‘Welcome to My Brain’ (paper)

Dr. Anne Beate Reinertsen PhD is associate professor and post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Education at Nord-Trøndelag University College, Norway. The professor welcomes you to her brain. She offers you this explanation in her paper entitled : ‘Welcome to My Brain’ (in: Qualitative Inquiry, July 12, 2013)

“This is about developing recursive, intrinsic, self-reflexive as de-and/or resubjective always evolving living research designs. It is about learning and memory cognition and experiment poetic/creative pedagogical science establishing a view of students ultimately me as subjects of will (not) gaining from disorder and noise: Antifragile and antifragility and pedagogy as movements in/through place/space. Further, it is about postconceptual hyperbolic word creation thus a view of using language for thinking not primarily for communication. It is brain research with a twist and becoming, ultimately valuation of knowledges processes: Becoming with data again and again and self-writing theory. I use knitting the Möbius strip and other art/math hyperbolic knitted and crocheted objects to illustrate nonbinary . . . perhaps. Generally; this is about asking how-questions more than what-questions.“

The author provides a number of references to support her thesis, centering around the concept of ‘Neuroknitting’ : for example :

[1] The work of Dr. Karen Norberg, of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who “… spent a year knitting an anatomically correct replica of the human woolly brain.” (Gammell, C. ‘Psychiatrist knits anatomically correct woolly brain.’ The Telegraph, 15 Jan 2009)

[2] The work of Papathanasiou, E. S., Myrianthopoulou, P., & Papacostas, S. S. (2003). ‘Knitting artifact’. (Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 74, 1501) who were the first to show artifact generation in EEG plots of experimental subjects whilst knitting (that’s the subjects, not the researchers).

COMING SOON:  Knitting Mathematics