Re-viewing desires : re-(per)forming interdisciplinary matter(s) : the written thesis as scholarly home(s) : a thesis submitted to Massey University in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Visual and Material Culture, Massey University, 2014
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Date
2014
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Massey University
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Abstract
This research explores methods of representing individual interdisciplinary
inquiry in the context of a written thesis. It is an active experiment that has been
driven by performative writing experiments: writing, re-writing, reflecting, and
inflecting. While this process examines the construction of this thesis, in doing
so this also informs wider consequences of how we comprehend the academic
thesis as scholarly vehicle. The term ‘home(s)’ is used to signal an irrefutable
crisis, and to draw attention to a desire to belong, in academic home. So
throughout, performing meaning has been employed as a method of engaging
with the many homes—both physical and abstract—of creative research, that
include but that are not exclusive to academic discipline, other means of drawing
spatial territory, and the written (and the writing of a) thesis itself. I question
disciplinary home(s) – how they are constructed by, and how they construct,
subjects (inquirers AND topics). This thesis affords a new understanding of
academic home: the thesis is asserted to be an—inquiry-constructed—scholarly
site – an alternative to academic discipline, interdiscipline, or other any other
“disciplinary” relation. This thesis generates its own themes, logics, rules—
methods—for viewing subjects, and seeks to assert its way of seeing the
world: the necessity of the other. A new materialist project, it investigates the
entanglement between viewed, viewer, viewing mechanism, and context –
elements involved in the re-presentation of ideas and articulation of meaning. A
temporary apparatus, the thesis as contingent body facilitates re-iterative material
encounter, re-views of both matter and matters. The thesis doubts being fixed—
it is a textual boundlessness: is/never fixed, is never in one home, or at home
for long. Nor have I been fixed by this thesis at all, but have been made visibly
iterative and always in a state of becoming. Presented in the possibility of the
other, is the infinite ability to re-view.
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Keywords
Academic dissertations, Interdisciplinary research, Postmodernism, Research Subject Categories::HUMANITIES and RELIGION::History and philosophy subjects