‘Waiting in the chaotic place of unknowing’

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Waiting in the chaotic place of unknowing: articulating postmodernemergenceMargaret J. Somerville aa Monash University , AustraliaPublished online: 18 Apr 2008.

To cite this article: Margaret J. Somerville (2008) Waiting in the chaotic place of unknowing:articulating postmodern emergence, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 21:3,209-220, DOI: 10.1080/09518390801998353

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International Journal of Qualitative Studies in EducationVol. 21, No. 3, May-June 2008, 209220

ISSN 0951-8398 print/ISSN 1366-5898 online 2008 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/09518390801998353http://www.informaworld.com

Editorial

Waiting in the chaotic place of unknowing: articulating postmodernemergence

Margaret J. Somerville*

Monash University, Australia

TaylorandFrancisTQSE_A_300001.sgm10.1080/09518390801998353InternationalJournalof QualitativeStudiesinEducation0951-8398(p rint)/1366-5898 (online)OriginalArti cle2008Taylor&Francis213000000May-June200 [email protected] is just before dawn, that still quiet time before the little birds chirrup at first light. I luxuriatein the silence when no one will call or email or knock on the door. It is a sort of dark emptiness. I am safe in the space of my bed, a cup of tea and the warmth of the laptop on mylegs. I do not yet know what I will write. The song of the little birds rises up as I begin to type,

click click of the keys. Reaching into body memory, half-formed images. Marks appear onthe blank screen, grow into sentences, making meaning. I let them keep on coming until theystop then I can examine them, move them around or erase them all with a slide of the cursor and a click of the delete key.

This introduction to a Special Edition of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education follows a paper in which I proposed a new methodology that I labelled, temporarily,postmodern emergence (Somerville 2007). The reason for seeking to articulate such amethodology was that in educational research generally, and in the available pedagogical

processes for research students in particular, there appeared to be a closing down rather than anopening up of the possibility of generating new knowledge. I wrote about my concern for the

increasing press from supervisors towards standard forms of thesis production that come to stand in for pedagogies of doctoral supervision. This was especially so for those students for whomthere was no choice but a radical alternative methodology, no other way to ask the questions or generate the knowledge with which they were so deeply entwined. In my own research I havenecessarily continued to evolve radical alternative methodologies as the only way to respond tothe postcolonial questions and research conditions in which I find myself. I consider the

processes that support the generation of new knowledge to be important in all research, but itseemed more possible to articulate the qualities, ontology and epistemology of postmodernemergence at the extreme end of a continuum of alternative methodologies.

I proposed an ontology of postmodern emergence that emphasises the irrational, messy and

embodied process of becoming-other-to-ones-self in research. Any process of making newknowledge necessitates opening the self to this process, to the fact that in making new knowledgewe will come to inhabit and know the world differently than we did before. I suggested anepistemology requiring a new theory of representation, as a response to the emphasis on decon-struction in poststructural research and the crisis of representation in ethnography (Denzin and Lincoln 1994). This new theory of representation was based on the idea of a pause in an iterative

process of representation and reflection. Such a pause is constituted when a particular assemblageof forms and meanings comes together as a moment of representation, a temporary stabilitywithin the dynamic flux of meaning-making in (re)search for new knowledge. I understand the

*Email: [email protected]

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210 M.J. Somerville

characteristics of this momentary representation as of the moment rather than timeless, aestheticand pleasurable rather than correct, and intertextual rather than independent in meaning.

I came to this introduction in the same way that I tried to think (then) about postmodernemergence, as a process of wondering and generating. It is a process that cannot begin withlogic but comes from a place of not knowing, informed by intuition and responsiveness. I ask the question: How can I open myself to what I do not yet know? I invited papers from research-ers I met in Australia and overseas who have recently completed doctoral studies or were in the

process of completing doctoral studies. I had responded to their work with my inner ear, the ear that listens to the rhythm of things, to the music that resonates with my desire to know differ-ently. I asked these new researchers to contribute a piece of writing about their research thatresponded in some way to the ideas about postmodern emergence as they were presented in the

published paper.This has not been an easy and seamless process and it seems important to name the silences,

because the spaces of absence reveal as much as the presences. The first absence is a researcher from Japan studying the art form of butoh. Tamah Nakamura contributed the title phrase waitingin the chaotic place of unknowing and also the photo and text that I have included at the end of this introduction. She submitted a draft paper with exciting ideas about coming to know bodilythrough performance in a study that spilled beyond categorical borders through the aware-ness of artistic and aesthetic consciousness and values I brought to my research emerging as anartistic process. Tamah danced, moved and voiced her data and translated it across threescripts in her text Chinese ideographs, romanization of the Japanese text, and English transla-tion. In these research acts, she was concerned with problematizing her own identity as anAmerican long-term resident of Japan:

Waiting in the chaotic place of not knowing, and not knowing when and if I would know, and,

further, not knowing what I would know, while honoring the informants knowledge as greater thanmy own, acknowledges method as a creative process.

