Black dogs

Winston Churchill is the cultural figure famed for using the term 'black dog' to describe his affliction of clinical depression. Whether or not Churchill invented this phrase or not is a matter of dispute - it would seem unlikely, given that the metaphorical image of a black dog within common parlance, literature and folklore has a long and tangled back-history. Indeed, cultivation of the phrase has also been attributed to Samuel Jonson, Hester Thrale and John Boswell, which indicates that conceptions of depression found description in the visual symbol of the black dog long before Churchill spoke about his illness. Nonetheless, in 1911 Churchill wrote to his wife, Clementine, having visited a doctor who he felt had 'cured' him:

"I think this man might be useful to me - if my black dog returns. He seems quite away from me now - it is such a relief. All the colours come back into the picture."

The notion of colour in relation to depression is curious, since it figures frequently as a way of measuring or describing ones internal state. That the ascription of mood to colour is culturally learned does not prevent it from 'feeling' like a natural or instinctive way of expressing the tone of personal emotion. Grey, black and blue are ready shorthand descriptors for feelings of apathy, sadness, bleakness and hopeless sensations, all of which are common symptoms of depression.

The evolving thesis

Though the focus of my thesis has not changed, what has been clarified over the past six months is the methodological approach that I wish to employ. I am interested in the pursuit of qualitative research methods, as practices that represent an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. I am keen to produce a thesis that signifies the convergence of a number of ideological stances, that utilizes a wide range of research methods, written styles, and observational angles.

I wish to avoid writing a thesis that assumes the role of outside quantifier: I do not wish to occupy the position of colonial ethnographer, observing the habits and customs and cultural output of the Lake District, from the assumedly elevated position of expert analyst. Instead, a qualitative research model offers a conceptual framework that is gendered and multicultural, and is thus a more appropriate – and I would argue interesting – position from which to weave a written thesis that attempts to reconsider certain ‘truths’ about the landscape of the Lakes.

My earlier desire to take on a mixed-mode thesis came from my wanting to approach my work in a way that interconnected practice with research, in order to locate myself within, rather than without, the project. I am interested by how research might pull at certain hierarchies and traditions, and how it might therefore actively mimic the same themes of my thesis. I like the idea of producing work that interrogates hierarchies as much through its form as through its content. I see qualitative research strategies – weaving together a research project that refuses to privilege one methodological perspective or theory – as an exciting opportunity to borrow from a number of disparate theoretical models and practices.

Though I have dropped the ambition to unite visual illustrative practice with research, the desire to remain on the inside of the project remains steadfast. I shall employ qualitative research practices that locate and situate the researcher in the world, and am keen to utilise interpretive material practices that make this world visible. I should like to draw upon ‘a variety of empirical materials – case study; personal experience; introspection; artifacts; cultural texts and productions; observational, historical, visual and interactions texts’.

It is from this notion of interconnection and range that I came to the concept of bricolage, or assuming the role of the bricoleur. Though it is sometimes disregarded as a methodological approach which is prone to being vague and imprecise, bricoleurs come in many forms, and interpretative bricolage is a methodology that knits well with cultural studies. Qualitative research can thus be described as ‘multimethod’ in its perspective, as it chooses to incorporate a range of different voices, points of view, and political angles; and the researcher is at liberty to draw upon various research tools in her desire to make ‘the world’ of the research questions visible. But I have said little so far about the content of the project, or what I am going to look at, rather than how I am going to go about looking at it. Below, I have sketched out a rough chapter plan which details the cultural texts I wish to look at as overlapping sequence of representations of the Lakes:

1. The Lakes in television: ITV1’s The Lakes; BBC2’s One Man and His Dog; W.G Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape, and Landscapes of England.
In this opening chapter I am to employ the methodological tools of media and television studies to look at how work and employment is presented as an integral part of Lake District ‘life’ – and analyse the kind of narrative structures that are devised to denote the assumed ‘eternal values’ attached to vocational work in the Lakes

2. Ingrid Pollard: ethnicity in the Lakes. Also I want to us Conrad Atkinson as a case study but I’m not sure how yet

3. The difficult third chapter

4. Wainwright: I want to use this chapter to look at how Alfred Wainwright’s illustrated texts formed part of the politicized ‘opening up’ of the Lake District countryside; to examine how access to the land has changed common perceptions of the landscape; and compare his hand-drawn illustrations to other visual depictions of the landscape, such as maps, photographic guides and walking handbook.

