The humanism of the other in sociolinguistic ethnography

2.1 The human subject

This paper conceives of difference as a resource and argues for an applied linguistics which considers the individual less in terms of categories of identity and languages and more in terms of relationality and human dignity. To build this discussion I turn to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his ethics of alterity, drawing also on Judith Butler and her ethics of precarity.

Levinas argued that liberalism fails to account for generosity, trust, love, and being-for-the other. He saw that “an unhindered movement of sovereign ego, in its autonomy and its absolute freedom, leads to indifference, and ultimately tyranny” (Tahmasebi-Birgani 2014: 97). In an inversion of liberal politics, Levinas resists the self-referential prioritisation of ego. Levinas’ philosophy proposes a radical ethics which counters the liberal tradition of uncaring individualism. His philosophy has been described as “inverted liberalism” because it flips a liberal conceptualisation of individuality on its head by retaining singularity, but losing autonomy (Alford 2004: 146). For Levinas (1981) individuals no longer serve themselves, but are bound to the Other relationally. Alford argues that Levinas provides a non-liberal justification of the supreme value of the individual, a key assumption of liberalism. This is what Butler (2005) refers to when she speaks of the Other as a timeless moral relationship. It is to consider the relationships between self and alterity not in terms of ego, identity, and freedom, but in terms of responsibility, non-sovereignty and unfreedom. Butler, following Levinas, argues that we are unfree because our responsibility to the other was not chosen, but is nonetheless necessary if we are to retain our humanity. The individual is a crucial concept in Levinas’s theory because the apparatus of the state too often fails to see the individual’s suffering. Levinas proposes that in the face of a hierarchising society, we can make a difference to the way we encounter one another as individuals, beyond the social and linguistic categories which name us. Levinas’s philosophy dramatically distinguishes itself from neo-liberal accounts of “the romantic portrayal of triumphant individuals” (Rosa 2019: 29) because subjectivity commences not in sovereignty but through upholding the unassailable Other, whose difference must be heard.

Levinas is radical because he upends the way we conceive of ethical relations. The ‘awakening’ is not in the ‘I am I’, but in the ‘I am for’. This means that at the most primary level we are acted upon by others in ways over which we have no say. It is this “passivity and impingement which inaugurates us into who we are” (Butler 2005: 90). This willingness to be commanded, this ‘unfreedom’, this ‘trauma’ is what makes humans ethical. It is to be for the Other, without the assurance that they will be for me. What Levinas does is to recast the Other as the crucial character in the process through which the moral self comes into its own.

Neither Levinas nor Butler are prepared to offer a road map to political transformation (Rushing 2015). However, both allude to the serious political consequences of not understanding that the “life of the one is bound to the life of the other” and that certain obligations emerge from this most basic social condition (Rushing 2015: 68). Similarly, both Levinas and Butler argue there is an ethical valence in unknowingness. In the relationship with the Other there is an opacity which remains forever open to impression and ethical possibility. For Levinas and Butler the encounter between self and Other is where ethics lies. Because Levinas is philosophically concerned with the ethical possibilities of human contact, he steps away from language with its proclivity to name. Language reduces the other to known categories, and hence turns otherness into sameness (Herzog 2020). Levinas’ ethical stance highlights difference and the unknowability of the other, suggesting that categorising, explaining or even attempting to understand such uniqueness always reduces the Other.

Levinas proposes that signification should be conceived as face, proximity, sense, and touch. The face is a “generosity”, and a “moment of faith” according to Levinas et al. (1988: 175). Levinas pushes back against semiosis as sign in the linguistic sense. His concern is not with what we know through language or other modalities, but, rather, the signification gained through being in contact with others. The face therefore provides the possibility of ethical kinship, but also political action, because observing the face of the Other is a call to address injustice. This is a point Butler adheres to in her ethics of precarity which builds directly on Levinas’ philosophy.

