Researcher positionality: Grandmothers are other-with: Applications for researchers
“Let me have a look at you,” Graham said to Viking. Val was about to lift Viking up and put him onto the examination table, but Graham put his hand on her forearm.
Her eyes did widen.
She did pull back in shock.
Viking did look quickly between them – Val and Graham.
“I can look at him where he is, he looks most comfortable with you holding him,” Graham said, and they all relaxed again. Little frissons of tension, little moments of reconnection. Old stories, current needs, future possibilities flowing in and out of the embodied communication. Sometimes there was focus, sometimes diffused tangle.
Overview: October 2023
This month’s fiction is: It is time for you to go
This month’s application posts are:
Researcher positionality: Grandmothers are other-with: Applications for researchers
Substack tells me nine of you made the step from reading the fiction to opening the post about the meaning of the fiction for practitioner researchers last month. I don’t know who you are, but individually I hold each of you in mind and imagine I am writing to you directly as I seek to convey what the fiction has reflected back to me this month as I continue to work out how to use tacit maternal wisdom in my research process, as well as using that research process to continue to elaborate a theory of tacit maternal knowing to inform practice.
I wonder about each of you. What might you be seeking to do with your research?
Why did I research?
It has become about wanting to discover, theorise, and disseminate to the world the private, intimate, and intentional exercise of power used in the service of the vulnerable other that I termed tacit maternal knowing. It didn’t start there. At first, I just wanted to understand what I did in my practice, hence calling my doctoral research What Did I Do? I Don’t Know. I’ve gone from being inward-focussed to trying to find a way to be outward-focussed without losing contact with the intense power of the knowledge that came from the heuristic inquiry. I want my sharing of experience to remain powerful, but am aware in doing so this can seem unfathomable to others (think about Priya’s response to putting Val into a consulting room).
This month's engagement with the core concept of multisensory, through the utilisation of the research process and method developed via the EdD, has illuminated a further aspect of tacit maternal knowing, something I associate with a more grandmotherly position.
Up to now I have thought about the motherly application of tacit maternal knowing, that deep absorption and focus on early infancy. I have claimed that when correctly used it will make a difference and enable alleviation of distress in children who, for whatever reason, had missed out on that wholly absorbed maternal reverie that both Bion and Winnicott talk about in their own ways.
That primary maternal pre occupation (yes I did mean to break up the word that way, this is about what happens before we DO something), as Winnicott termed it, is inward-focussed and wholly absorbed by the minutia of the multisensory, embodied care of the infant.
In focusing on that infant/mother aspect of maternal care and, last month, angrily claiming it as an epistemology and ontology of the body, I felt I was elbowing away the dampening impact of the mansteam, the river of the poisoned ducks. This month, Graham is seeing Val as an ocean, not a river. This speaks to me of the ability, as a practitioner researcher, to move from the particular (river) to something broader and, dare I use the term, generalised – but not meaning it definitely applies to everyone, I’m thinking more about our oceanic community of practice (see Time and healing wait for no man, but tacit maternal knowing might just go with the flow). Maybe shareable is a better term than generalisable.
This got me thinking that in finding our voice as practitioner researchers embedded and embodied as people who prize tacit maternal knowing, and who speak from a power that is relevant to that position, there may be another aspect of tacit maternal knowing, something that is not so deeply and intimately focused on the daily acts of care but which still holds the maternal albeit in a more outward facing way.
In August, Val to some extent enjoys her outsiderness by identifying as being a bit of a mad old biddy who wades in where no one else will. In September, that power was eroded when her enthusiasm and presence was felt to be bullying. And here, in this month's fiction, we have another manifestation of her power. Here we have Val being seen by a male character in a way that he recognises her power, is arrested by it, and connects it to a sense of ocean. It is in the connection of tacit maternal knowing with a male character that enables action, primary maternal pre occupation becomes occupation, doing something with an embedded sense of purpose.
There are few species on the earth where females continue to be part of the community when they are no longer able to breed and so are post-reproductive. As well as humans, orcas also have space in their world for the menopausal matriarch. Such female orcas lead the pods and also keep the young males in order (Brent et al., 2015; Grimes et al., 2023) and are especially valuable when times are hard. They are powerful and use their power in the service of others. They protect the future of the pod by keeping a relationship with the young males. Val, to me, feels like an orca in this fiction.
One critique of the deep self search way of research – whether it is heuristic inquiry, autoethnography, or narrative inquiry – is that it is not generalisable. It doesn’t apply to everyone. Of course it won’t, because what we are researching is that ineffable and contingent thing, the therapeutic relationship that is the agent of change. We are researching how we make and use the intimacy of relationship to connect. That is deeply multisensory if we view it through the lens of tacit maternal knowing, but such mothering is often not seen. Stadlen might say it looks like doing nothing, but is an embodied communication, a multisensory connection of tone, sound, touch, smell, taste. It is a lived experience of more than can be said (Polanyi, 2009) and so is hard to communicate. As I said before, shareable may be a better term than generalisable for this form of evaluating the outcome of our research.
This task of sharing research methodology, method, and findings may come through learning how to inhabit the space of the Graham character. This feels to me to be a first step in allowing the positive male gaze onto the positive and strong menopausal/orca aspect of self in my engagement with and research into integration of fe- with -male. To be seen as strong and to allow herself to be seen as strong is a different identity that Val is allowing than in either the August fiction (being rebellious or at some level taking power over a situation) or the September fiction (being undermined and feeling a victim, experiencing someone taking power over her).
By finding ways that female power can be other-with, rather than Othered-by male power, then there can be a powerful voice that cuts into the roots, and places at the roots of our research work this multisensory way of being. In finding a research positionality that is grandmotherly, still deeply embedded in the tacit maternal knowing but no longer needing to be absorbed by the labours of actual gestating, birthing, feeding, and caring, I feel at a start of potentially grasping something that has epistemic congruence to the phenomena that practitioner researchers focus on, and something that builds on an ontology of the body.
We have to research in the way we work, one aspect of which is being multisensory, for the research endeavour to be congruent and therefore robust. It is the multisensory connection between Val and Graham that makes the decision to put Viking to sleep sound, without minimising the pain of loss. That connection between fe- and -male has to be at the level of other-with. In the extract that set me on this researcher reflection, Val could easily go down the Othered-by route when she is touched by Graham. (In the educator post this month, I start to disentangle the connection between touch and reproduction, such as the expectation of touch being sexualised). The fiction tells me that when female power is held as other-with male power, then the focus (Viking) can be seen in the context that is most appropriate (Val’s lap), not discomforted into a place that is more comfortable for the man (moving to the examination table) and so Othered-by expected norms of the manstream.
Phew, not sure, small and hardy band of researchers, if you are still with me! I hope this rather dense post has helped show a process of illuminating multisensory research, as well as sharing something of what I am still uncovering in my own understanding and self-growth as a practitioner researcher.