Crafting a patchwork thesis

I have used crafting a patchwork to represent the process of crafting a thesis. In the main body of my thesis I write about how it wasn't sufficient for me to keep this just at the level of metaphor (although I have doen this as well). I had to actually do something concrete and produce a tangible artefact and I will be taking the completed item into my viva. However, I also made a movie from the photos I took as I went about crafting the patchwork and I've been in a quandry about whether and how to make this visible to others. Should I put it on to a DVD and enclose that with my thesis? Should I put it on a memory stick? I decided finally to put it here. This blog is also part of my efforts to make visible the parts of knowledge production that usually don't see the light of day and in that respect it provides a more suitable home. I also want to destabilise the notion that knowledge can be delineated by and contained within the covers of a thesis. My idea of the messy text means that it spills out all over the place so I also like the idea of part of my work floating around in cyberspace.

This is the patchwork I originally intended to sew and in fact did start to do - but went wrong. It is hard for me to put , if not my incompetence, then certainly my limited ability, on display but it is part of my enagement with Bev Skeggs' critique of academic 'cleverness' that I do. And of course in doing so I'm probably being too clever by half.

This is the design I finally went with. It may not seem that different but each element of the whole is saturated with the reasons for its inclusion. Changing one thing impacted on all the others. It took days before I was satisfied that this spoke for my intentions and was not just a compromise (although it is that as well).

As an aside, when I do a posting I am usually just writing for myself and for persons unknown (although I do of course know some of the people who have read, and commented on, what I have written). This time I am very conscious that some of the people who might read this are my examiners.