How to choose a method?
When reading Abidin Kusno’s text, what he describes the city as a constellation of relations, more specifically of multiple dimensions. He draw from multiple thinkers between the theoretical frameworks to writers such as Seno in order to consider how to approach the city. Some key frameworks include considering what are the situated experience (Lily Ong) and the worlding (Aiwha Ong and Ananya Roy)
A lot of research is embodied - or should be written in a way that enables a form of embodiment. There is an epistemological turn, where the subjectivities of a researcher is also formulated into the body of research. Embodied turn, where the body, relationships and practice is intertwined in the act of seemingly objective research becomes contentious in this body of research. Affect, which foregrounds the fragmentation through unstructured feelings, of how knowledge is discussed, learned and felt, encourages us to rethink the context and ways of how pedagogy is conducted. Is it a holistic part of life? Is it simply a portion of our day? or how can and should we be making and sharing ideas with our communities?
By thinking through collectives, I can feel that the methodology I will embark on is informed by embodiment. To be part of an embodiment, an embeddedness that is tied to local knowledge. I talk to many of these collective members almost everyday - just because of our friendship and shared interest.
In the field of architecture, it is often the combination of many roles to formulate the depiction, use, construction and the form of space - These ideas are loosely tied together with a concoction of Cultural Studies, Ethnographic Authority, Historical thinking and sightlines, and Visual Analysis. It encompasses a vast set of knowledge to disentangle how spatial conditions come together.
There is often the personal integrated in this complex web of constructing knowledge. James Clifford discusses how Art practice is now influenced to become ‘provincial’, or responding to the local, rather than previously during the era of modernism, it challenged the emergent historical oeuvre. Hence the task of the ethnographic turn is seeping into cultural production. (p55)