Caught in a loop
It’s been a significant period of time that I have not written down my thoughts and actions about moving on with my PhD research. The proposal for the research remains unwritten, broken into small chunks that appear meaningless and incoherent. My mind, and my thinking about this research, is caught in a recursive loop, circling in on itself. Perhaps by writing my thoughts and confusions down on this post, and perhaps subsequent posts, I can clear my thinking and break the loop open, allowing me to move forward with conviction. I’ve selected this image of an infinity loop using colourful sound waves as dual lines, as a try to remove the noise that is cluttering my thinking and find the right rhythm in order to proceed with my research. It’s time to stop the cacophony rumbling in my head and critically remove the unharmonious elements, so the harmony of ideas, concepts, and methodologies can emerge.
The first loop deals with epistemic confusions. I’m looping philosophical stances that will ultimately impact my research and directions. This should be simple, but it’s not. I’m looping from social constructivist theory around to connectivism and rhizomatics, which lead me to phenomenology and more specifically, post phenomenology. With the analysis of phenomenological stances done by Valentine et al., (2019), I can see the fit for post-phenomenology but still need to write this into my research proposal and provide substantiation and a valid argument for this epistemic position grounded in research. But, once my mind makes this decision, it loops around to the issue of methodology and thus loops around to … if it’s post-phenomenology, what methodology fits?
The second loop relates to my methodological stance for this research. I started this research work thinking that I would be looping around digital ethnography, This is still a primary component of my thinking. But the other methodologies that fill this loop include constructivist grounded theory and crystallization, which are not mutually exclusive in my thinking. The other side of the loop keeps me thinking that maybe this research is best done as a narrative inquiry or even as connected case studies. I return over and over again to the GO-GN Research Methods Handbook to read and rethink. Where will this loop lead, only back over and onto itself. I need to take some reflection time to cut the loop and make a decision that will move this research proposal forward.
The third loop keeps me thinking about methods since this is uniquely tied to the previous loop. Crystallization (Ellingson, 2009) is the method and methodology that I keep coming back to, mostly because it will allow me to think beyond the text formats that are traditionally used in research. It will allow me to revisit and revise my thinking by using alternative media formats for making sense of data and ideas. While crystallization my be a primary component of this third loop, and the overall method I will apply, this will also necessarily be shaped by the resolution of loops one and two.
So here I am, stuck in this looping. I’m hoping that by writing this down, I can come back and make more sense of these ideas and thus break these loops open, then recombine them into one logical loop from ontology, epistemology, methodology, and methods. For my research to be validated and substantiated as necessary and important, this loopy thinking needs to be resolved.
Image Attribution: Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay
