December 24, 2011
Getting Ready for the Next Legoviews
Recently, one of the questions I’ve been asked the most is how did I come up with the idea of LegoViews. So, since it’s Christmas, it’s a good time for stories and here’s the story.
When I’ve started my PhD almost 3 years ago, I was obsessed with my ontological view and spent months trying to find the right approach to tackle my research questions. I ended up embracing Social Constructivism and in particular John Searle’s approach. But once I defined the theoretical framework, I needed to find a research method which were constructive enough and which could help me to highlight how social realities are built.
I spent a lot of time reflecting on methods, did my duties reading books and papers about the traditional methods used in social sciences: survey, interviews, focus groups… None of them was fitting enough into my idea – I wanted something more challenging and something which could explain and show the processes and which could materialize somehow the construction of social realities.
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Posted in Methodology |
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December 16, 2011
According to Wikipedia, “An interview is a conversation between two people (the interviewer and the interviewee) where questions are asked by the interviewer to obtain information from the interviewee.”
LegoViews (LWs) do not much differ in the aim, though they deeply differ in the cognitive mechanisms they involve and in the process. Most of the best interviews we can think of, realised by investigative journalists, deeply delve topics in an argumentative way and the interview, in most cases, it’s a dialectic and cognitive fight between the interviewer and the interviewee. John Pilger, for instance, and most investigative journalists, are masters in the art of challenging their interviewee and dominate the dialectic fight.
LegoViews are not fights, they are collaborative dialogues, they are conversations.
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Posted in Methodology |
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December 10, 2011
Ollie building his models with LEGO
As soon as we meet, Ollie, 23, proudly shows me his brand new DC motor for a bike generator. He’s excited about making his own energy and eager to start the LegoView experiment. I met Ollie the first time the Occupy movement had taken the streets in London, on October 15th. He was enthusiastic then and so he is today. Since his job contract ended, he is now free to occupy full time and contribute and support the movement. I show him the LEGO bricks and he immediately starts building even before I ask him to do so. “I am building a house” he says. And he starts assembling the bricks. “It’s about homelessness” he tells me while making his model, “there are like 600,000 empty houses in the UK that are liveable, which are not falling down or abandoned and there’s so many people who are homeless…. They’ve been trying to make squatting illegal for years now… and that’s how you have people sleeping in the rain every night and houses which are completely empty… it’s just stupid…” He comments while playing with the bricks.
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Posted in Activism, Journalism, Occupy |
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December 8, 2011
Ollie building the Occupy Movement's model
A thought-provoking LegoView with Ollie, one of the very first occupiers at St. Paul’s, will explore and explain the movement, its principle, its vision.
“I think that if you have a completely set base, which sets standards for how things are meant to look and how things are meant to do, you can never fit in the way things are in the present moment.
When you are stuck doing things in a certain way, you can’t react to new situation. So I think not having a base it’s important because it doesn’t limit the way you can grow.” [Ollie, 23]
Posted in Occupy |
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