it is diffracted, broken apart in different directions, non-contemporaneous with itself. Each moment is an infinite multiplicity. “Now” is not an infinitesimal slice but an infinitely rich condensed node in a changing field diffracted across spacetime in its ongoing iterative repatterning.

(Barad 2014: 169)

An interesting example of how diffraction can be used as a narrative strategy that invites the reader to translate, create, and re-create stories is Ehrnberger’s (2017: 17) study, in which she makes use of diffraction as a research method to write multiple entangled stories through her design practice. ‘I want to offer you my story for the creating of your story’: ‘Jag vill erbjuda dig min berättelse i skapandet av din berättelse’ [Swedish]. As her designer work materialises through the text, she enters into writing, and the reader is invited to enter too, to create their own stories. Another example of a narrative diffractive style is Holmquist (2019) textual and visual narrative method entitled The Production Novella. Through written memories from the design process and photographs from working sites, the novella method forms a language to communicate how globalisation changes the conditions for local industrial production.

Diffractive writing is also intimately intertwined with reading. Jones (2012, 2013) invites the reader to a multitude of time and space moments on a thinking journey Arendt. Moments of reading Arendt, and reading other’s writing about Arendt, are interwoven with memories of traumatic events in the past. This becomes the departure for Jones as a writer to ‘dive into’ the story. She writes (Jones 2012: 58): ‘Reading the book again like a writer, I began to understand what made its narrative so compelling: the storyteller had slipped into the story […]’. Characteristic of Jones’s writing is a diffractive style, composed through historical events, life scenes from the past and present, agency and resistance that seems to be untimely whenever they happen because they go against normative conceptions of what is a woman, what is love, what is possible.

My understanding is that diffraction has much to offer, both as a theory and as a method for situated writing. It re-conceptualises reflexivity by using an inventive approach that is both organic and optical, which can be used by researchers to situate and re-situate their selves, to shift writing positions, to see and see again, and to invite the reader to enter the story and engage in the creating of new knowledge. As Barad (2014) shows, diffraction works through the untimely and through memory. It rejects dichotomies and offers multiple ways of seeing, and its optical and organic characteristics are useful for theorising what can be done through life writing genres such as diaries and letters. In the context of this book, the untimely academic novellas’ textual and visual shaping of snow and water offers diffraction patterns for the kind of ‘narrative, graphic, psychological, spiritual and political technology’ that Haraway (2000: 2) advocates. The snowflake is useful as a prism for narrativity. Snow is created through rainfall when water vapour is cooled to temperatures below zero degrees celsius. They take different shapes due to temperature and wind, from snow star to snowflake, and the movement of snow in the air when falling is aesthetically appealing. Snow is used in untimely academic novella writing to situate the writing body as a temporal imprint in rural space (Livholts 2010b). As the snow angel shifts through shades of whiteness and melts, it re-locates and re-situates the writer through water, entering into s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Tables and figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Aim and organisation of this book
• How to situate and read this book
• PART I Situated writing as theory and method
• Part II A trilogy of untimely academic novellas
• References
• Index