5. Railway posters, adverts and packaging in the Lake District: I wish this chapter to focus upon how the Lake District figured in poster art, advertising literature and commercial packaging. This is where I'd like to talk about the picturesque tradition, and how that has informed our understanding of the efficient representation of the landscape.

6. Political rhetoric: Using close textual analysis, I want to focus on how the Lake District has been used within speeches by a number of political figures including Thatcher, Chamberlain, Baldwin, Atlee, Nick Griffin and John Prescott. I'd like this chapter to look at the overlapping rhetorical tropes of these speeches and in an attempt to locate a ‘common parlance’ that exists within political representations of the Lakes.

A defining aspect of qualitative research that makes it quite distinct from quantitative research is the blurring of the boundary line between traditional notions of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ research, as such researchers see all methods as a complementary web of insight and knowledge. Qualitative approaches encourage writing that draws upon observation and participation, and sees such writing as articulating a liberal and feminist ideological underpinning. I am therefore keen to visit the Lake District and undertake participatory research methods such as interview, case study, visual practice, written observation, anecdote and personal account. I shall re-visit the Lakes and take photographs and produce my own visual practice, but this work is not to be exhibited as part of my PhD assessment.

To conclude, this project will call attention to the value-laden nature of academic enquiry, by focusing on rupture, overlap, intersection and coincidence of Lake District representation, rather than the ‘grand narratives of the aloof observer’ .

What's the point of anything

This post demonstrates the futility of life. You see you might have got doing your ponytail off to a fine art, but when you face the front, you'll still look like a boy called Sean.

Cultural labelling/quantification

A fleeting thought: if your aim is to quantify culture through an outsider-located perspective, the risk* is you will still distort the specifics of the culture under investigation. In the same way that labelling the plant changes the make-up of the plant, quantitative research is similarly transformative. The gaze of the researcher is not negligible. But quantitative approaches continue to be seen as bias-free expertism. It is still top of the academic hierarchy, and it is still believed that in the pursuit of knowledge, such models outperform mixed-mode processes. Ludicrously, proponents of quantitative research still claim they operate from a value-free framework. Within the world of qualitative research work, it is openly acknowledged that individual action and experience intersect with culture. Also, we like description and detail and the people over at Castle Quantity deal in generalizations. Basically hang with us because we're the liberal positivists and they're the boring dullards

*definite likelihood

Shy Misgivings

As the daughter of a history professor and a retired schoolteacher, and the younger sister to an English teacher and a Guardian night-desker, you'd be forgiven for thinking I have been born and raised with a desire to engage in debate and discussion. You'd be forgiven, but even so, you'd be wrong. I detest debate, and am shy of intellectualised conversations. I don't find pleasure in arguing and even if I do 'win' in a discussion - that is to say I happen to undermine the other person's particular argument - I feel awkward, a little embarrassed and even more convinced that such manners of engagement are redundant. I don't think conversation necessitates having a victor.

