The “Meta” Research Question
The question I’ve been investigating throughout my life
In what ways might I complicate people’s understanding of the role objects and places have in our lives?
This question is the consistent thread through the ten years of my design practice. For my Ph.D. work, I’m moving past proving to myself the idea that people use objects to cope.
For the past ten years, I was looking to validate the importance that things and visuals had in my life. There’s plenty of evidence of this kind of neutral use of objects and place, and I’m pretty ‘over it.’ I’m finding myself procrastinating re-reading the Donald Winnicott and Sherry Turkle essays I used to be excited to read. I’m moving onto an understanding of things that for me feels more politicised and personal.
During the intensive, Shana Agid highly recommended I read Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting the Sociological Imagination. In Chapter 1: her shape and his hand, Avery Gordon writes:
I came to write about ghostly matters not because I was interested in the occult or in parapsychology, but because ghostly things kept cropping up and messing up other tasks I was trying to accomplish. … The persistent and troubling ghosts in the house highlighted the limitations of many of our prevalent modes of inquiry and the assumptions they make about the social world, the people who inhabit these worlds, and what is required to study them. …
The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure … one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course.
This is exactly what I needed to hear. Avery Gordon gives us examples that we aren’t alone.
Norma Alarcón (1990) is following the barely visible tracks of the Native Woman across the U.S.-Mexico border, as she shadows the making of the liberal citizen-subject. Maxine Hong Kingston [(1990)] is mapping the trans-Pacific travel of ghostly ancestors and their incessant demands on the living. Gayatri Spivak (1987, 1989a, 1993) keeps vigilant watch over that dialectic presence and absence that characterizes “our” benevolent metropolitan relationship to the subaltern women “over there.”
Nicolò Degiorgis captures this new excitement I have in his photography collected in “Hidden Islam: Islamic Makeshift Places of Worship in North East Italy, 2009–2013.”
bell hooks writes,
The walls of images in Southern black homes were sites of resistance. They constituted private, black-owned and -operated gallery space where images could be displayed, shown to friends, and strangers. These walls were a space where, in the midst of segregation, the hardship of apartheid, dehumanization could be countered. …Images could be critically considered, subjects positioned according to the individual desire.
Michael McMillan writes,
Post-World War II black settlers in Britain may have been represented as socially problematic ‘Others,’ but their participation in an emerging consumer culture meant that [West-Indian formal living rooms in Britain] came to signify the ongoing decolonizing process in an attempt to re-define themselves.
As I started the first few months of reading after getting back to Turin from the intensive in Melbourne, seeing these ideas on paper has given me permission to straighten out the spirit and foundation of my own personal practice. It’s energizing me to define this and later bring it back to inform my work at Matter–Mind Studio in concrete and meaningful ways. Feeling dissatisfied with the soul and gut of my studio plays a major part in me pursuing the time and space to do this research in the first place. My meta research question is still the question I’m asking. I’ve dug up something that’s closer to who I am now.
If you want them, I’ve got pdfs of this stuff. Ask me for them, I’m happy to share!
Gordon, Avery., and JSTOR. Ghostly Matters Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. New University of Minnesota Press ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Alarcón, Norma. “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman.” Cultural Studies4, no. 3 (1990): 248–56.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tripmaster Monkey : His Fake Book. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds : Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York ; London: Routledge, 1993.
Degiorgis, Nicoló, and Martin Parr. Hidden Islam: Islamic Makeshift Places of Worship in North East Italy, 2009–2013. Bolzano, Italy: Rorhof, 2015.
Weisman, Celia Y., and bell hooks. “Art on My Mind: Visual Politics.” Womans Art Journal 19, no. 1 (1998): 54–64