I did not know Tamah when we began to correspond about a possible paper. During the courseof our email communications I have come to know the pain of her dissertation:

I recall promising you an article for your upcoming specially themed journal on emerging methods. It was a foolish promise. My self-esteem is below zero right now as I sit in my office daily trying tomake sense of very major dissertation revisions. In the morning everything seems possible but by4 p.m. Im in tears. So I go to the gym and sweat it out with some music in my head and fall into anexhausted sleep. Day after day of this cycle. (Tamah Nakamura, email correspondence)

Tamahs struggle is one we can recognise from our own labours, with the added impact of work-ing from the in-between space of languages and cultures, and of the increasingly hegemonic

practices of research and doctoral standards. In the end she has to withdraw her contribution,struggling to perform a standard doctoral thesis based on the tight logics of academic form:

I am staying with the required argument type of writing and am finding discoveries in the process. However, Ive had to cut all the interesting bits such as the three scripts, etc. I have opened Misc. files, though, where I have saved all the good stuff which is close to my heart. For later someday.(Tamah Nakamura, email correspondence)

Together we hoped that later someday would happen when the good stuff that is close toTamahs heart can emerge. The meaning of the text she has produced will inevitably be limited

by the absence of the textual choreography that opens the reader to the multiple translations of knowledge-making.

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International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 211

Chrissiejoy Marshalls presence also haunts this text. I wrote about Chrissiejoys UAlayimethodology in Postmodern emergence as an Indigenous methodology based in Country, her country of Terewah , or the Narran Lake as non-Indigenous people have named it. I wrote aboutthe sorts of knowledges that cannot be known, or communicated in old forms. Chrissiejoy and Ihad also begun a project about water in the drylands of the Murray-Darling Basin, extending outfrom the Narran Lake to all of the waters that connect throughout that body of water. We wrotea proposal and then she had a car accident that left her in so much pain from a spinal injury thatthe episodes of pain caused white moon-shaped lesions visible in an MRI on her brain, spaceswhere her brain cells were destroyed.

Keeping Chrissiejoy informed, I developed a team of artist/researchers and carried on withthe project, weighed down by our sense of her absence. We planned the trip to the Narran Lakethat Chrissiejoy and I had talked so much about. Much to our surprise, Chrissiejoy turned up,driving several hundred kilometres in a huge four-wheel drive to get there. The Lake, the objectof our trip, was elusive. Each day we searched for the Lake, locked away on private property,hard to gain access to and even harder to find the way into. One day we spent several hoursdriving in circles around the 18-mile paddock, following tracks of sheep, cattle, kangaroos and vehicles in the hard, dry ground, searching in the maze for a track into the Lake. Finally, on our last day, after some phone calls and more searching, we found our way through locked gates toa vast expanse of barren red earth that stretches from horizon to horizon. Is this a lake? Onehundred kilometres around, it must have been a spectacular sight when full of water. I feared Chrissiejoys response, the pain she had likened to viewing a body at an autopsy, not knowingwhether it is better to remember the body as it was in life. I had no idea of what all of this mightmean in the context of our research question about a place pedagogy 1 of the Narran Lake. I wasfilled with the sense of not finding, not knowing and powerful sensory images.

We met again some months later. It was a low point in the project, a time of struggle and

despair. Chrissiejoy brought a painting to show and some words to read to us. She read hesitantly, her speech impaired by her brain damage. The words she read addressed each member of the project team in turn with an individual message. Then she told a story about the greensprouts on the lignum, the dry twiggy bushes that covered one end of the lake near where awatercourse might enter the lake if there were rain. She ended her story with the powerful words:I have come to understand that the Lake is not dead, it is dormant. The painting she broughtwith her showed her sense of the Lake coming alive in a cyclical process of death and renewal.The work of the project, she told us, is to sing the Lake back to life again. I understand whatshe brings to the table through my sense of the place. I can feel the dryness of the drought-

parched land, and the living texture of the green shoots on the lignum. I also understand through

the stories of Chrissiejoys life by the Lake, living within its cycles of wet and dry, and throughour relationship with each other as representative of the larger (post)colonial struggles for land and identity.

