Holding On Together

BT: I have a problem... It is a problem with this whole issue of reflexivity... which is, how would you describe this process? You put a great deal of emphasis on one's own personal resources, being intuitive, 'duck and dive' when necessary, the development of certain tactics which are appropriate here, but not there, and so on. How does this coalesce around the methodology; how can you package this as a methodology which others can learn from? It seems there's a whole array of different and individualized tactics.

IG: Yeah, I think that's an extremely good question for which I don't have an answer... Rather than doing what I think implicitly most people want us to do which is, as you say, your phrase, 'how do we package your methodology?', I think that there are some methodologies which are frankly unpackageable because... personal dynamics are themselves unpackageable.

BT: OK. If I accept that method, which I do, then you can't socialize the young, inexperienced researcher and that's one of my reservations about it. But given all of that, do you think that it was precipitous and ill advised to go into a project, such as this one, where the whole idiosyncratic model is overladen with a whole range of new problems, namely for power, asymmetry?

IG: Yeah, maybe. But how would you suspend or solve those problems with any other methodology?

BT: Depends what you specify as the problems. But I think that those problems are exacerbated with this where one is acting as a therapist, more or less, asking deeply personal, potentially incredibly intrusive questions of individuals whose position within the society is highly vulnerable.

IG: But what's the logical conclusion for that if you are asking difficult questions of people? Not to ask them? Not to speak to them about it? What's your alternative? Silence?