In the ethics of alterity, ‘the Other’ is said by Levinas to be the beginning of a more responsive self, opening avenues to “the other in me” (Alford 2004: 162). To speak of the human subject therefore is to speak of the ethical subject (Critchley 2013), the resonant subject (Nancy 2007), and the listening subject, attending to meaning as a sense, an echo, an affect, a reverberation. The researcher as the listening subject is an ethical, sensing, and relational subject who shapes not only social space, but also moral and aesthetic space (Bauman 1993). Aesthetics here does not refer to feelings, impressions, or spirituality. Levinas rejects a Hegelian conception of art with its expectations of beauty, idolatry, and egotism (Herzog 2020). Levinas points to the limits of an aesthetics which generates passivity making people indifferent to the suffering of the world, keepings them in indifference, allowing people to withdraw from responsibility. Rather he seeks an obliterative art which shows the incompleteness of reality. Obliterative art “denounces the easiness or light insouciance of beauty and recalls[s] the damage attendant on being”, revealing its secrets, namely “the fact that being is open to otherwise than being” (Herzog 2020: 19). Such art considers the disjuncture between proximity and incommensurability. It leads to the Other.

Levinas offers a theoretical direction which presents social action as neither located in indifferent individualism nor in descriptions of totalising subjectivities. What I take from Levinas is a non-essentializing explanation for the responsibility researchers show others in field and team relations. He provides a critique of neoliberalism because he emphasizes individual subject’s responsibility to work towards social justice. His is a social ontology which foregrounds human relationality and vulnerability, a project also shared by Butler whose ethics of precarity is an attempt to counter violence and political hatred by seeking to understand points of human connection (Cyfer 2019).

2.2 Responsibility

Difference matters deeply, as sociologist Stuart Hall puts it,

I come to the present, to who I am, by a different route from yours; and therefore, our conversation has to recognise that different histories have produced us, different histories have made this conversation possible. I can’t pretend to be you. I don’t know your experience. I can’t live life from inside your head. So, our living together must depend on a … conversation. (Hall 2007: 148).

We each speak from a particular place, out of a particular history and set of experiences, and Hall, a Marxist sociologist, was keen to express the centrality of racial and ethnic identity in Black cultural politics in England. Hall insists on recognising difference rather than erasing it. But he also describes difference as the beginning of a conversation which might lead to wider political organisation and connection.

To scrutinize my own and others’ listening, looking, and writing within team ethnography, it is useful to work with two theorisations of difference. The first is ‘difference from’, which considers the ways in which a unique subject articulates its difference from others (Biesta 2015). Biesta describes difference from as an instrumental difference, which involves the naming of identities to categorize and make distinctions. Here difference is an effect of discourse in which people become categorised, and knowable to themselves and others. The second theorisation refers to ‘in difference’ (Williams 2021; and this thematic issue), in which difference is a feature of being human, and demands an ethical response to the Other. To be in a state of ‘in difference’ is to respond to the ethical demand to trust the stranger, with all of the attendant hopes and disappointments (Løgstrup 1997). In the analysis of research vignettes we will see how social categories of ‘difference from’ become relevant. But we will also see researchers dwell ‘in difference’ as they respond to the precarity of others.

Central to sociolinguistic ethnography are the activities of listening, observing and writing. Beyond hearing what is said, ethnographers listen to the sounds of the social context, and what those sounds reveal about another’s world. Nancy (2007: 5), a philosopher of music, defines listening as an “intensification and a concern, a curiosity or an anxiety”, in which the self enters an attentive state. To listen to the voice of the other is to attend not only to the message but also to the tone, timbre, rhythm, and vibration of how something is said. Nancy builds the concept of the ‘resonant subject’ as opposed to the ‘phenomenological subject’, posed already in its point of view. Instead, the resonant subject is attentive to the sonorous present in which the voice echoes, reverberates and rebounds. It is a subjectivity in which the body senses what is outside and inside the self, in which listening is “to be open from without and from within, hence from one to the other and from one in the other” (Nancy 2007: 14). Nancy suggests that listening is a process of both self-discovery and a willingness to be open to another’s story. It is an opportunity to connect with and share the moment. Here the past is not finished, fixed or final but open to oncoming time as it rebounds and reverberates.

2.3 Representation

The research vignette is an example of a “biographical and speaker-centred approach” (Purkarthofer and Flubacher 2022: 3) to writing ethnography, and sits within the ‘Auto-Socio-Bio-Ethnography’ continuum (Busch 2022: 290). Such accounts are often highly personal, and draw upon the experience of the author/researcher, while also incorporating multi-genre approaches such as “short stories, poetry, novels, photographs, journals, fragmented and layered writing” (Hamilton et al. 2008: 22). The biographical and personal narrative is now a well-established form of ethnographic writing, and despite ongoing concerns that it is atheoretical, too subjective, uncritical, solipsistic, interiorised, and open to commodification, it is “here to stay” (Behar 1997: 32). In her seminal text, ‘The Vulnerable Observer’, Behar (1997: 32) is persuasive in her drive for an anthropology that wears its “heart on its sleeves”, occupying “a borderland between passion and intellect, analysis and subjectivity, art and life” (Behar 1997: 174).