I dont necessarily think that all knowledge comes from despair and struggle but in this caseit certainly came from waiting in the chaotic place of unknowing. It came from a deeplyrelational space, a place where the boundaries of self, both physical and metaphysical, are opento other materialities and other knowings. Part of this openness is being in the physical presenceof the Lake. Experiencing the heat and the barrenness, knowing through sensory experience theexact lie of the land, the stretch from horizon to horizon quivering with heat mirage, the dip atone side where water might flow even in times of drought, and the aliveness of the sparse greensprouts on twiggy weeds, knowing that in this greenness lies life. I can hear in my imaginationthe frog calls of milinbu that herald the coming of the water weeks before it arrives. The waitingstories of knowing when the waters are going to come, the small intimate signs of this knowing.Over years of deep intimate knowledge of the rhythms and cycles of change, Chrissiejoy can

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knowledge production. Managing this process led me to consider the ways in which the review process, like thesis examination, is a pedagogical force. Through the process of peer review wesimilarly shape what is possible to write, the forms in which we write, and the content of thatwriting. I began to ask how reviewers, as experienced researchers, contribute to pedagogies of knowledge production as it is represented in the publication of scholarly articles. How does thereview process shape the development of new knowledge?

When I planned this Special Issue I thought it would present the work of newly graduated doctoral students who had employed alternative methodologies and modes of representation.They were invited to respond to the ideas about postmodern emergence in the published paper.I had imagined that the meaning of the articles would be intertextual, that together they would create a conversation of possibilities. I had thought that I might draw out some of these meaningsin the Introduction to enable the further development of these ideas. And that the readers would also contemplate how the papers contribute to this thinking about the emergence of the new. Ithought that this was clear in the invitation that I circulated to the reviewers. I even rewrote theinvitation, but still I was shocked by the responses I received.

While many reviewers expressed their great joy in reviewing these articles, others found thesame papers difficult, even impossible, to review. There is clearly no external measure of whatis suitable for publication. For some, there were personal issues of recognition because of theunusual nature of the contributors research. These personal issues seemed to be haunted by

judgement and a fear of what is different. For others, there seemed to be a need to manage, toregulate, to correct, and to conform. There appeared to be a major compulsion towards perfec-tion. Some reviewers were generous and constructive in the way one might expect of experienced researchers towards new doctoral graduates taking a risk. Others were hostile. Reading throughthe reviewers comments made me aware of how such reviews shape the sort of risks we are

prepared to take, the kind of writing we are prepared to do, and the knowledge we are able to

generate through this writing.Peer review, according to Graue (2006, 36), is at its most powerful when it merges the

gatekeeping and developmental functions. All of the reviews of the peer review process that shesurveys in her paper include comments on the importance of balancing originality and tradition,the emergence of the new and the already-known. There is a general concern that the peer review

process is fundamentally conservative, favouring unadventurous nibbling at the margins of truthrather than quantum leaps. Moreover, the sorts of new knowledge that tend to be excluded ineducational research are voices that traditionally have been marginalised:

[C]ertain voices are being kept out of the conversation, especially voices that traditionally have beenmarginalized in and by the field of educational research. The peer review process often functions asa gatekeeper, weeding out groups that have yet to learn or refuse to conform to prevailing assump-tions about what makes research high quality as well as groups that critique the mainstream, or,more precisely, that indirectly critique the perspectives and practices of the reviewer. (Kumashiroet al. 2005, 285 in Graue 2006, 37)

If we want to include new and alternative knowledges in our scholarly journals, it is importantto regard the review process as pedagogical and to consider it as playing a role in shaping howwe can be in the world and what it is possible to know. This is not to imagine that reviewers havea direct teacherly role in the process of review. This would be to assume too much, that wealready know the knowledge that is being offered. We need to move towards the space of theother, to think about what is being offered and the difficulties of expressing it. To imagine how,as reviewers, we might assist this new knowledge to come into being. If we were to think aboutthe review process in terms of postmodern emergence, we would facilitate the uncertain and theimperfect, the reaching towards, not-quite-there in knowledge production. We could similarly

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apply these understandings to the process of research supervision and approach the process of supervision with an openness to possibilities, not knowing what the endpoint is going to be.

