The researcher as occupational Traveller: From strategic essentialism to creative understanding

This paper records the author’s reflections on a five-month study leave involving interviews with occupational Travellers and their teachers in five countries between February and July 1999. The focus is on ways in which elements of the researcher’s subjectivity were mediated and negotiated through interactions with the interviewees and others, processes that both clarified and contested those elements for the researcher. The argument is advanced that, like occupational Travellers when interacting with non-itinerants, the author simultaneously engaged in ‘strategic essentialism ’ (Spivak with Rooney, 1997) and strove for anti-essentialism in the form of ‘outsidedness ’ from, and ‘creative understanding ’ with, others (Bakhtin, 1986). This suggests that the interplay between essentialism and anti-essentialism is complex and fluid for both educational researchers and occupational Travellers