The past year has kept me silent as I focused on constructing my thesis after years of scholarship. Now, we wait to hear what, if anything, will be accepted for publication after peer review. A hiatus after more than 15 months of reading and writing and rewriting. Is it any wonder that little energy remained for any form of personal writing on my blog?
I didn’t think I’d write online so soon, nor that it would auto-ethnographical in nature utilizing introspection as my tool for design research… but, as I wait, I do not want to lose the momentum of writing that has carried me forward this past year or more. I have one last document to craft before I can claim that I am done with my studies.
I also wanted to see how much my writing voice has changed after such intense immersion in the academic style.
Caution and a more considerate and careful choice of phraseology and words is something I am able to discern immediately. The larger and deeper more structural change however is less visible. I will use a quote from Martin Nakata’s book ‘Disciplining the Savages:Savaging the Disciplines’ (2007) to introduce what can only be described as a fundamental transformation of my epistemological paradigm.
“Ironically, my time at the university was giving me confirmation of what I had been struggling to come to terms with — that I would never be able to argue my position cogently and coherently until I understood it in its totality, and that I would never be able to do this from within the confines of that knowledge system” (Nakata 2007:10)
Pushed to the margins of the dominant knowledge system and its knowledge production structures and practices, I had no choice but to observe and ponder the entire system from my viewpoint at the interface (Nakata 1997, 2007). As I said earlier this morning, all I ever wanted was to figure out why it was so hard to garner recognition of the innate creativity, ingenuity, knowledge and skills of the informal sector. Instead, I found myself unraveling the foundations of my own knowledge. Instead of shaking my worldview, it sharpened my perspective. Suddenly, it seemed, I had the tools I needed to craft robust arguments for the very same things I have always said, both on this blog as well as on social media and standing up in front of audiences. This sort of thing very naturally leads to a change in paradigm, but I argue today that it is not my paradigm that has changed so much as my perspective. Instead of replacing one epistemological paradigm with another, I learnt to step back and look beyond the obvious – as I have always done on this blog for the past 20 years – and note that all the paradigms, both within the academy and those which build bridges at the interface (Chilisa 2019), can now be available as design tools when we consider the large-scale social structures that informs our societies as objects of our design initiatives (Koskinen & Meroni 2023).
I also fear that I won’t be able to go back to writing without references automatically being appended at the end of my sentences, now that I have transformed my writing and thinking style as I set out to do – here on this blog – almost 4 years ago. My deep and close relationship with my innate need to ‘go back to first principles‘ whenever I seek to make sense of and understand something that may feel incomprehensible at first glance, is not only reflection of being an engineer but also the motive driver from the destination I have now arrived, at this, the last half mile of my years long doctoral studies.
What I didn’t expect was that I would go all the way back to the first principles of “knowledge” itself – epistemology, and ontology – to make sense of things well enough in order to craft something novel to contribute. Which is the ultimate expectation of a doctoral student’s work: What are you contributing to the academy? Well sir, professor sir, let’s talk about the nature of reality and the degree of control we have over knowledge production.
“It is, in fact, rather curious that one of the chief magic formulas in the Kalevala consists of retracing the origin of the things over which one wishes to have a hold. It is only thus that one can subjugate them. […] Every time that a man, in work, had to deal with matter he must, in order to deal with it successfully, know the formula” (Notes from Bosley translation, Kalevala)
If today I had not thought to sit down and scroll through my old writing – deliberately documented for just this purpose – I would not have noticed the closure of my epistemological loop of meanderings as I now near the end of my journey. On one had, it has been a terrible experience of loss and isolation and exclusion, yet on the other, would what I am proud to have created been created without the stresses and strains I underwent? Almost 25 years ago, during my MBA in Pittsburgh, I adopted this unattributed sentence as part of my email signature:
“A clay pot has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain.”
Today I’m feeling a soupcon of my old contentiousness to ask if I wanted to become porcelain in the first place?
