My so-called ‘real life’
What does it say about contemporary social science that the following Call for Abstracts is currently circulating?
Call for Abstracts
Vital Signs: Researching Real Life
An international and interdisciplinary conferenceOrganised by Real Life Methods, part of the ESRC National Centre for
Research Methods9-11 September 2008
University of Manchester, UKKeynote speakers:
Prof Les Back (Sociology, Goldsmiths)
Prof Tim Ingold (Anthropology, Aberdeen)
Prof Carolyn Steedman (History, Warwick)‘Real life’ is complex and complicated. How can we use research methodologies and methods to produce knowledge and understandings that are ‘vital’ and that resonate with everyday life? Abstracts are invited for papers, posters or symposia around the following themes:
* Methods for researching nature, culture, the material and the social
* Researching visual, auditory, tactile and other sensory realms
* Bridging different disciplines in understanding real life
* Mixing methods in real life research
* Accessing, measuring, and representing real life. What counts as ‘evidence’?
* Authenticity, rigour and rhetoric in real life research
* Researching intersubjectivity, memory, emotions, and humour
* Communicating and disseminating real life research
* Challenges in analysing real life data
* Real life research in policy and politics
* Participatory real life research
* Real life research ethics and moralities
* What is real life? Theorising real lifeThe deadline for abstracts is Friday 7 March 2008.
Full details and submission guidelines at:
http://www.reallifemethods.ac.uk/events/vitalsigns/
And is there anything funny about this sentence, “‘Real life’ is complex and complicated”?
Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.
I totally thought this was a joke. As in, academics do not study real life… so…
reminds me of The Journal of Post-Autistic Economics, which also fooled me into thinking it was fake.
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It makes a lot of sense … if you are aware of the fact that the scholars who put this together are online avatars in Second Life.
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What’s really funny is if you click on the link and go to their website. Their logo graphic consists of four circles with little images in them:
1) a crying baby
2) french fries
3) I’m not sure but this may be a floating house with a rainbow roof, flying through the sky and leaving a trail of colored exhaust in its wake, while giant marshmallows float alongside
4) a hand holding a leaf
All very vital. Very real.
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Hmmm, I think that third thing in their logo is a toothbrush with the cap to the toothpaste sitting next to it on the counter. For real…
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Methinks ya’all doth protest too much.
And yet, how relevant is our research for most of our subjects? How many interlocutors read our books? Of those who do, how many feel it is “real” as opposed to just some academic-ese? Is it merely a coincidence that anthropologists were specifically targetted for an NSF funding slash-and-burn because our proposals had “silly titles”. But yes, their logo is too abstract, those hippocrits. Clearly, anthropology is only intended for people with PhD’s to understand.
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_And is there anything funny about this sentence, ”’Real life’ is complex and complicated”?_
To an editor there is. The quotation marks create an ambiguity. Do the authors want to say that real life is complex and complicated or that the concept denoted by “Real life” is complex and complicated? (I remember Tarski’s famous sentence: “‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.”)
That said, I wonder if the discomfort the sentence causes isn’t deliberate, a postmodern gesture to unsettle the relationship of words to reality. Are the complexities and complications in the words or in the world to which they refer, or both? That sort of thing.
It is interesting, too, that the keynote speakers represent three disciplines, sociology, anthropology and history, all of which grapple in different ways with the relationships of quantitative, ethnographic and textual research to the reality it purports to describe. This thought speaks to an issue that I am currently grappling with, in a project that combines social network analysis (quantitative), ethnography (interviewing creatives who occupy central nodes in networks of ad contest winners) and textual research ( the creatives in question are frequently prolific authors). Since the starting point is published collections of ad contest winners, the relationship to the reality of the advertising business as a whole cannot be taken for granted.
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What?! A toothbrush? Not a flying rainbow house with gigantic marshmallows floating alongside?
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Wow, I had never heard of post-autistic economics until encountering Chris’s comment… and it would appear that the subfield is indeed related to the “real world”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1843312360/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
I personally laughed out loud when a conference ostensibly organized around the idea of real life put scare quotes around the concept. And I LOLed again when reading Kerim’s comment.
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Uh… didn’t we use to call these people “substantivists”?
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This was very interesting, and left me to wonder: the anthropological study of anthropology would then be the study of… “unreal life”? Joking aside, assuming that is possible with such a call for papers, the notion begs the question of what is unreal life. Thanks for the post.
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Well, my grandmother certainly did not feel the study of anthropology had anything to do with real life.
Since when did anthropologists have trouble investigating semantic meaning? What does ‘real’ mean to you? when you have faith and believe that this life means something more than day to day mundane living, all of a sudden “real life” needs scare quotes.
How do rural farmers react to the insane high flying lifestyle of city dwellers? Or how do people see the lifestyles of drunken tourists?
What do you tell someone with a massive drug addiction. Can he grasp “reality”. As people distance themselves from society, the meaning of “real” becomes more meaningful in my opinion.
Isn’t it about shifting perspectives? Maybe we are here for a reason, and maybe some of us feel traditional science doesn’t cut it?
Is this critique meant to be constructive or are we still playing power games?
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Well I see I misread the thread as usual. But I think academics do study the real world, but the way they do it is often fake… or “fake”…
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“Real life research ethics and moralities”
I’m in the middle of my IRB protocol, so this kind of made me laugh-I’m just picturing a fifteen page proposal done completely in compliance where the person justifies brushing their teeth, putting on their underwear, etc IN THEIR CAPACITY AS A RESEARCHER.
Also, what the hell is ‘research morality’?
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