All 7 entries tagged Biography

How do my values affect my resarch

How do my values influence my research interests? This is a first-week-of-study question, but I will put out a preliminary answer, written at night whilst drinking rosé:

I wish they did so to a larger degree! Anti-racism is the primary motivation for my academic activity. To make the project researchable and fundable though, I have found a case where Norwegianness is a serious point of political controversy, and focussed my study on that. The case is religious education. However, the field and literature is full over other issues that I will have to grapple with, and that represent a digression from my central motivation for this research.

That my questions and answers are heavily value laden and political is, as far as I´m concerned, a good thing. This, I think, is a Weberian supposition: questions can and should be fueled by values and politics. Analysis and data collection should aim at transparency and accountability – factors which demands a level of intersubjectivity.

The processes involved in analysis and data collection must be made intelligble and (hopefully) convincing to the readers. The answers and conclusions may well be political insofar as the questions asked were value laden. Nuanced research may give tabloid answers, the value of science does not lie in the amount of qualifiers given to any answer.

Lars Eriksen : 15 Oct 2006 20:12 |  Tags: Biography |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Biko and my point of view approach

The other book I would like to present is the South African Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko´s writings ”I write what I like.” Biko is one of the most salient and forceful critics of the idea of charity and ”help.”

If a person is to achieve a sense of human dignity for herself og himself, this can not be a gift from above, but is invariably an achievement from below. As a result, Biko would have nothing to do with South African ”white liberals,” who, according to Biko, not only oppressed black, but also told black how best to fight oppression. When asked what whites could do to join in the struggle against apartheid, Biko answered ”fight white racism among whites.”

Now, unpacking what Biko meant is a difficult job. The sources are few, and his thinking changed. One interpretation which had a strong political impact, but which probably is a misrepresentation, is a form of strategic black essentialism.

What I have got from reading Biko during my stay in South Africa in 2002, is a sense of point of view. This is the origin of my idea to study how majority ideas of norwegianness changes due to multiculturalism, rather than study the minorities.

I found a more academic formulation of the same idea in Ruth Frankenbergs work ”White women, race matters” approaching the idea of whiteness as an ”empty signifier” which kan be filled with whatever content suits the individual.

Lars Eriksen : 15 Oct 2006 20:07 |  Tags: Biography |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Slaughterhouse–5 and my big–word positions – epistemological and ontological musings

I would like to turn the attention towards two books that I have read. Not necessarily because these books caused changes in my life, but because they might be suited to explain to others the otherwise convoluted workings of my brain. The first one will be in this post, the second book in a seperate post.

Kurt Vonnegut´s book ”Slaughterhouse 5,” describes the authors attempt to write something sensible about the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Essentially, it shows that the world is bigger and more complex than human brains can do justice to. It shows that whatever worldview an individual chooses, that worldview is that small brains attempt at grasping the world. The world is bigger than our brains.

I read this when I had just moved to an international sixth form college from insular Norway. Sharing kitchens with refugees from Bosnia and Rwanda in the mid-nineties reinforced my sense that world is a disorderly place, and that my attempt to make sense of it was a modest one. In fact, the world we experience is infinite.

Not in the way that there are an infinite amount of numbers, but more comparable to the fact that pi is infinite: 3.14 is quite a small number, but it still goes on in infinitly greater complexity. I could spend a whole life studying a piece of grass, and not grasp the complexity of it. I could spend my whole life styding the hydrogen atom and not grasp the complexity of it. I could spend my whole life studying subatomic particles, and certainly not understand those.

Today, I carry with me these experiences. Ontologically, I assume that there is a real world out there, which is so complex and weird that to live and work, humans have to make simplifications, maps and shortcuts when describing the world. Epistemologically, I notice how people at all times (history of religions gives a background for this) have carved out meaningfull social worlds from the raw material of their experience of the world. That these life-worlds are socially constructed seems self-evident to me.

Lars Eriksen : 15 Oct 2006 20:01 |  Tags: Biography |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Academica biography: Dinner tables and class

A point can be made about class, though less concerning my research interest than with the fact that I have a research interest in the first place. My parents have often wondered why they got such academic offspring. My father calls it ”a happy milkshake,” my mother calls it a credit to the principles of her teacher training school, by which she raised her children, at least in terms of literacy. I credit dinner-table conversations. As the youngest, I was able to listen in to conversations about my older sisters homework, or whatever my father had read in the paper. In this way, I absorbed an academic way of speaking, arguing and discussing. Having learned this early, it is closer to a motorskill than in a home with different dinner table discussion.