That is not to say I don't enjoy thinking deeply about a broad variety of topics: I do. The enjoyment I glean from running, cycling, walking, swimming, drawing, painting, riding around on the tube and listening to songs whilst staring out of the window comes largely from the associative white space these pursuits allow you to fill with deep and protracted thought. I find running wonderfully uplifting but the movement itself is monotonous: I am an able long distance runner not because I am exceptionally athletic but because I see 10km as an opportunity to think deeply and extravagantly. Similarly, I like being silent because when you are silent, you can think. My best friends are people who can bear an absolute and lingering absence of dialogue. To be lost in comfortable thought whilst in the company of another is a rare and special occurrence. A favourite memory of an ex-boyfriend involves our lying silently and companionably for a number of hours on a beach in Sucuraj, on Hvar. When I finally turned to speak, he smiled and said "hello" in a manner so curious, so surprised and friendly, I think he'd genuinely forgotten I was lying next to him. Some may see this lack of dialogue as unforgivably tedious but to me, such moments marked a rare and mutual fondness for our own thoughts.

When it comes to spoken discourse, I like to engage with others through a light reading of popular cultural markers. To me, conversation is a little like a giant jigsaw puzzle - where it is your collective job to find appropriate pieces to attach to the peripheries of the discussion. Conversation can move swiftly or dawdle languidly, but either way, the aim remains the same: to quantify the cultural terrain, to feel you have traversed as much of it as possible, without contention, without rupture. Dialogue that seeks to worry problems, to tease at loose threads, to dismantle before ultimately re-assembling component structures is for me, tiring and fretful. Maybe I am too quick to interpret disagreement as animosity, or something, but actually I don't think it is a question of psychology: I feel it is more to do with a visible model of communication and for me, conversation that boils down to sharing references and prizing agreement provides a cleaner and more productive model of discourse than an essentially Aristotelian approach. My family and I communicate by talking about television programmes, adverts, clothes, food and drink and people we know. We tell anecdotes about places we have been to but they are light and seemingly inconsequential: no one moment of conversation holds any great point or attempts to uncover particular 'truths'. Instead, the meaning of our conversation is greater than the sum of its parts: our dialogue is rooted in the past or in the present tense, it is familiar, it is rooted in the realities of our everyday lives, and we do not debate topics for the sake of their debate. There is little attempt to abstract concepts and work through their logic: with the exception of two topics; sport and film. My brothers will speak at length about football and are happy to make intellectual enquiries into the historical and social contexts of the game. Similarly, my Dad - educated at Oxford, a lifelong academic, a Professor for the last ten years - will only impose critical reading onto film, and even this is done sparingly, and only with people he thinks will be interested. Otherwise, Professor Hill mostly talks about the overinflated cost of things, how his laptop is unnecessarily complicated, or how he should like to acquire a new scarf. He does not foist his academic ability onto people. My Dad approaches intellectualism in the same way he approaches his knowledge of French: it is a separate language, removed from the language of the everyday, a particular type of specialist discourse that is reserved for scheduled seminars and papers at conferences. And, before you wince, avoiding particular modes of academic discourse does not signal a patronising 'dumbing down': because that claim would itself announce a hierarchical view of language that neither I - nor my Dad - subscribe to. To engage in pronounced intellectual debate is not, necessarily, a more profound mode of communication than other, more popular, discursive practices.

What fascinates me about this topic is that until the age of 21, I assumed all families used dinnertime to discuss what the lady in the Post Office had said or how the man at the dry cleaners thought he'd lost his ticket. I thought everybody spoke about the bus ride home, or how there was an idiot on the train. It wasn't until I started visiting the homes of friends that I'd made at Oxford that it dawned on me that other families held conversations in the way we'd been holding conversations in academic tutorials. The Father would carve the meat and say something like, "well, personally I think it was about race" and off they'd all go, debating whether Nachhatar Singh Bola's death was racially-motivated murder or not, and everybody would join in, and become very animated, and it would be clear that a great deal of pride was at stake. And so it would go round the table, everybody squabbling and in high spirits, and they would try to undermine each other, and afterwards, when everybody had settled down again, they'd move onto pudding, as if nothing had happened. But in that moment, in the moment at which the conversation was taking place, it clearly did matter. To everybody. Stuff mattered. Everything was important, and potentially cerebrally interesting, and multiperspectival, and no thing could be taken for granted as being good or bad, because there was always somebody close by who would leap on the opposing bandwagon and contest your opinion. I was disappointed by my own family's aversion to feather ruffling. I craved the constant mental agitation I saw in the lives and relationships of others.

