Encounters at Manuscript Preparation: Inquiry in Conflict’s Aftermath

Abstract

This exercise of the researcher self explores relationships materializing in manuscript preparation, suggests that conflict-site research is more of a social and affective experience, from proposal to manuscript preparation, than most researchers realize. Outside of clinical and ameliorative approaches, little educational research focuses on ongoing, unresolved conflict. Even less sheds light on the experience of the conflict-site researcher. Here, I show how texts of other conflict-site writers accompanied my process of manuscript preparation, just as activist teachers I observed during the field work phase stood among peers when protesting and facing police repression. Correspondingly, I discuss an intertextual approach of reaching out to others and drawing on published stories while composing the main narrative of my manuscript, Movements on the streets and in schools. I call this practice conrading based on my turning to Anna Tsing and W. G. Sebald who had turned to the stories of Joseph Conrad in their books. As I called upon other authors who wrote about conflict in my assembling a social movement-based manuscript, moving forward, I suggest the uptake of social and textual relationships will become important when researching in times and spaces of pandemic, state repression and institutional defunding.