Criticality and
reflection
Claudia Markovich ‘Reflection’ at
http://www.claudiampublications.com/TheCards/CardReflection.shtml
PhD Training Session
26/1/2012
Sarah Amsler
Heather Hughes
Linda Hitchin
M.C. Escher ‘Self-portrait in
spherical mirror’
Today’s programme...
• ‘Criticality’, ‘reflection’ and ‘reflexivity’ are
central to all research
• They have different meanings in different
disciplines/subjects and are therefore complex
• Our task today: to explore these concepts in
order to problematise them
By the end of the
session.....
• Clarifying meanings of and relationships between
‘reflection’, ‘reflexivity’ and ‘critical reflexivity’
• Understanding how we are located, individually
and collectively, in relation to these concepts in
terms of disciplines/subjects
• Understanding how we might apply them to our
own research practices
Reflections.... A task
Look at your own reflection in the mirror; what
do you see? Write something down
Look at your partner’s reflection: write
something down (but don’t share this yet)
Reflecting as critical
practice: some questions
What choices did you make when deciding what to write about your own image? About
another’s?
Are there thoughts you entertained but did not write; things you wrote but do not say? Are
there resistances to writing and saying things about yourself/others?
Does it matter who holds the mirror? Would it matter if you were doing this at night, by
candlelight? In front of a wall-sized mirror? With a different group of people? If you could
not see with your eyes?
What do your reflections actually represent?
How can we use this practice of reflecting in our scholarly research?
Reflections....responses
Can I draw what I see? Does it have to be written?
Emotional experience of looking at self
Differences/tensions – in head/mind, words, visual images
What small parts of a person/experience/experiment end up as
public ‘artefacts’?
Outside is different from inside: dissonance
Distance of mirror affects our attitude: too close is not good
Reflections....responses
Reflections can be true and not true; mirrors hide as
well as reveal
What one sees is unique
Taking a photo of reflections: collapsing complexity, or
creating it?
We use ‘devices’ external to reflection to interpret it
Is reflection a form of affirmation or not?
Reflections....responses
What we ‘see’ is shaped by social expectations
We tend not to stop at description: we are
inclined to abstract and interpret
Reflection can be about far more than what we
‘see’ – we draw on associations
From reflection to
reflexivity
Exploring examples in science, in social
science......
[Reading time for McGregor and Amsler]
Responses
• Our literature review provides the best opportunity for reflection: looking
back to what we reject, what guides us
• Reflection can be
– Adaptation
– Looking back
– Locating politics of choice
• What difference does it make when we are researching THINGS/nonhuman living organisms?
• ‘Headwriting’ to connect researchers to their research
• Violence/violation in research relationships?
More responses...
• Experience of professional practice – which is not like
academic research at all! (Eg life of journalist in China)
• Reflection: a lens?
• Reflexivity: a WAY of doing research; ongoing process
• Does reflexivity encompass a universal process?
• The significance of situated knowledge
‘Reflexive turns’ in the
(‘western’) world of
research
•
•
•
•
•
Critiques of positivism from 19th century
Marxist theories of knowledge and power
Feminist theories of situated knowledges
Constructionist theories of lab knowledge
Post-structuralist theories of racialised/universalising
expertise; postmodernism
• ‘Writing the world’ – anthropological critique
• Action research, militant research, radical science
• [to be developed by ‘us’ (?) – critiques, contributions]
Further questions to
consider
• Constructionism
– As researchers, how are we placed in relation to the topics/processed we are
investigating? Is ‘objectivity’ possible?
– Is our role to uncover ‘truth’ - or to question whether there is such a thing?
Are there not always things which we include and exclude? On what basis
does this happen?
– Does it matter for us to grasp the situated nature of our own work?
• And more……
– When does a truth become a truth – or an error – or a falsehood – and then
maybe a truth again?
– Distinction between reflection and reflexivity?
– Can you think of examples from your own disciplinary background?
The case of the LHC
• LHC commissioned at CERN after 20 years’
planning/construction
• Most powerful particle accelerator ever built
• To investigate the building blocks of the universe:
particle physics and the fundamental
constituents of matter; the Big Bang
• ‘The LHC is going to tell us more about
everything’ – Tara Shears
News release 13 Dec
2011
“In a seminar held at CERN today, the ATLAS and CMS experiments
presented the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs
boson. Their results are based on the analysis of considerably more data
than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make
significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to
make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the
elusive Higgs. The main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs
boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range
116-130 GeV by the ATLAS experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS.
Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in this mass region,
but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery.”
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/
The ultimate reflexive
question....
At what stage do we pull the plug....?
Summing up
• The importance of understanding what didn’t
work as well as what did
• Does research have an end?