ABSTRACT

Donald Campbell once remarked on the value of being able to ‘reduce the need to put up a brave front of continual competence, and enable one to talk about intelligent hypotheses that proved wrong, stupid investments of research energy that were never worth undertaking even in anticipation, and promising lines of research that were dropped before fruition due to faintheartedness or doing too many things at once’, and how such a story illustrates ‘the chancy indirectness of discovery, and the further chanciness of recognition’ (Campbell, 1981: 455). Fragilities of memory and the danger of hubris put at risk any effort to trace a career. I am answerable for too many periods of dull inactivity and ill-thought through investments of energy, and the recipient of too many unplanned good fortunes, to justify claims to more than occasional patterns in the following account. While I reflect in the first part of this essay on the influences that seem to have shaped my work, I then play a more conventional note by considering the inter-relation of practice and research, and how I think the pieces included in this collection fit.