Neither field note nor diary, we might say the research vignette is a mini auto-ethnography. It is intended to highlight the importance of researcher-researched as well as researcher-researcher relations, producing accounts of “feelings, desires, needs, aesthetic reactions, and moral dispositions” (Hamilton et al. 2008: 20). The research vignette has come to play a specific function within our teams of researchers, serving to bring back the ethnographic moment of individual field work observations, while making those moments available to the larger group. The research vignette links individual experience in the field with the professional imperative to communicate more widely. As a genre, the research vignette bridges a person-specific text (Geertz 1996) akin to a personal diary, and a public professional text analogous to a report. It is a first instance of going public, in which there is an attempt to do justice to representations of earlier field contexts. As a genre the vignette offers stability by upholding a semi-conventionalized form, which nevertheless, remains open to reinterpretation through reenactment (Hanks 1987).

I came to the research vignette through the very route Behar critiques in her influential text.

Indeed, a recent trend among some anthropologists is to work as overseers of large teams of assistants on big research projects … The tendency is to depersonalize one’s connection to the field, to treat ethnographic work (only a small part of which is done personally by the principal investigator) as that which is “other” to the “self,” and to accumulate masses of data that can be compared, contrasted, chartered and serve as a basis for policy recommendations, or at least as a critique of existing practices. (Behar 1997: 25)

Over the last 20 years, I have often worked in this kind of large research team. Through experience I have become aware of the dangers highlighted by Behar, including the potential for hierarchy within teams, distance from the field, othering of research participants and research team members, and the over-production of large, impersonal data sets. However, funding regimes have changed, and working in teams of researchers across disciplinary boundaries is more common than not, at least in the social sciences in the UK. And this shift requires that I engage with these issues by attending to the voices, values, thoughts, and feelings (Appiah 2007) of a linguistically, ethnically and socially diverse research team. Indeed, the research vignette became a means of listening to other researchers who are listening to themselves listen to the other/Other. Research vignettes describe what it feels like to work in a team in which there are pre-existing hierarchies. They document what happens when the researcher walks into the world of complete strangers, and is faced with the task of subjecting them to intense scrutiny. They deal with the tensions, anxieties, missteps, recoveries, and small victories of that process. Research vignettes are intended as a space for researchers to address these tensions, and for the team to pay attention to them. They are mediated accounts of the ethnographer traversing categories while unavoidably reproducing them. While research vignettes are mediated texts and therefore problematic in Levinasian terms due to his focus on saying and doing rather than a concern with the said and the done, I will argue nevertheless that they work diachronically because they are able to document the researcher’s openness to their limits of knowing and the researcher’s ethical disposition to ‘be in’ difference.

The research vignette is available to team members and to wider audiences. It is a genre which is both evocative and analytical (Denshire 2014), connecting to broader social issues, replete with narrative components of “description, chronology, evaluation” (Ochs and Capps 2009: 18). Sociolinguistic scholarship has greatly deepened our understanding of the discursive practices of narrative evaluation and our awareness of the ways in which humans author themselves. Like other narratives, the research vignette is a site of moral evaluation (Ochs and Capps 2009: 47), in which “thoughts, and feelings are interpreted in light of local notions of goodness.”. Goodness, Ochs and Capps explain, is not a ready-made set of moral tenets, but the pursuit of sense-making through narrative activity, “to air, probe, and otherwise attempt to reconstruct and make sense of actual and possible life experiences” (Ochs and Capps 2009: 7). The research vignette is therefore simultaneously evocative and analytical, personal and professional. Fundamentally it is an untidy, incomplete, and unresolved conversation, not simply between a researcher who is authoring herself, but a researcher who is authoring the other, and who finds herself responsible for this representational process, asking,

How does our writing … reproduce a system of domination, and how does it challenge that system? For whom do we speak, and to whom, with what voice, to what end, using what criteria? (Richardson 1997: 57)

To recap, I have made the argument that in the neoliberal university the individual researcher is compelled to compete for attention and resource in an environment which values a self-interested subject. Gershon (2011) has documented the moral vacuum this creates. I have asked what other theorisations of subjectivity beyond neoliberalism are available to explain the ethical kinship researchers appear willing to develop in relations with others. I have introduced the concept of the Other as ethical invitation to search for the “the other in me” (Alford 2004: 162). Through reference to Levinas, Butler and Hall, I have considered more inclusive understanding of the subject extending the conceptualisation of the listening subject as an ethical, sensing, and relational subject. I have suggested the research vignette is a suitable genre for retaining the complexity of ethnography and documenting accounts of difference and subjectivity.

