Send in the Clowns Scoping Non-Representational Theory as Ally and Method to Foster Inclusiveness in Digital Innovation

“The PhD process is an unnecessarily cruel, codified, ritualised, and inefficient exercise.” ⤴️
“Rigour is not heartlessness.” ⤴️
“Getting to know about knowing” ⤴️
“Lists are violence.” ⤴️
“PDFs are not made for human consumption. They were designed to be consumed by machines. Why on earth are we doing this to ourselves?” ⤴️
“there is a high chance that we will misunderstand each other.” ⤴️
“PhDs are not made for human consumption. They seem to have been designed to consume humans. Why on earth are we doing this to ourselves?” ⤴️
“Thus my conclusion is that non-representational approaches are indeed of value to innovators as a means to catalyse a type of awareness(es) that makes otherwise inutterable questions possible. I am claiming that through fostering alliances across methods, traditions, disciplines, writing styles, ethnicities, media and epistemologies - with the help of non-representational theory - more inclusive research is enabled and method itself can be invigorated” ⤴️
“Is there room for ‘messy’ writing that calls for speculation?” ⤴️
“the act of withholding weaves as potent a tale as the boldest declaration.” ⤴️
“the quest for truth becomes a mirror, reflecting not just what is revealed, but the vast expanse of what remains unspoken.” ⤴️
“felt like an imposter in the academy an impostor in neurodiversity, and feel adequately uneasy with the term disabled.” ⤴️
“Erin Manning spoke about ‘neuro-conformity’ being an unhelpful mirage; not worth our respect” ⤴️
“rigorous academia does its job, and does it well. Does its gardening. And by that I mean I mean it teaches how to think: Teaches how to be original - correctly - . And by that I mean it weeds out weak thinking.” ⤴️
“define their remits, practises, and myths. Which we then affirm to each other to grow more of which fits well enough to be recognisable and yet is different enough to be noteworthy. Difference is then the fuel that makes the faculty ‘work’. And with that, difference becomes consumed.” ⤴️
“But my queer gaze is not an act; is not a choice. My talent is not how I look – I was born with these eyes. My talent is in archiving myself: Writing ‘menus du jour’s The menu makes me paletable: the dish remains the same.” ⤴️
“Code switching is flagging, Queer folx invited the hanky code.” ⤴️
“The pale folk get angry that I breathe under water. And over the years, I learned my lesson and quit breathing under water. Instead then, I now hold my breath. I got damn good at holding by breath.” ⤴️
“And then the experts told me something Ilong knew,butdidn’tbelieve Ilong believed butdidn’tknow something I didn’t know, and didn’t believe or something I always knew; belief irrelevant.” ⤴️
“I could get amphetamines easily close to my home in Salford where I live. but these are special. I have a pink slip to prove it. The box says ‘retard’. This is not a metaphor. The box says ‘retard’. This is not a metaphor. The box literally says retard.” ⤴️
“I am dosed in the right way. And I pass so much better.” ⤴️
“I make my argument for diversity in a way that keeps me on the email lists.” ⤴️
“I commodify who I am, what I do, how I do it; why I do it, and how I do not have a choice.” ⤴️
“But I have receipts that prove I participate in the neurodivergent economy. Ispend –thereforeI am.” ⤴️
“and permitted me a chance to make my case for the necessity to break with academic tradition for the sake of consistency of message and objectives, and I felt I was given a fair hearing as to make my case for why the thesis is as it is.” ⤴️
“orient the reader to what they should expect to read and set out a rationale for the decisions you have made, including decisions concerning: - the form and structure of the thesis (its productive constraints)
- the style of writing - the deployment of many different concepts, terms and traditions without definitions and explanation (in many cases). We encourage you to consider this statement in terms of the principles and practices of inclusivity that are central to your work.” ⤴️
“I will leave it up to you and whoever reads this to label me with whatever is most useful to them.” ⤴️
“Your self-description is entirely appropriate. It underscores the multiplicity that defines us all. You’re not just one thing, and this label reflects the interdisciplinary complexity that is inherent in your thesis. We” ⤴️