The papers in this collection represent some of the alternative voices and ways of knowingin educational research. The authors grapple with questions of how we can be in the world and what it is possible to know, shapeshifting in the process as they morph into new subject formationsand new research processes. They do not necessarily embrace a poststructural methodology, theone I most closely identify with, but they do all enact an interest in an ontology and epistemologyof the in-between. They operate in a wide range of registers and emphasise different sensorymodalities. Their research is characterised by multiple acts of translation always on the border-line between different forms of representation.

In these multiple acts of translation they take Richardsons writing as a method of inquiry(Richardson 1994; Richardson and St. Pierre 2005) to a new dimension, through their engagementwith other forms of representation such as oral storytelling, painting, dance and conversation. Theyare deeply sceptical of standard forms of academic writing; some are sceptical of all writing, espe-cially in the English language. Some are interested in bending the forms of academic writing and using different forms of writing side by side to generate intertextual meanings. A recurring themeis the absences and silences, the things that cannot be spoken, the in-between spaces that haveno name or are too difficult to name, the private and the shameful. In her body of work Richardson(1997) employs a range of different and alternative writing styles including scanned transcripts,a play, narrative fiction and so on. She then interrogates what she knows as a result of these newforms of writing. She is not, however, sceptical of writing as such in the way that these papers are.

In attempting to articulate what these papers might contribute to our understanding of post-modern emergence, I found it useful to develop a table to access their collective meanings. I

began with the main categories that I used in the Postmodern Emergence paper the quality, theontology and the epistemology of emergence. While this exercise was reductive it assisted me to

engage deeply with these papers, problematising what I thought I already knew from severaleditorial readings. One of the new ideas that came out of this engagement was a recognition thatin each case there was a metaphor or image that carried the meaning of the quality of emergenceand that these metaphors enhanced my understanding of the ontological and epistemologicalwork of these papers. I therefore present the table below before returning to the individual papersand the nuances of their contributions.

I have chosen to introduce this collection of papers with Marlene Atleos use of her cell phone voice message, Hi, this is Mar(e), Marlene, or Marilyn, to explore her multiple selvesand their relation to an unfolding methodology. This mode of inquiry is reminiscent of ButlersGiving an account of oneself (2005) in which she proposes that the opacity of the subject may

be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, and that it is precisely this opacitythat incurs and sustains some of its most important ethical bonds:

An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing, and this other estab-lishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give anaccount of oneself. Moreover, the very terms by which we give an account, by which we makeourselves intelligible to ourselves and others are not of our making. They are social in character, theyestablish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our singular storiesare told. (Butler 2005, 20)

It is such a profound recasting of selfother relationships that is at the heart of postmodern emer-gence. In qualitative research it is commonly accepted that the researcher is the instrument of data collection, analysis and interpretation. The ontological basis of postmodern emergence is aresponse to two decades of critique of ethnographic practice following the crisis of representa-tion (Denzin and Lincoln 1994) and feminist poststructural re-imaginings of selfother

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relationships. Beyond the impossibility of researching the other, and working the ruins (Pillowand St. Pierre 2000) of qualitative research, postmodern emergence examines the ways in whichthe undoing of the self-constituted relationally in the research act is a necessary condition for the generation of new knowledge. Ontology, epistemology and processes of representation areco-generating and co-generative in and of this process.

Atleos exploration of the simple everyday message on the cell phone, Hi, this is Mar(e),Marlene, or Marilyn allows her to examine the complex selfother relationships in the topic of her research study on Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations health programs. It allows her to unpack theimplications of ?eh-?eh-naa-too-k wiss, the self she does not have and have not the heart to captureher in the technospace of her voicemail box. ?eh-?eh-naa-too-k wiss is her Nuu-chah-nulth First

Nations traditional name as the hakum (chiefs female partner) in the haoothee (system of spiritual,moral, social, political, and economic rights and obligations) of the Nuu-cha-nooth chiefdomships.Through the device of the mode of address and naming, she explores the complex relationshipsamong culture, language and thought that are central to her research and to her unfoldingmethodology.