4.1 Vignette one: Daria Jankowicz–Pytel, London

The last phase of the project involved collaboration between two key research participants, Michalina and Barbara, in an advice centre in London. Both Michalina and Barbara were trained advisors, offering guidance to people on a range of issues, including benefits, immigration, and welfare rights.

The research partnership started joyfully, but soon revealed complex positionings. I began to wonder how far Michalina’s participation in the project was her own decision, and how far it was imposed on her. At first, pushing myself into this relationship seemed uncomfortable and intimidating – I felt I was an outsider and intruder. Later, I realised it was a great position for an observer, offering a wide-angled perspective. I understood that these tensions were not personal. Rather, they were unremarkable, and a natural and necessary mechanism of the organisation. In other words, the institution was run by strong, professional women protecting their vulnerable clients. Indeed, the two women’s roles in the organisation’s structure were clearly defined: Michalina worked on relations with clients, and Barbara on relations with stakeholders and funders. Any initial tensions I experienced were put aside. I saw that the two women built their relationship around trust, loyalty, and the responsibility they felt to protect and support vulnerable clients.

Trust was an important and changing factor. Initially, the lack of trust was an issue for us all. I found myself relying on the ‘shields’ provided by the university, which made data collection more ‘legitimate’, ‘meaningful’, and by implication ‘harmless’. I also sensed that the concerns of Barbara and Michalina about the research were diminished by the authority of university governance, and its responsibility for any potential mess. However, our relationships developed beyond this. Once the trust-building process started between me, Michalina, and Barbara, the interactions became informal. When I got access to their kettle, and to silly jokes shared across the team, I noticed we were all more comfortable! However, the arrival of two other TLANG co-investigators, neither of them Polish speakers, both university professors, again changed the atmosphere. Things became more uncomfortable. I saw that although interactions continued in Polish, their language towards me became much more formal. In the presence of others from the research team, Michalina maintained social distance, which vanished again when I returned to observing her alone. I could see she preferred to be observed by me only, and I suspect the argument about limited room space was sometimes just an excuse to keep the other co-investigators away.

I often felt I could identify with Michalina in some ways. There was this sense of shared knowledge about the reality of the ‘old Poland’ (1980s–1990s). For example, the context for sarcastic jokes about pointless queues – shelves in shops during communism were empty, so a queue meant something was offered for sale – whatever it was, it was a good idea to queue – for tea, for soap, for washing machines – grotesque; tacky glass-holders identical in each and every Polish household; or spitting with tobacco when smoking cigarettes without a filter. Our shared knowledge was also a context for bitter memories, as I could see sad similarities between Michalina’s and my mother’s life stories, which were reminders that I am happy to be right here and now. On the other hand, little tangible things like the old-fashioned crystal fruit bowl (exactly like the one my beloved Gran used to have in her kitchen), the habit of drinking tea ‘the Polish way’ with sugar and lemon, or the music of Michał Lorenc played next door to Michalina’s office. All these brought back the past Poland into present day London, and made me realise I miss people and places, which are only memories. It also made me understand I am part of something that doesn’t exist anymore, and if this is my ‘Polishness’, it exists neither here nor in Poland. Yet, I don’t feel ‘British’ either. Polish language seemed to link all these dispersed worlds into one meaningful world to me, the one in which I live. I could tell Michalina’s feelings were similar.

Michalina had the skill to find things from people just by falling silent, including from me. Sometimes I wondered who interviewed whom. Michalina kept her private life securely away from the project, therefore I focused on her work routine. I felt inexperienced in dealing with other people’s tragedies, and I struggled to manage my emotions during observations of the advice meetings. Limited space in the advice room, direct eye contact with clients, and uncomfortable silences during interactions between counsellor and client seemed to shape emotions in the room. I only realised my own emotional reactions through retrospective writing. In this process I understand I learn by doing but only if I notice; self-reflection appeared to be the tool which helped me controlling and re-defining my role as a researcher.