Lars Eriksen : 15 Oct 2006 19:52 |  Tags: Biography |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Academic biography: Why do I write the way I write?

Both my sisters are at my level of education or higher, so I can´t quite see gender as an independant variable explaining why I am doing a PhD. However, I think gender identifications have a bearing on my style of writing, and my self-presentasion as an academic.

Specifically, I have made an effort to avoid two male academic stereotypes. One is the objective keeper of true knowledge, a position happy with the social status given to academics, indulging in the arrogance which people will let you get away with, if you play this role well. The other is the socially inept nerd. Certainly in Norway, the image of the good girl that does her work conscientiously is different from the male nerd.

I feel that the gendered roles of the arrogant intellectual and the socially inept nerd are both lurking on the horison, both labels I have been afraid of. As a result, I try to avoid the worst excesses of jargon and assumed objectivity. I have experienced that as a gendered process.

Lars Eriksen : 15 Oct 2006 19:50 |  Tags: Biography |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Academic biography: Why religion?

Religion
Religion suffused my childhood. I have made a journey where personal faith has been been replaced by a research interest in religion. This is by no means a natural consequence of reflection or higher education, as some secularists may claim. However, having grown up within the world of norwegian christendom, it is a world that I am deeply socialised within.

I might find two explainations why this socialisation has an impact on my choices. First, an explanation of how socialisation might cause a sense of existensial importance. Bourdieu (I THINK!!! ????) presents three forms of knowledge.

He talks about 1)bodily knowledge (hexis), which is about stance, motoraction and so forth. 2) taken-for-granted knowledge (doxa) which is about our assumptions and the real-life assumptions that are so obvious that they seem to fade into the foreground and remain unnoticed. 3) Reflective knowledge, which is availble to us in conciousness and reflection.

Even though religion as faith does not have the same truth-claims as it did, questions of religion are important to me for reasons I can´t quite explain. In Bourdieu´s terms, my habitus has been shaped by the doxic knowledges pervasive in my religious upbringing. The fact that I find religion important and fascinating will change at a slower pace than mere faith.

Bourdieu´s scheme might point in another direction as well. Sociologists of education and labour have pointed to how those with power tend to favour learners and applicants who are familiar with themselves. This does not necessarily mean have the same opinions, but showing a shared set of references.

During my time as a student and job seeker and employee, I have noticed two things: Firstly, when I speak about religion, I recieve positive feedback. People listen to what I have to say to a larger degree than when I talk about other aspects of society. Secondly, I get much more positive feedback from employers in Christian institutions than from secular institutions. I don´t know what it is.

Following Bourdieu, I probably walk, talk and act in a way that says ”you are one of us” to liberal norwegian christian employers and funders, at a hexic and/or doxic level. I am not above repeating those of my actions that give me positive feedback. A christian socialisation gives me a sense of the importance of religious identity as well as easier access to some arenas of academic life.

Lars Eriksen : 15 Oct 2006 19:46 |  Tags: Biography |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Academic biography: Why multiculturalism?

Multiculturalism

My research is involved with multiculturalism. Can my family background help to explain this? I have been brought up in Norway, but with a constant reminder that my identity as Norwegian isn´t ”just so.”

Growing up, the idea that we were a Christian family was more salient than any national identity. Indeed my parents occasionally tell the story of their marriage in terms of shared faith overcoming cultural differences.

During childhood, I have been told about the missionary fields and the importance of thinking about ”poor people” elsewhere, to the extent of posting my packed lunch ”to Africa” as a child.

If we are to see beyond the paternalist motivations for such charity, it is clear that my horizons were never bound by the borders of Norway. Being a middle-class home, we could also afford to visit my English relatives regularly. We had the economic ability to turn my my bi-national background into real life experience.

A specific form of Christianity and a bi-national home set me aside from the taken-for-granted horizon of norwegianness prevalent among my friends. I see my project as fundamentally anti-racist. The fundamental idea that all people of the world deserve equal dignity was brought forcefully to me by a bi-national and low-church missionary upbringing.

Lars Eriksen : 15 Oct 2006 19:42 |  Tags: Biography |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem