many ways to skin a cat

i hate that expression. it has always conjured thoughts of dead cats, the sound of ripping and the separation of cat skin from cat flesh. flogging a dead horse is a similar idiom that i try to avoid. why all the dead animals? but this idiom (the cat one) is in my thoughts tonight, because here I am, writing a thesis without having an institution which may sanction it and award me with a qualification one day. i am homeless in the land of academia. well, officially so, although i continue to work at a university, and thus i continue to be a paid researcher who presents at conferences, talks about his research, and tinkers away on weekends and spare hours. in re-reading and re-thinking lyotard's concept of 'narrative knowledge', i'm pitching an argument for the inclusion of this text, but not the entire text, just the part about competence and know-how as pivotal to contemporary ways of knowing. i'm poaching, as certeau might say, like a thief in the night. or better still, i'm engaging in bricolage. i'm taking up 'narrative knowledge' as a theoretical approach from the toolbox of western philosophy. this is how foucault would like to see people use his work, and this is what i try to do - not just with his work, but lyotard's too. and certeau, latour, haraway, kuhn and others. because in poaching their work i get to engage with it, and this is what i'm here for. i want to read and consider and play with ways of knowing, writing, and narrating. such an approach is demonstrative of the politics i point to within my thesis - that of young people's sex practices. here too, is an array of tools and discourses in which young people engage to create particular sexual knowledges and realities. knowledge and learning is generated here through practice. just like my thesis, where it is only in the practice of writing, reading, and re-writing, over and over, that i come to know what i know. there is no actual guide to writing a thesis. and (despite what supervisors have told me) there's more than one way to write a thesis. when i told previous supervisors that i needed more time to read and think, or spoke of the ways i need to approach this so as to manage and maintain my interest, they didn't listen. they rolled their eyes and told me to write a thesis in the way that everyone must write a thesis, otherwise it's not a thesis. they wanted me to tailor it to fictional (as yet unconsidered) markers who would give the stamp of approval. they didn't believe that i knew what was best. they didn't accept that my experiences of making and writing other things (including an honours thesis) gave me a sense of knowing my capabilities and preferences, and how best to manage my learning. and thus, i was a bad student, evicted from the academy. but still, after falling off this near dead horse several times, i have a sense that i was right, that i did know what i needed; that is, when i needed to keep reading, when i needed to not-yet write, and when i needed to play with concepts and data in ways that might seem risky, yet were the only ways to sustain my interest in a project that often overwhelms me, stretching itself well beyond my periphery. and now i guess i have time to play. and maybe the game will end in a thesis.