Experience-based Enquiry
Convenor: Catherine Robinson
Members: Gillian Cowlishaw, Rick Iedema, Stephen Muecke, Katrina Schlunke
The Experience-based Enquiry program centres on expertise in 'experience-based enquiry' which researchers use to intervene in traditional knowledges and traditional forms of knowledge production in academic, professional and public realms. Researchers draw from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies and work into arenas of professional practice including cultural education and display and policy development and service delivery in areas including health, welfare and housing. Simultaneously, researchers more broadly work to intervene in public imaginaries of key socio-cultural issues through publication, media and community sector involvement. Researchers are likely to be charting new knowledge terrains as they develop methods to tap evidences arising from their own and others' lived and felt experiences. The emotional, sensory and reflexive capacities of human subjects are explored in the documentation of practical knowledges. An important component of this research is 'reflexive enquiry' which involves researchers and practitioners sharing data and negotiating analyses of this data, and thus producing innovative results and perspectives on existing practices.
Projects since 2007
Catherine is currently undertaking research on 'homelessness felt and lived', which includes consideration of felt-experience as a site and tool for knowing. Her research interrogates the tension between applied 'policy-relevant' research and new social and cultural geographies of the body, place and emotion. Catherine's research outcomes relevant to Experience-based Enquiry reflect the dual audiences of her work: in April she delivered a paper at the National Homelessness Research Seminar, has submitted a paper for review to Cultural Studoes Review, and a manuscript to Syracuse University Press. All of this recent work focuses on an exploration of felt-experience (of homeless people, service-providers and researchers) as the inadmissible evidence of homelessness in research and policy arenas.
Rick won a tender in July to produce a research-based reflexive resource to enable health care workers to monitor and intervene in their own information exchange practices. This work is an extension of a recent ARC Discovery grant and addresses the unacceptably high levels of incidents resulting from inadequate information exchange processes that are part of 'handover'. His recent work on 'Open Disclosure' (clinicians being open with patients about clinical errors) has led to invitations to speak at different national conference events to report on the degree of uptake of this new practice among frontline hospital staff. Recent paper submissions include one on experiences of horror during training among newly qualified anaesthetic specialists and one that explores the effects of frontline clinical staff 'reflexive listening skills training' on the clinician-patient relationship and the ethics of negotiating the consequences of clinical error (both Social Science and Medicine).
Katrina. In the last semester Katraina has presented a paper at the 'For Ethnography: Anthropology and the Politics of the Present' (organised by Gillian Cowlishaw), on Ethnografts which tried to look at the relations between readers and producers of ethnography as both productive and sensual. The argument was that this was the result of the ways in which ethnography can work as kind of rubbing into the ordinary when looking at a topic such as Captain Cook as known in the contemporary and political imagination. She is currently in the process of editing an introduction to a section consisting of three chapter contributions called 'Ethnography' in a book co-edited by Catherine called 'Cultural Theory and Everyday Practice'. Recently she gave a guest lecture on Ethnography in the 'Theory and Method' subject convened by Catherine and co-edited the most recent edition of Cultural Studies Review, called 'Slight Anthropologies' which includes examples of new, critical, creative and radical ethnographies.
Emergent Collaboration
Bodily Knowledge, April 2008: A one day seminar. This is a small-scale event which aims to draw together researchers interested in exploring the range of knowledge that the lived body makes possible. The seminar will encourage consideration of key forms of bodily knowledge and the kinds of affective and sensory politics these knowledges may give rise to.
For further information, contact the convenor, Catherine Robinson.