Michalina and I developed a friendly relationship in the project. However, this varied, appearing to weaken and strengthen at times throughout the project. I was puzzled. It was reinforced after the EU referendum when moods shifted. Barbara and Michalina rolled up their sleeves to work with the media and fight against skewed images of ‘bloody-foreigners’ which negatively portrayed Polish migrants in the U.K.

4.2 Vignette two: Adrian Blackledge, London

Here I am having a mug of tea in the market caff scribbling notes in my new notebook. I am looking forward to the observations but feel slightly intimidated by the markets. I buy fish here when I get the chance and know that communication can be forthright.

ALL RIGHT MATE YOU FOUND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR?

EEYARE ALL THIS HALF PRICE TODAY! EEYARE MATE HALF PRICE TODAY!

ERE YOU GO ALL THAT PORK A FIVER! ALL THAT A FIVER!

Look and listen

three seventy

three seventy?

three seventy

too expensive! [laughs]

eight pounds a kilo

eight pounds?

three seventy

eight seventy

eight seventy?

three seventy and five pound, eight seventy

Listen

WHA’ GWAAN?

Write

the head of a young goat

crystals of ice defrosting

on eyebrows and eyelashes

falling as tears

Write

holds up gnarled fingers and thumbs:

ten pigs’ hearts for five pounds

Write

A woman who looks African buys a large piece of pork belly from B. He puts two pieces on the scales and she shows him which she wants. ‘Do you want it cut?’, making with his hands a cutting sign. ‘Yes’. ‘Here? How do you want it cut?’ She indicates with her hand, an indeterminate sign which he seeks to clarify. He ‘cuts’ the meat with his hand. ‘Sliced?’. She nods. He checks by showing her a thick piece of already-cut pork belly. She nods, but indicates two cutting motions with her hand. He says ‘here and here?’, showing her where it will be sliced. She agrees, and he takes the pork to the cutting board.

Listen

chop-chop

cheap-cheap

Look

The young man from All Seasons trundles by with empty boxes marked ‘Tilapia, gutted and scaled’

Listen

A fishmonger walking past says in a heavy Brummy accent: ‘you’re not having a break already!’ ‘yeahhhhh’, says the new man. ‘They’re too nice to ya!’

Write

Scald, cauterize, boil for three hours

with fistfuls of salt until bleached

then drench still steaming and hot

with nothing but sweet malt vinegar

Listen

A couple (possibly Romanian, Bulgarian?) buy a bag of chicken feet. They discuss further purchases and the woman points to a cut of meat. B weighs it and says ‘two sixty’. The man interprets for the woman, who says ‘OK’. She buys something else for one pound eighty. ‘Anything else?’, asks B. The man interprets. The woman shakes her head. ‘Four forty altogether’, says B. The man and woman have further discussion and the man asks ‘how much that one?’. B gives a price, and the woman points to other pieces of meat. She says ‘that one, no, that one’, as B lifts selected pieces to show her. ‘Six fifty’, says B after weighing the meat. The man interprets. The woman, who wears a colourful, full-length skirt, nods. As they are walking away from the stall the woman says ‘Can I have a receipt please?’ in heavily accented English. Although the man interprets for the woman throughout, she appears to have some proficiency in English.

Write

Cows’ feet line glass counter tops.

Each hoof, or toe, or toenail, or is it

fingernail, is painted vibrant pink

not carefully, but roughly, clumsily.

Look. Listen. Write.

A well-dressed, older African Caribbean woman comes to the stall. She seems to know B and he enjoys serving her. She complains that the chickens are too skinny. ‘Blame the chickens, not me’, says B. Mr C intervenes, saying with a broad smile, ‘skinny ones have more flavour’. She tells them it is her birthday. Either B or Mr C asks how old she is and she says ‘I’m a young girl’, and puts on a physical mime involving hips and fingers to represent an attractive young woman seeking to draw the attention of young men. They all laugh, and B says ‘I’ll take you out’. Mr C joins in, but it is the customer’s show. She tells them she is eighty-seven. She says ‘I’ll love you and leave you. See you next week.’

Listen. Write.

This is Mandarin. I cannot understand. Rachel transcribes. I can understand. Teamwork works.

