Week 10 Reading:‘James always hangs out here’: making space for place in studying masculinities at school: Dónal O’Donoghue (2007)

Sitting here after reading O’Donoghue’s text, I am brought back to my own primary school experience in Ireland. I attended St. Patrick’s BNS in the city centre; when I was there, one of the Patrician Brothers was the principal and two other Brothers were teachers; the rest of the teachers were lay people. Before I transferred there, in the middle of 5^th class, I had been attending Scoil Éinde BNS. The kids who went to this school were mostly from my area of the city and from solidly middle-class families; detached/semi-detached house, two cars outside. St. Pat’s had a different set of kids, many from less affluent backgrounds. The schoolyard was a challenging place, especially for a student coming into the school in the middle of the school year. Finding a “safe space” in the schoolyard was not easy. One of my earliest memories of the school was of seeing two brothers (students) fighting, one biting the ear of the other, drawing blood. The school principal shouted at them to come to him, had them stand before him, and slapped both of them really strongly across the face. I’d never seen a teacher hit a kid before and I was quite shocked by it all. The two brothers seemed to shrug it off and went back to join the throng of screaming boys. The schoolyard was in a U-shape, with one leg of the U being a place of mayhem. The other leg, nearer the doors, was relatively peaceful though you had to have your wits about you there too! 

I just looked at the Facebook page of the school and it looks totally different. The towering grey walls of the mayhem leg are painted (by the students it seems) in bright colors and seem far less industrial/institutional than I remember. They also seem to have a school garden and many other “soft” facilities that were not there back in in the early 90s.

O’Donoghue’s work seeks to explore how young boys “learn to speak, act and perform masculinities in school spaces and places”. Given that his focus was on the interaction with spaces, his research methods needed to be able to encompass his subjects’ “gut feelings” and so the use of art making and writing was used. I feel this was a useful approach as the subjects may well have found it difficult to articulate these feelings in an interview setting. Instead, they were given a disposable camera and notebook and given the task of showing how they felt about these spaces through the use of photography. O’Donoghue says he was “less concerned with the discovery of truth claims than with the creation of meaning”; there really is no “truth” to be found in this kind of research – each subject will have a personal relationship with these spaces affected by their experiences, perceptions, and memory of events. That the focus was in the search for meaning meant that there were no “answers” as such; just an uncovering of feelings, an intense vulnerability and an awareness of self and identity within the hierarchical spaces of the all-boys school. 

The method is based, generally, in arts-based research and, specifically, in a/r/tography. This offers the chance to explore the topic, though it doesn’t offer any specific “deliverable” in terms of findings or recommendations. 

For me, the research results in a snapshot of the topic rather than a formulaic presentation of discovery, nicely bound and with suitable references supporting it. I would imagine that, being Irish himself, O’Donoghue was able to speak the language of the participants and understand their feelings quite well. I feel using interviews would have made the research quite clinical and created the effect of pigeonholing the experience of the subjects. That the study had no walls/boundaries in term of what the participants were asked to do created a kind of third space for them to inhabit, as researchers themselves, where they could critically view their relationship with the physical spaces in their school. This kind of research seems to raise more questions than it answers. It certainly evoked a response in me, bringing me back to my school experience, that made me engage with the topic. Perhaps this is one of the advantages of a/r/tography in that it offers many different “on-ramps” to the research so that, regardless of who the reader is, there is always the possibility, or at least a non-threatening invitation, to join in the exploration of a theme in the search for meaning. Powerful stuff.