ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses alternative models for a localized, reflexive methodology and examines the ways in which doctoral students have appropriated reflexive texts in their theses. It then considers the indeterminate qualities of those appropriations. The chapter offers a new account of reflexivity as ‘picturing’, drawing analogies from the interpretation of two very different pictures, by Velázquez and Tshibumba. It concludes with a more open and fluid account of reflexivity, offering the notion of ‘signature’, and drawing on the work of Gell and also Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the inherently specific nature of ‘concepts’ situated in space and time. In that way, it seeks to ‘educate the local’. The notion of ‘signature’ emphasizes the singular nature of qualitative appropriations of meaning and value. It offers, then, a counter to more globalized ways of making meaning, and to the reifying specification of meaning in methodological accounts:
Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