Phoenix de Carteret is similarly interested in exploring the process of relational selving,through which selves and knowledge evolve simultaneously. For her, as a researcher, attendingto the uncertainties and knowledge spectres hauntings, consonant with the inquiry itself issignificant in the evolving methodological process. Her focus on the absences in womensstorytelling opens her process to the opacity of the subject (ibid) and the limits of knowability.This leads to a methodology that evolves through conversations where the absences are ascritical as what is spoken and where collective and individual relational selves come into beingin the process of knowledge-making. The silences are made visible as spaces on the pages of scanned transcripts and imaged as the patterns made by the holes in lace. The women in deCarterets family have a tradition of lacemaking and she draws on this as a metaphor for her

research where the absences are integral to the pattern of the (w)hole.The condition of radical doubt and vulnerability is echoed in Caroline Josephss piece where

she positions her self-as-researcher at the limen or threshold, consciously seeking to be other tooneself to disrupt the taken for granted. In positioning herself in this way, she moves betweenexperiences as they emerge in different forms and qualities the personal, the conceptual, thereflective, the rational, the visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic body sensations, writing, reading,drawing, dreaming, consulting during the process of her research. Her research interest is in oralstorytelling, which she characterises as a leap into the unknown, into the relational moment of

performance when self, audience and knowing come into being. Josephs writes about her senseof the research choosing the researcher in resonant moments which became a guiding, an

organic way of researching. In the last section of her paper Josephs introduces the hairlinefracture of writing, a space that eventually she learns to occupy, and write from, in alternative processes of representation.

Nancy Toncy too, reflects on iterative acts of representation through different sensorymodalities in her research. As a Muslim woman living in New York, Toncy speaks bothArabic and English and returns to Egypt to conduct her research on Muslim women. Shechooses neither English nor Arabic as the vehicle for her research, however, recognizing thatmovement has always been the form in which I expressed myself. Her methodology evolvesas a creative response to the difficulties experienced at each stage of her research. Movement,like dance, becomes the method of her data collection, analysis, interpretation and representa-tion as a subtly nuanced way to research the meaning of Egyptian Muslim womens lives. Shechoreographs a dance in response to each womans individual story, dances the dance back tothe woman and then refines her dance-as-analysis. The elements of each pause in this iterative

process of representation and analysis the audio recording of the womans story, the dance

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and the video of the dance, the refinement of the dance, are then available for further assem- blages of representational forms. The process culminates in the choreography of a dancewhich represents the collective meanings gained through the research process.

Just as for Atleo, de Carteret and Toncy, there are silences, absences and spaces that becomethe creative focus for research, Martin Mantle takes up the challenge of his own blurred visionto better understand his topic of the image of the blind man. His intention in this paper is toexplore the absences and interstices in academic writing as sources of knowledge. Mantleswriting juxtaposes poetry, personal journal writing about his own visual impairment, and academic theory and narration. Meanings are generated intertextually with as much emphasis onthe embodiment of absence as the marks of printed text. At the simplest level this is realised inthe spatiality of lines of poetry on a white page, but at a deeper level his poetic writing opens upa layers of meaning resonant of the eruption of the semiotic in Kristevas madness, holiness and

poetry. The paper focuses on bending the possibilities of writing as knowledge production at thesame time as revelling playfully at the limits of writing. It is a paper that dwells in the represen-tational aspects of postmodern emergence.

Like Mantle, Paul Reader is also simultaneously interrogating form and content as he devel-ops his written paper. His challenge arises from his location in a visual mode of representation.His development of a painterly methodology is based on capturing the moment of new imagesappearing on the canvas of himself as a practising artist. The video captured the all-at-onenesscharacteristic of such images, enabling the evolution of a methodology designed to think visually, relationally and without language. For Reader the subjectivity of the painter, the paint-ing and the meaning it generates emerge simultaneously with a painterly methodology whichfinds its way into uncertainties. An additional layer is of a methodology that emerges via analternative epistemic route, is enacted in his use of a hypertext assemblage where the viewer can

begin with any image from a mosaic of images and view each of the component parts, or pauses

in this iterative process. Reader is not interested only in the methodology of the visual, but inhow this then enables an exploration of the nature of knowledge generation.

In conclusion

It would be contrary to the spirit of postmodern emergence to try to come up with a list of prin-ciples or a recipe through which to describe or enact these ideas. I have taken up a stance of wondering and generating , developed in the original paper, through which to approach this intro-duction. I began by locating my embodied self at dawn as a generative space for me and allowed what came up in this mediative space to lead the way with this writing. The first things that

emerged were the shadows that haunt this collection. Invited papers by Tamah Nakamura and Chrissiejoy Marshall did not materialise for this Special Issue. Tamah provided the title and clos-ing image and text. Chrissiejoy contributed the ongoing experience, and the unfolding processes,of emergence in our collaborative research. I have drawn on images from this research to further articulate what postmodern emergence might mean. The third spectre that haunted this text wasthe ghost of the review process and I have speculated on this process as a pedagogical force thatshapes what is possible to write and therefore what it is possible to know.