Over the four years since being 21, I have had friendships and relationships that prized dynamic disagreement, been on holidays during which people sat about and talked endlessly about 'issues', and found employment in offices where contentious ideas were regarded as a more vigorous means of achieving progress. I have talked with friends about various current affairs, argued about the benefits of politics and religion, and even picked films apart immediately after exiting the cinema. Now, the idea of family members undermining my every possible assertion or conception seems a draining, exhausting notion. Because in the end, debate for the sake of debate is a false construct - it is a way of communicating that achieves similar ends to not debating. Contesting everything is closely related to contesting nothing, because both models seek equilibrium. I find arguing not progressive but tiring, and also largely pointless - I think personal opinion is born out of a very nuanced ideological framework, one that is very specific to the contextual and biological makeup of the individual, and it is therefore quite difficult to change minds. I don't believe that confrontational analysis is the most profitable approach to discourse, but it has such a long history, and sounds so thrilling, and is married to a rhetoric that is so highly prized in film and television scripts that it is regarded as a far more glamorous mode of exchange than more passive models of discursive intercourse. For me, the most valuable treatment of ideas comes when one internalises them: when a concept is silently quizzed, deliberated over, picked and turned and interiorised and poked at during the quiet process of internal reflection. But you couldn't make a high-grossing, dramatically active Hollywood film about a young-buck lawyer who sit quietly at his desk with his headphones in, listening to melancholy songs as he silently ponders the trivialities of the case. It would lack a certain, argumentative jazz. Thinking quietly - giving in to your shy disposition - is like sucking a boiled sweet on a long car journey: it may not look very interesting, but it can sustain and comfort you for a surprisingly long period of time. Striving for peaceful conversation, peaceful thought patterns, and peaceful discourse will not announce your intellectual capabilities to the world: but it may distract your attention from that world for long enough that your own internal repertoire of thoughts and ideas have a little more room to flourish.

Looking Back/Thinking Forward

I'm 25 years old now: which means twenty years have passed since I knew I would be a vet, fifteen years since I was to be a champion showjumper, ten years since I wanted to be the unexpected rising star of English ballet, and a varying number of years since wanting to be a park ranger, mounted policewoman and all of the other (usually animal-related) jobs that I've at some stage dreamed of having. In the very early years of my life, I proclaimed that I would be either a boy, or a clown. As time advances, that claim seems to grow more and more prophetic.

In actuality, none of those vocations have come into being. I am neither a qualified vet, nor do I live in the country with a horse in my back garden as I unflinchingly always forecast. I don't yet own a dog and I don't run a tearoom. Instead, I share a flat with two other 25-year old girls behind the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, London. It's a small, cold, dampish place with single glazing and an unusual layout, but we like it. We have an unkillable mouse and seem fated to shiver in our beds at night. Without our hot water bottles we'd have most likely died long ago. I can't help but wince at the coincidental crossover of my first winter in the flat and a rampant attack of pneumonia. So: it is not luxurious. But it is well-located - just two minutes from the tube station and in close proximity to the ordered beauty of Brockwell Park, and eight minutes away from my brother Tim's house, and ten minutes away from cousin's Simon's house. Brixton is vibrant and noisy, a clash of different cultures and exotic discourses, our road especially prone to middle-of-the-night misdeeds and shady occupants. Last year I inadvertently walked right through the middle of a drug exchange that was happening on our doorstep: well-mannered to the last, I even bid that they 'excuse me please' as I negotiated my bike through the middle of the packages that were changing hands as I passed into our shabby stairwell. To the credit of the seller (although I think the word is dealer), he did apologise and give me a hand with the door.

