Why would any individual continue to write a blog like this in the world as it is today? 

What is arguably the most powerful nation on earth is currently led by a malignant narcissist showing increasing signs of dementia. A man with a clear preference for cosying up to absolute dictators, responsible for actively enabling the State of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and, in the face of all the evidence, currently denying that the airstrike that killed 168 civilians in southern Iran, most of them schoolgirls, was carried out by the US military. A convicted criminal who has been subject to ten federal criminal investigations, eight state and local investigations, and twelve congressional investigations. A man who has appointed as his Secretary of State for War someone who believes that the current attack on Iran is ‘part of God’s divine plan’, that his President was anointed by Jesus, and who insists that: ‘The only side that targets civilians is Iran.’ 

The only answer I can come up with to my own question is that it helps to share my concern for all those things that are of no interest or value to a malignant narcissist. Trying to articulate something of the warp and weft of interest, concern, relationship and connection helps sustain me in this bleak era and, I have to assume, is of some valued to the one thousand two hundred plus “users” who are signed up to this blog.  

The series of short essays, all sharing the common title ‘Re-collecting/ Re-connecting’ that follow this Introduction have been prompted in part by the tortuous process of writing a paper for a special edition of the journal Cultural Sociology called Revisiting Janet Wolff: Affinities between Art History and Sociology. Back in October 2025 I was received an invitation out of the blue to submit an abstract for a contribution and, to my surprise, was subsequently asked to submit a full paper for review. That paper is called Internalising the Thinking of Janet Wolff: an Example. Its abstract reads:

‘This auto-ethnographic paper begins by identifying the impact on its author, then working in tertiary art education, of Janet Wolff’s Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism (1995), particularly the chapter Eddie Cochran, Donna Anna and the Dark Sister: Personal Experience and Cultural History. This informed the author’s ongoing approach to deep mapping – an arts-based approach to the socio-environmental complexities of place – by catalysing two creative works. A brief description of two texts reflecting on Wolff’s influence then introduce a turning-point in the author’s relationship to her thinking. Her questioning of disciplinary boundaries in Resident Alien also informed the author’s critique of the limitations imposed on creative arts-led research in his Art as Research: Creative Practice and Academic Authority (2009). Having indicated something of that critique, the paper turns to the internalisation of Wolff’s thinking, an internalisation then re-externalised through a “conversational” approach predicated on ‘mutual accompaniment’ (Watkins 2018). The paper then reconsiders the concept of influence in its larger context, drawing on a distinction between ‘orientation’ and ‘discipline’ (Zitzewitz 2022). Taking up Miroslav Holub’s distinction between the presuppositions of the arts and sciences, the paper then discusses Wolff’s ‘oblique memoir’, Austerity Baby (2017), using the poet Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin as a counterpoint to Wolff’s work. The paper concludes by proposing a degree of convergence between the author’s concerns and Wolff’s “conclusion” to Austerity baby. A position taken as indicative of a move from influence, as construed within the academic production of texts predicated on the authority of citation, to mutual accompaniment based on internalised orientations that are holistic ways of being and knowing and fundamentally open, inclusive and relational’.    

The auto-ethnographic approach to my own past work indicates why this series of essays has ‘re-collecting’ in its title. It’s required me to return to, and offer an account of, significant aspects of my professional life just prior to, and during, the first two decades following the turn of the current century. The ‘re-connecting’ element is, however, probably the most significant indicator of what I’m concerned with. What Paul Ricoeur refers to as our ‘narrative identity’ is made up of both the stories we tell about ourselves and, equally importantly, those that others tell about us. That’s to say, it is made up of the connections between the two. Consequently, “my” sense of self can only be relational, the ongoing construction of a shifting narrative animated by the innumerable connections, tacit and explicit, that place me in the multiverse. Or, to put this in the psychological terms set out by James Hilman in his essay “Man is by nature a political animal” or: patient as citizen:

‘If Self and its draw towards reflective interiority refers not to an immanent soul-spark of a transcendent God, or to a germ, seed, truth, centre or core of will-power, but rather is constituted of communal contingencies, then the draw must at the same time be a draw toward exteriority, towards the contingencies of the actual ecological field – where I am placed, with whom I am, what is happening with my animals, my food, my furniture, what the toaster and newspaper and refrigerator purr do in the field I am in. To find myself I must turn to them, visibles and invisibles’. 

So, the essays that follow are an attempt to articulate that turning to the ‘visibles and invisibles’, to the particular shared ‘communal contingencies’ regarding the thinking and making that have shaped how I find myself placed in the world.