What is research? What are human beings? What is human experience?
My understanding of research is that it is a tool to enable us to understand the answers to the second and the third questions above. We human beings perceive the world through our senses: through sight, smell, sound, taste, temperature, touch, and our sense of space, for example. Then we being combine those perceptions with things that we already have inside of ourselves; feelings, memories, emotions, our unconscious psyche and our thinking. If the aim of social science research is to understand human experience, its methodology will be dependent on the particular researcher’s understanding of human beings and human experience, which in my case, is an understanding based on art, spirituality, senses and feelings. Thus in my view there is room for a methodology in the human sciences that is closer to the nature of day-to-day human activities: one expressed in pictorial, symbolic images and perhaps not in formal, written natural language but in the style of conversation; one relating not only thinking, but feeling; one that is perfomative, that is to say based in movement rather than stillness.
