By Ohad Ben Shimon, CUCo researcher-in-residence
What is a good life?
To be honest,
–and this feels like becoming a larger feature
in my thinking for the last few months–,
I don’t really know.
As part of my researcher-in-residence position at CUCo, in recent months I have been interviewing (and will continue to interview until 2025) inspiring, caring, smart, funny, brave, witty, responsible, versatile, articulate, ten mid-career researchers that are currently, or have in the past, been affiliated to a CUCo research team, or were interested in my research at CUCo, and got in touch with me. These people have allowed me to enter their living archive of bodily experiences, memories, feelings, emotions and struggles. They opened for me a window, or door, to what being in academia, and doing academic work, on a very high scientific level means today, or can possibly mean in the future. They shared with me the space of where they do their most intimate work – where they think, feel, discover, critique, move. They also shared with me a substantial amount of what in today’s academic environment seems so scarce – their time. This has touched me deeply.
As I go over the interview transcripts, I identify glowing themes that gather my attention. I pick up on the idea of glowing data from Maggie Maclure’s method of attending to ethnographic data in which ‘a fieldnote fragment starts to glimmer, gather our attention’ (2010, 282). For every site I have worked in, in these past three years of my PhD fieldwork, I have found wonder in these glowing themes that emerge in “the entangled relation of data-and-researcher” (2013, 228). Expanding on Maclure’s idea of the glowing data-researcher relationship, I believe it is also the interviewees, and their mode of presence in the world, that have contributed their fair share of glow. I have seen that glow in each researcher with my own eyes.
As I look at the glowing themes I have listed for myself from going over the interview transcripts I see such glowing themes as: ‘the good life’, ‘boundary’, ‘joy’, ‘discipline’, ‘flow’, ‘desire’, ‘energy’, ‘burnout’, ‘drives’, ‘ecosystem’, ‘change’, ‘fight’, ‘atmosphere’, and more. I mention these just to give an idea of what will possibly turn into writing threads of my third and last PhD chapter. However, before I embark on this writing trajectory for this year, I felt it necessary to pause for a moment, and give credit to the people who have made this happen – firstly my PhD supervisors, and the CUCo managerial team that facilitate my residency, of course. At the same time, I really feel it comes down to the individual decision, of the individual researcher, who agreed to be interviewed, that I am most grateful for.
Working in collaborative teams means you need to get along with someone else. That someone else is different; they have a different body, a different cultural baggage, a different upbringing, a different history, and most importantly –for the context of CUCo– a different discipline. Being, or becoming disciplined, as most researchers are trained, funded and valorized to do, or be, means to a certain extent, leaving behind some romantic idea of being an amateur (from the Latin amātor meaning “lover”), or of having what is called in Zen Buddhism a beginner’s mind. However, I have clearly felt this loving, amateur mind-set, or attitude, still very present in my interviewees. Even when the odds seem to be against advancing academic scientific endeavors, in the form of extensive governmental budget cuts, or growing rates of burnout and exhaustion, the glowing, loving, mindful gestures seem to shine from them. They shine even when they were talking about the difficulties, and harsh realities of academia and academic work, or when they embodied the extensive knowledge, they respectfully gained and worked hard for, in their respective domains.
I too, –as my PhD project is the first time I conduct ethnographic research, including one-on-one interviews–, feel that I am at liberty to approach the interviews in an amateur, loving way. I have read the most recent literature on ethnographic methodology and have skimmed over its history enough to trust that what is most important for me sipped in through the pores of my skin. I try to approach my research into embodiment in the collaborative research teams of CUCo with an open mind and heart, as much as I can, even when all my humanities-critical-theory-induced-educational-upbringing-alarm-bells go off loudly and ask me to pay attention to this or that shortcoming. I resist the resistance, and honestly, it’s one of the hardest things I have needed to do in my short academic journey (another humanities-critical-theory-induced-educational-upbringing-alarm-bell goes off: “Don’t use the word ‘journey’!”).
Lastly, I’ll go into this writing assignment as to what will come out of it, with a bit of hesitation whilst all the alarm-bells go off, not just in my mind, but all over the world, as I believe that most knowledge or wisdom, is discovered, or revealed, along the way, by putting your body on the line, by allowing it to move one step ahead of your mind that is busy trying to figure out what is a good life?
Works cited:
MacLure, Maggie. “The Offence of Theory.” Journal of Education Policy, vol. 25, no. 2, Mar. 2010, pp. 277–86. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930903462316.
—. “The Wonder of Data.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, vol. 13, no. 4, Aug. 2013, pp. 228–32. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708613487863.