I have been asked a great many questions about my work over the years, some banal, some based on misunderstanding, some (like those of my viva) exceptionally challenging in ways that forced me to rethink the project and the value that I placed upon it but I have  never been asked a question that I perceived to be so openly hostile to my work or my intellectual project. Instead of telling a rather senior member of staff at a distinguished UK university, who was on this occasion part of a panel interviewing me for a lectureship, that I found his question at best dismissive and at worst rude and prejudicial given the circumstances, I fumbled out an answer about the imparsability of conceptual entanglements which I do not believe convinced him for a second that my research was useful, interesting or engaging. That is, while for me, the idea that the means and motives, people and places of the shopping centre and largely unknowable and impossible to disentangle from webs of connection and concepts, is an essential idea, I don’t think for a moment that this “Socratic wisdom” was something he accepted as an answer to his abrasive question.

If I have been bold enough, I would have systematically deconstructed the assumptions that my work at the shopping centre could have “clear findings” separable from the “theory” with which I engaged and would have highlighted the paradox in him asserting that I need not provide a “simple” answer while still necessitating that Deleuze not be invoked. I find myself reflecting in disappointment that I did not respond to this question with a more disagreeable bent (I thought that if I had I would have reflected poorly on both my subdiscipline of CMS and my supervisor who had written me a great recommendation letter). I continue to reflect that if I had been offered that job, I would not have taken it simply because of how maligned I continue to feel by that question. I reflect further on how welcoming, particularly by contrast, Kent has been to me thus far and wonder at the shift in my thinking from “any port in the storm” to “you are not right for me”. I don’t know yet what this means for my work but I’ll continue to reflect on it.