Paul Smith at PRASH ….

Hi All

this is my draft abstract for the PRASH conference at Edge Hill University in June.

http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers/56271-220101/Postgraduate-Research-in-Arts-Social-Sciences-and-Humanities-PRASH-conference-2010.html#pageInfo (Link no longer active)

You’re allowed 150 words only, so here they are. I’ll be sending this Thu/Fri so any comments would be most welcome!

The title of the presentation is currently “The ‘Interdisciplinary Turn’ and Locating Research”. Hh-hm:

“I do not intend to talk about the minutiae of my research but to give a broad-brush discussion, pitched at the level of sweeping research movements or historical “turns”, about how I have come to locate it within a tradition. Locating the research in this way has provided an overall coherence to both the project and to my identity as a researcher.

Part of the challenge has been conducting interdisciplinary research. Both of the sub-disciplines I am employing (Ethnomethodology and the New Literacy Studies) can be seen as critiques of or responses to “essentialising” discourses, and have been thus used to find a palatable alternative in an area of research interest that has previously been limited to psychologistic, experimental methods and generalising assumptions (Contrastive Rhetoric). The realisation that both EM and NLS are part of the same “practice turn” has allowed a productive re-reading of my work to date.” = 149 words