While our group started discussing and shaping the project, we shifted our approach. Our initial reflection on the links between Territory, Sovereignty and Security through the analysis of very different cases shifted more towards a collective reflection on methods that could be used as experiments to think the different ways the three terms relate, with a fourth concept so tightly linked, mobility. Quickly then, the project shifted from a detailed study towards an open experimentation, investigating about alternative method to visualize complex phenomena that we could all try out on our cases.
This allowed me to feel a lot freer regarding the case, the neighborhoods I wanted to observe, the level of detail I would try to unveil. Rather, I became interested in asking different questions to interrogate what was assumed or hidden within the Plan Abre narrative.
While we kept meeting once a week, we changed our organizing. We defined that every week, one of us would present a method they liked in order to try and see what would come out of our cases. We also explicitly decided to change the pace. We are still living a pandemic, not able to physically meet, laugh and be together to work. Some of us were going through extremely difficult personal circumstances. We also decided that we would take in consideration how we felt during the meetings and throughout the process. I consider that our second meeting was fundamental in that sense. As explained in our collective iteration, we changed our pace, in order to include emotions in the process. This sense of collective care has been implicitly at the center of our intent. I was not surprised to hear all the member of the team expressing it while telling the class about our progress during the last encounter of the semester. Laura stated that the process had relied on “thinking collectively and caring for each other”; Jessie said that “we try things and we support each other”. The first disruption of the research process and incorporation of our emotions took place when Jah sensed our frustration and invited us to turn the cameras off to write down individually what we thought the definitions would serve for. It was liberating and also gave us a better sense of what we were doing: collective inductive research, trying to center care as the pace-giver of our progress and contingency as a method to maintain permanent openness.
This set of flashcards reflect some of the group movements and decisions we made to find new paths and avoid traps, while always centering care:
http://www.obliquemethods.space/
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