I approached each of the individual contributions in the same vein, asking: How can I openmyself to what I do not yet know? The headings of the original paper the quality, ontology and epistemology of postmodern emergence were useful in understanding their responses, but evenmore insight was made possible from the different metaphors that held the meaning of emergence in each of the individual papers. These metaphors gave me images through which toexplore and articulate meanings that I might not otherwise be able to access. The metaphors orig-inate in different sensory experiences congruent with the topic and methodology under study,

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emphasising different sensory modes and ways of knowing. They are resilient in the same wayas the embodied images I described in my work in the Narran Lake research, in that I can returnto them over and over to contemplate their meaning in more depth. They are dynamic in that theyare a bridge to meanings but are not fixed in themselves. These images are embedded in thedifferent representational forms that the authors work with including dance and movement,visual arts, oral storytelling and conversations, and the different forms of writing.

The crisis of representation in qualitative research and the feminist poststructural work of re-visioning selfother relations is an important ontological site in qualitative research methodology.I draw on Butlers theorising in Giving an account of oneself in order to better understand theontological work of postmodern emergence. Butler proposes that all subjects are constituted relationally and the consequent opacity of the subject that results from this relationality is the

basis of ethical relations. I have suggested that this is a way of reading the ontological work of the researcher selves that are made visible in these papers. The selves that these researchersexplore are made visible in the process of becoming other to themselves, vulnerable, partial, and subject to radical doubt, but they are not immobilised. They produce accounts that strain at thelimits of meaning through multiple forms of representation and modes of writing.

Writing practice remains central to generating meanings about our research. For over 10years Richardson has demonstrated her commitment to writing-as-a-method-of-inquiry in multi-

ple forms of writing research such as drama, responsive readings, narrative poetry, pagan ritual,lyric poetry, prose poems and autobiography (Richardson 1997, 3). The authors in this collectionare also deeply sceptical about the possibilities of meaning-making through standard modes of academic text. This scepticism is reflected in their use of representational forms other than writ-ing, such as dance, painting and oral storytelling; forms of non-writing such as silence, absenceand blurred vision; and alternative forms of written text such as journal entries and poetry. Thesealternative representational forms are not an addition, but are essential to the meanings generated

in their research. They are not presented as an alternative to the academic text, but as forms whichopen up and provide access to other meanings and knowledges that stretch the boundaries of academic text. This writing is characterised by working the space in-between, the hairline frac-ture, the intertextuality created when these different forms meet. The activity of this work, then,involves multiple acts of translation, moving across and between these different forms. It is thework of the margins. If we believe it is the aim of research to generate new knowledge, thinkingthrough postmodern emergence may open up these possibilities.

Through the Other

A stage of elevated feelings

Reasoned quietness

In unorganized chaos

Connect through the camera lens

To changing, quivering

reality and illusion.

I am a technician

An observer

In one integrated moment.

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In this violent current

Filming and physically experiencing

Is both an attraction

And a fear beyond description.

(Nakamura, interview, March 6, 2003)

AcknowledgementsThe author would like to acknowledge the insightful comments from Bill Green and Peter Wright who read an earlier version of this Introduction.

Note1. Bubbles on the surface: a place pedagogy of the Narran Lake is funded by the Australian Research

Council and some discussion of this project has been published by the author in the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy , 30 no. 2: 149164 and an article on place pedagogy is in press in the Journal

of Educational Philosophy and Theory .

Notes on contributorMargaret J. Somerville is professor of education (learning and development) at Monash University, Austra-lia. Her research interests are in space and place in educational research, and feminist poststructural, post-colonial and alternative methodologies. She has a special interest in creative approaches to research and writing and how these approaches can generate new knowledge.

References

Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.Denzin, Norman, and Yvonna Lincoln, eds. 1994. Handbook of qualitative research. Thousand Oaks,London and New York: Sage Publications.

Graue, B. 2006. The transformative power of reviewing. Educational Researcher 35, no. 9: 3641.

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‘Waiting in the chaotic place of unknowing’

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