“However, after completing my own Viva, I came to realize that “Corrections” are merely a lingering echo of a process already concluded.” ⤴️
“I didn’t write this work for the Academy; that is very important to me.” ⤴️
“I wanted to produce and discover new knowing; I want my work to be weird and “pass” not for the sake of being weird; I want this piece to be an argument-in-itself. <It’s not an argument through the text, it is an argument by existence.> I wanted to create a work that is uncompromisingly me, or – us. I want to demonstrate that I and my communities have a place in academia without distorting our voices, or losing our voices.” ⤴️
“Placing your thesis within the academic realm, while simultaneously challenging and pushing against its norms, is a profound statement.” ⤴️
“when you are using - for want of a better term - the tools of the oppressor, the tools of the Academy to challenge the Academy, you’re doing it with a great deal of depth and knowledge, and you’re doing it with a knowledge of how those tools function.” ⤴️
“I really reject the idea that this work is oppositional. It is in many ways really not. It is a love letter to the Academy. It is the embodiment of a hope for change that I compassionately yearn for. It is an expression of my fervent passion for the Academy. But acknowledging in this love, that The Academy is not in a state where I want it to be. It is not in the state that I want to see in. The Academy is in a state of toxic self-contradiction and those who are paying the biggest toll for this are the ones I want to empower.” ⤴️
“Direct opposition is perilous if you are not able to act as a key curator of power” ⤴️
“resistant, proud acquiescence as a more creative and productive space” ⤴️
“the communities most affected by these issues are the ones paying the price – the Mad, the Queer, the Foreign, the Embodied knowers, those with Tacit and Inherited knowledge, anybody else who finds themselves decentred, and all conceivable intersectional combinations thereof.” ⤴️
“because it’s crucial to establish early on that your work is an act of love. This sets the tone for our discussion.” ⤴️
“my argument necessitated an unconventional approach, and suddenly, I found myself taking an academic tool designed for efficiency and using it to explore the outer limits of thesis production, making it do things it wasn’t originally meant to do.” ⤴️
“the importance of doing things differently and unfiltered.” ⤴️
“that the role of the Jester or the clown is one of critique.” ⤴️
“I think its power resides from being able to tell the stories that are flying by just under the subconscious, just under the utterable, and having a hypothesis to do that kind of work almost feels contradictory because the hypothesis funnels and channels your attention. Its aim is to focus your endeavours into something specific. Yet, if my aim is to find the pre-conscious, it feels a bit contradictory for me to have a hypothesis per se, which operates very much not only at the conscious, but therein almost epitomises ‘the rational’. If I am required to articulate one, I can, but to me, this is not a priority.” ⤴️
“Sometimes metaphysics and ontology are entertaining to engage in. Just not too much because life’s too short for metaphysics. (laughter)” ⤴️
“What makes ‘an appropriate timespan’ is contextual.” ⤴️
“ad I drew the line when I reached saturation and” ⤴️
“Literature reviews need not be docile. Literature reviews are a curatorial act, and curators are the most powerful people on earth.” ⤴️
“Conducting a systematic literature review hinges on establishing firm, albeit somewhat arbitrary boundaries. Within these boundaries, a specific knowledge domain is defined for exploration. Anything beyond these boundaries is excluded from my review, while everything within them receives equal attention.” ⤴️
“there is also a broader lesson here—to recognize the fundamentally arbitrary nature of systematic literature reviews. It’s an arbitrary set of rules that are making an arbitrary set of decisions to arbitrarily draw circles around what is in a discipline and what is not in a discipline.” ⤴️
“We create these lists and they ought to be complete, yet we rarely ask ‘complete to whom’?” ⤴️
“is the real fallacy of the PhD process, which is that the PhD is one of the few things we do in our academic careers that we do in isolation.” ⤴️
“think there’s a playfulness to the German language, though. It is very malleable. You know, you can make up words,” ⤴️