KC: pig’s stomach. pig’s head

MC: always wanted to eat pig’s ear

KC: there is no pig’s ear today. they will be delivered on Monday morning. you want pig’s head?

MC: I am going. remember that

KC: I will remember.

MC: write it down on a piece of paper and stick it on your forehead so you can see it every day when you look at yourself in mirror

KC: I don’t need to look in the mirror, I know I am smart

MC: so you say yourself you are smart?

KC: yeah, so I don’t need to check the mirror. Hehe

Listen. Mandarin.

KC: Are you coming on your own today? Where’s the professor?

4.3 Vignette three: Agnieszka Lyons, London

When I first started working on the project, I felt both excited and anxious. Excited because I’d be working with Polish language and Polish speakers, and anxious because … I’d be working with Polish language and Polish speakers! Indeed, I felt the weight of being THE Polish speaker in the team, which meant I would be relied on as an expert on the language and culture, which I didn’t necessarily think I was. Working with Polish speakers was fascinating with respect to my exploration of my own Polishness. I worked as an English teacher in London for a number of years, and being Polish felt to me like a disadvantage, because how could I teach English (including teaching ‘native speakers’) if English was not my mother tongue?! I felt the need to prove myself, and to give myself more credibility. I even avoided telling students I was Polish (my distinctly Polish name was a bit of a giveaway though). What a change the project made! I was now openly a Polish native speaker, and appreciated for it! I also re-discovered my other foreign languages, especially Russian, which proved very useful. As the project went on, I found myself more and more proud to be Polish, and joined our key participant in singing the praises of Polish food, and actively participated in socialising senior researchers Zhu Hua and Li Wei into the Polish culture during our joint visits to the shop. I also felt right at home in the mixture of languages which surrounded me as we were doing fieldwork.

Thinking back on my relationship with our key participants, I think I worried about it a lot, especially during the preparation stage. Later I eased into it a bit more. The reason for this was that I knew we would be asking a lot of our key participants, and I guess I was expecting them to at some point say they’d had enough, and were now out. I didn’t want that, so made sure I listened to all the little noises they made, to tackle any potential problems as soon as possible. It seems that my worries were unnecessary. Both Edyta and Tadeusz seemed very happy to help with the data collection, and didn’t seem to think about dropping out at all. In fact, they proved very co-operative, and I soon started feeling at ease with them.

Researching a couple who were shop owners was very interesting. At the beginning, it was Tadeusz I interacted with more, but as the weeks went by, my relationship with Edyta strengthened and developed into a sort of friendship. Edyta wanted me to visit when she, rather than Tadeusz, was around, and was pleased to have someone to talk to when there were no customers in the shop. It’s such a small shop that you can’t avoid interacting with each other. It’s also not very busy in general, so Edyta and I spent a lot of time talking about pretty much everything, bar academic stuff. I knew she thought there was a big divide between me – being quite academic – and her – being not academic at all. She often brought it up, saying she wasn’t intelligent or studious. I found myself covering up behind a jokey, down to earth manner, and did my best to shed this academic self. I felt very protective of Edyta at the same time, playing down the scariness of the forthcoming visit from the “big professor” (that would be Angela), and trying to cushion Edyta’s interactions in the academic context. In conversations with the key participants, I often asked myself how much I should say or ask to maintain good relationships with them but not cross “the line” (and what is “the line” anyway?). In the end, in the emptiness of the shop, I tried to be myself rather than some researcher with a magnifying glass, through which I’d “inspect” participants’ lives. After all, I was asking them to record and video-record, and give me insight into their private lives.

The fact that the project team is so large and multi-disciplinary has meant working in a mix – of levels of experience, personalities, working patterns, and knowledge. It’s a great privilege to observe how these differences are mediated, and positive outcomes negotiated. On the local level, working with two extremely busy co-investigators, I’ve been my own boss, and taken the lead in getting things done. On a more global project level, I was confused at the beginning as to which decisions are taken centrally, and which are a more local matter. It’s also extremely interesting to observe the dynamics in each of the local teams, and speak to other Research Fellows. Although we do the same job, our work and experiences in the field are so different! It’s been a learning curve, and I’m really pleased we’ll get to run the whole process three more times. By the third one, I should have a tried and tested system in place.

4.4 Vignette four: Frances Rock, Cardiff

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