Some private sense-making ...

I've always been someone who starts by doing what feels right and then works out why I did it - rather than working out the right thing to do and then doing it. So I started a blog which felt important for my doctorate without knowing why or what I was doing! But today my epiphany began...

What is the point of my blog? Why is it part of me? Why is part of me who is doing a doctorate? Why isn't it like other people's doctorate blogs? Why is it part of me em duas línguas?

What I'm doing is a reflexive commentary of my own situatedness. And my situatedness is both part of my identity and part of me as researcher. It's also part of exploring the situatedeneness of my respondents. So my blog is both an interpretive space for extending my own understanding and it's a reflexive process that raises questions about me and about the power relations in my research process.

Now, I have a lot of difficulty saying that in Portuguese, not because of the language as in English/Portuguese - but because I haven't yet found an academic community I belong to in Portugal where i can use the discourse of interpretive/hermeneutic and critical theory paradigms rather than positivist/empiricist ones. So I can only say it in English because, in my mind, the community in which that "language" would be a legitimate part of my identity (rather than a language that framed me as an inglesa with manias) speaks English. But just because I say it in English doesn't mean that people who speak English will understand it, let alone relate to it.

In the meantime, that discourse belongs to only one of the multiple communities to which I feel accountable to - or in which I have an identity. For example, I also feel accountable to the respondents in my research and to local communities who may not speak that "language" - so I need to be able to find and use different languages and different discourses for the different communities in which I have an identity. But it's not just about language - it's about hearing, appreciating and dancing to the rhythms of different paradigms and epistemologies while also remaining committed to others. But what I feel I'm missing is a language and its sister state of being to be able to do precisely that.

And my blog is one of the ways in which I'm experimenting to try and find that language and that state of being. I've decided it's a bit like trying to find a synergy between promiscuity and betrothal!