“I insist on my right to model words to suit me; to try and maintain this linguistic playfulnes” ⤴️
“The fact that a text is in English does not equate to a singular, shared experience among readers.” ⤴️
“Different people will inherently perceive and understand the work in varied ways, and this is something I embrace and utilise. I reject the notion of reading as a naively democratic or homogenised process.” ⤴️
“The reader’s interpretation is deeply influenced by their own ‘baggage’ or personal context.” ⤴️
“English, with its idiosyncrasies, leaves you in a position of never quite knowing whether you’re breaking a rule. This is true for non-native speakers and for different kinds of neurodivergent individuals. It’s very difficult to say, “Am I doing this right?"" ⤴️
“There’s an English professor in the US who basically has said that he thinks that we shouldn’t teach grammar because it’s reinforcing a class structure.” ⤴️
“the point where you mention a reference that you’ve forgotten. This forgotten reference, in a way, becomes akin to the unknown soldier, a symbol for the forgotten and the unknown. It represents a hidden, universal experience within academia. The act of forgetting a reference is something many academics can relate to. But what’s intriguing is your choice to make this omission explicit” ⤴️
“For me, it’s a matter of intellectual and authorial honesty” ⤴️
“We’re often taught to write with authority, which, in essence, can be seen as writing with arrogance.” ⤴️
“I view translation as a form of meaning-making, where reading” ⤴️
“Mermaid - in 6 movements xxxix something in translation becomes a transcription, an adaptation of ideas. Translation, to me, often feels more like adaptation than a straightforward translation, where ideas are taken and reshaped to fit within a different linguistic framework.” ⤴️
“If I were to design the first lecture of a hypothetical undergraduate course in STS, the first lesson would be that “There are no innocent translations.” Every translation is violent or at least highly political. For me, it is very counterintuitive to expect that everything should be translated nilly-willy, in the knowledge of every translation being derivative and mutating.” ⤴️
“I had a very clear map, literally a map, of how this text would work.” ⤴️
“The three interventions echo each other, forming patterns, and the chapters are cyclical, mirroring each other with horizontal and vertical connections; there are diagonal lines and intellectual lineages that render this text serviceable I think; or at least greeting the reader amicably.” ⤴️
“Different codes are pitched at different audiences and communities. These are little windows behind the text, into my thinking at that time; or buttressing intellectual foundations that I wanted to acknowledge, but not centre on at that moment.” ⤴️
“Not all readers will find all codes; but all readers will find some of them, and maybe choose to use them.” ⤴️
“if all they require are the first 5 pages and never engage with anything further, that is legitimate and I have achieved my goal.” ⤴️
“Why did you feel it was necessary to incorporate this, despite the disagreement? Me: I see it as an honest account of my experience throughout the entire project.” ⤴️
“there’s something intriguing and desirable about IEEE. It uses only a number within square brackets for citations, omitting the name of the author of the cited attribution. Readers don’t immediately see who made the statement being cited. I think this forces readers to weigh up the arguments on their merits, independent of the institutional weight of who said them. I’d like to think it democratises knowledge and pushes us to appraise utterances on their merit, not their provenance.” ⤴️
“Congratulations to anyone who is sort of using this as a precedent to do something new and different in academia.” ⤴️
“synergies across a wide range of marginalised communities” ⤴️
“of radical inclusion and emancipation and active resistance problematising the academic institution from within. It is a labour of compassionate resistance and radical empathy.” ⤴️
“Whilst at first hand my project may appear to be (1) an exploration of the digital medium and new methods of its investigation, it is just as much (2) an examination of the thesis” ⤴️
“firm commitment to the circumstances I am bound to,” ⤴️
“the medium I find myself encased in.” ⤴️
“respectively with others in mind” ⤴️
“does not want to be placed into the canon of literature belonging to creative writing” ⤴️