As my Mum would say, I live a hand-to-mouth existence, earning just enough money to get by comfortably, but not enough money to save or luxuriate in. For the past eighteen months, my life has revolved around a PhD: a research project based in a Fine Art department but which really takes its cues from methodologies related to visual culture. It is also an undertaking which means I have a lot of time to myself, and a lot of freedom in which to live. With such freedom comes the stress of unstructured time, hours and hours of time that could be devoted to the eternal process of research and rediscovery but which very easily get translated into reading novels that definitely do not relate to my thesis, (I'm currently reading Howards End) thinking upon and dissecting Simon Armitage poems, going on dog-trot runs around pleasant parks and watching decidedly unacademic comedy clips on YouTube. It hasn't always been this way: for the first 5 months of my doctorate I lived at the British Library, enduring eight-hour days in Science 3, desperately grabbing around for texts that could be in some way illuminating to a project I had no handle on. After the fifth month, I rebelled, stopped visiting the B.L and instead explored London, listening to songs and replaying Curb Your Enthusiasm and failing to attend to any element of my work. This continued for a guilt-inducing 6 months before admitting I had well and truly lost my way. Such realisation nudged me back towards a happier mid-point between work and unrelated exploration. What I have learned is to treat the doctoral work as a job that must be attended to in order to earn my keep: thanks to a bursary and scholarship from the University, it is the monetary bread and butter of my existence. My thesis pays my electricity bills, and working on it is a responsibility that allows me a few sacred benefits. I do not have to commute. I do not have to sit at a desk in a room with other employees, dodging the minute detail of office politics. I do not have to take my lunch break when I am told to. I don't have to abide by the rules of a manager who I may or may not respect. I am free to go to galleries during the day, I can thankfully ride the tube when it is quiet, and I can go swimming in Hampstead Ponds during cold wintry afternoons. I can examine cultural attractions when others are being productive in their suits and ties, and feel as though my life is untainted by corporate cynicism. All of this I like, and appreciate. My life unfurls at its own leisurely, lo-fi pace: I cycle through a life that is certainly not glamorous, definitely not impressive-sounding, but at least not connected with the world of commercial work and money and high ambition. I experience London through the eyes of an Other and feel sidelined to many of the typified mechanisms that drive the city forward.

It's not a life I expected to live, or one I even knew to exist at all, and I continue to oscillate between feeling contented and feeling wildly lost. I have felt depressed more frequently since starting the PhD than I thought I could feel, but I've also come to know my own mind with an uncompromising sense of intimacy. This means I derive great strength from the academic and intellectual knowledge that I have attained so far. I have had the space and opportunity to read not just widely but also deeply, which makes me feel enriched - I have more tools in my arsenal, and a sharper sense of curiosity. But I wonder whether it's a life built around floating, existing on the peripheries and living by modes of defence rather than attack. Often, my days are spent warding off listlessness and thinking of new ways to approach the unrelenting task of research. I am not dynamic as I would be if people relied on me. I suppose I am on my own; walled in by a thesis that sits on my shoulder and refuses to budge, and a lowly position within the dominant social hierarchy.

I sometimes wonder whether my young self would feel proud or outraged that I've stuck with the doctorate for 18 months without feeling love or passion for the task itself. She'd probably be kind but despairing. She would advise me to go and pursue happier, more productive and more integrated avenues, ones that didn't allow for the constant self-analysis that she would find tedious and wasteful. She would encourage me to travel widely, and have fun, to be around others, to relinquish the ivory tower PhDs seem to demand you build. She would tell me to focus upon the essential task of making myself happy. She was a very good little lass, you see, one who only wanted to laugh a lot and have fun, and feel wanted, and essential; and somewhere, in amongst all the Derrida, and the overanalysis of research models, and the endless days of filling time and attending to self-supplication, I realise I have lost my grasp on her.