foster theoretical engagement? I suggest choosing an image, any image, included in this study and looking at it from above (not on the screen in front of the eyes), but leaning over it (leaning forward – feel what your toes are doing?), literally changing the body’s location and spatial relationship to the image. Do so for some time, and investigate whether some details of the image became more important than others, or whether color nuances become apparent. Sense what changes in your body. Soar over the image until you are ready to move on, with new insights that are informed by both theoretical engagement and embodied engagement with this study. What you see, looking at the image, no one else can see and thus I can’t analyze it (for you).
Soaring with/over this study could also mean looking at something from a more distant perspective, for example, by choosing a word and looking up its origins, meanings, and translations. I applied these two ways of soaring as a means to conduct practice led research in a direct engagement with the study. More often than not, soaring introduced me to surprising details. For example, the word “matrix,” meaning womb, was not a meaning I was at all familiar with, yet it opened up new ways of thinking through how to introduce theoretical matters in this chapter.
I started this chapter with two quotations taken from Google. I chose to do so, also because Google has changed the way scholarship is performed and changed the ways in which I, as a researcher and teacher, engage with younger colleagues in the pedagogical sense of meeting in the middle or meeting them where they are. I understand this study to also have the function of preparing me for future researching engagements. The Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, which was a two-year study of the student research process, had the goal “to understand how students do research, and how relationships between students, teaching faculty and librarians shape that process” (Erial Project 2018: online source). The project found that “many university students use scholarly databases like they would Google” (Creagh 2011: online source). This, in turn, changes the way I can engage with younger generation researchers and it indeed changes the way in which libraries of the future are designed and built. In my understanding, a literature review is in a way a subject specific library. Walk in and see who is there, and who says what from which position/through which medium.
[34] Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, is currently building a new library designed by Maya Lin.17 One main goal of this new library is to provide “state-of-the-art digital technology to enhance the creation of new knowledge” (Fliss 2017: online source). Therefore, in this example, libraries are understood to no longer mainly store, preserve, and provide books, but also to foster technologically supported and enhanced knowledge production processes. Thus, while extracting information using Google is problematic in many ways, I acknowledge Google as a technological feature that can trigger thinking and enhance playing with “low threshold” access routes to knowledge, but also can create networks between researchers. For example, the second opening quotation is taken from an online journal called Teorija koja Hoda (Walking Theory). I introduce the concept of walking theory as a means to engage theoretically in the last analytical chapter, which focuses on art. I first came across the notion or expression of walking theory in a book, and then much later I found the eponymous journal. Having found the online journal, and having Google translate, with all its limitations, I will be reading the journal and potentially reaching out to the editors.
This chapter is meant to provide an invitation to certain readings of theories as they were applied to the open field of this study. It aims to ease the entry for all people, regardless of disciplinary backgrounds, into reading the analysis chapters of this study. I will continue. laying out the overall conceptual approach of the study as it relates to various (theoretical) frameworks. Remember, this chapter is called “on the matrix of this study.” “Matrix bedeutet im Lateinischen Muttertier, Gebärmutter, also eine Hülle/Schutz, in dem sich etwas entwickeln kann”18, so Hanne Seitz (Seitz 2013: 149). It is, in this sense, that I chose the term matrix, in order for analytical processes to take place within a sheltering framework. Such framework allows for thinking out loud, for including yet unfinished thoughts, which from my perspective provides a good seeding ground for developing/introducing something “new.”
This chapter supplies an initial insight into theories and notions that informed this research. It provides information on the bilingual approach to language, and offers initial insights into how stories and data studied relate to the expanding field examined. It presents a first understanding of some of the causes that affected the choice of inviting considerations on the interrelatedness between body and Leib into the analysis. The relationality between body and Leib, as theorized by, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, provided a theoretical matrix and an “atmosphere” for the analysis within this study as it [35] evolves from chapter to chapter inviting additional theoretical frameworks in to assist and inform the analysis (Merleau-Ponty 2012 and 2001).
Theoretically speaking, designing this study began with an interest in the multi-layered social, cultural, and political implications of RGTs and biomedicine. At the beginning, it was my concern to pay specific attention to the various “makings” and social meanings of the relationship between the embryo/fetus and women in contemporary biological, medical, and socio-medical discourses, including art. Later, it became crucial, due to the rapid ethical as well as political challenging technological developments in the field of RGTs, to include wider developments in the field of biomedicine into the analysis of this study in order to allow for the establishment of a thorough analytical picture of the complexity of issues in the field of RGTs and biomedicine. Or, saying it differently, it became important to enhance the wingspread.
During the first decade of the new millennium, social science research within and about the biomedical sciences increased extensively. Funding bodies, such as the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom, the Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Germany, invested significantly in research that explores the social implications and public perceptions of developments in biomedical and genetic research. In addition to research that addresses broadly conceptualized topics (such as biotechnology or genetic testing), during the period in which much of the primary research for this project was conducted (2003 – 2007) specific funding streams were implemented to support research specifically on emerging technologies (such as stem cell research and medical imaging technologies). The amount and foci of the funding which has been made available, highlight on one hand, that topics such as biomedicine and genetics are not considered easy to grasp from either a public or a social scientific perspective and, on the other hand, that it is in the interest of society (and science) to acquire a grasp on new developments.
This introduction to the theoretical considerations of the study includes stories of events, which took place during my fieldwork. In recounting these stories, I pull in “still images” of the cultural background of this study, and place the frameworks that I am applying into an interactive relationship with these stories. Some of these will be expanded further in the analytical chapters.
[36] 2.1 On the Interest in Messiness and Inclusion
“Traveling through time is just like
traveling through space”
(Carroll 2009: online).
“Perhaps attending to these questions
would allow teacher-researchers […]
to embrace
the messiness
of practitioner research and the
impossibility of disentangling
research and practice”
(Steinberg and Down 2020: online source).
In a publication distributed after a few