“biomythography” ⤴️
“My work is political” ⤴️
“Through the digital, the thesis, academia, and the written medium. All this, all these are entangled and conditional to another, and my thesis is conditional on this ensnarement” ⤴️
“rejects any notion that I ought to tame my aims in order to be neatly archivable and conducive to taxonomy” ⤴️
“I reject the notion that I should privilege any aspect of my investigation over another.” ⤴️
“My account and my biography standing in for libraries and cities full of uncited, uncitable, forgotten and erased thinkers,” ⤴️
“My knowing is one of a holistic and ravaging natur” ⤴️
“commit to the big picture at infinite detail. My rigour does not emerge from isolation, my rigour is ofcontext.” ⤴️
“I am almost without exception, the only person in the room who does not get paid for their attendance.” ⤴️
“would never dare to deem myself in the matter of Decolonizing adaequately learned in a manner that I consider satisfactory. I am blatantly aware of many of my shortcomings, and I get nauseous at the thought of all the many things I currently am unable to even sense my own oblivion in. Yet” ⤴️
“they do not hire Black women” ⤴️
“nurture hurt white fragility, risk making enemies and accept retaliation.” ⤴️
“catalyse what I can achieve on my own in matters ofdecolonizing” ⤴️
“whilst I try to ignore the fact that it takes place on the back of free labour by this person of colour.” ⤴️
“I will not only stay with the trouble, I become the trouble, and I will show why you must be troubled too.” ⤴️
“a demonstration of new knowledges and new ways ofknowing” ⤴️
“Diegetic being the design-specific term for ‘atype ofprototypethatmakes it possible to think (and discuss) something new which does not yet exist’” ⤴️
“Such writing, discourse and knowledge-encryption is a most overdue deed of restorative justice [189], equity and fairness” ⤴️
“The remit of ‘the digital’ is limitless. Its discussion and shaping cannot be a privilege to those who call themselves technologists or similar” ⤴️
“there is still a certain hesitance from non-computing scholars to engage with digital technologies and matters; especially when compared with other grandissues ofour time:” ⤴️
”- An absence of any training in economics does not disqualify a scholar from engaging in considerations of capitalism’s impact and entanglement with/on society and the planet” ⤴️
“Shaping (and discussing) the digital cannot remain a privilege of those who are literate in computing; and its research cannot be limited to methods that privilege detailed close ups and small and concrete case studies. There is also an urgent need and imperative to approach the digital at-large (and to do so right from the outset).” ⤴️
“The right of being permitted to ‘speak about the big issues’ is usually reserved for (in)famous and established scholars in the field(s) but I assert that there is also a need (and right) for such work to hail from early-career-scholars.” ⤴️
“of the digitised human condition” ⤴️
“Colonialism (and exclusion) are not an abstract-evil force that can be countered, it is continuously instantiated and emergent from ubiquitous, mundane and everyday practices” ⤴️
“I cannot even make an objective argument for decolonizing; as the premise ofargument and the premise-promise ofreason is colonial” ⤴️
“my project falls into a different tradition: an unapologetic one; a proud and colourful assertive resilience. An act of self-love and self care. This work is not a service.” ⤴️
“a longstanding project of learning to see.” ⤴️
“‘un-learning’” ⤴️
“voices who get to speak from the centre and not the peripheries” ⤴️
“it is my method” ⤴️
“Poetry is not a luxury. Poetry is not a textual practise. Poetry emerges in response to being confronted with the limits of reason, the thresholds of (one’s) language and the boundaries of cognition.” ⤴️
“putting words down on paper, but in a fashion that leaves them mobile. This” ⤴️
“I am my own method” ⤴️
“It is our claim to a doctoral text. This thesis is calling on the faculty’s bluff promises: This thesis does all the things a thesis ought to do, but does them so much differently. My work is a claim and assertion of a right to be written. “Other creatures do it differently, but verbal intercourse has always been our human way, and our entitlement.” [145, p.ix]. I entitle myself to this new writing; as a human and not an other-creature. “Unruly” knowledge [33, 286] is still knowledge,” ⤴️