I’ve just returned from listening to a lecture on Generative Research Methodologies and what really stuck out for me in MC’s stories of working in collaboration, was the essential practice of being in relationship with people.
Something that I feel I haven’t been doing is legitimising the relationship building process that I have been part of for the past year with women in Mäpuru. Is that because this process hasn’t been written down or documented up until now? Are the baskets I have woven together with these women a sort of evidence of that process? If the baskets could talk, what stories would they tell about being in relationship, or being with? What intangible things are being generated in this practice? So, how can my research be alive and essentially a generative process? What would that look like? What types of relationships would I need to have with people to facilitate this type of creative process? Does the weaving then become the metaphor for the work we do together?
On a different tangent, MC posed a question to the audience which I gobbled up and am ruminating over as I write, ‘What assumptions are preventing me from new ways of understanding?’ Whilst this has been a guiding question for me from the onset of my Masters, I haven’t used it to look at my ideas of being with. I guess it’s time!
Being with Country 