The second in a new series of blog posts entitled: A-Z: An alphabetical journal through the doctoral experience.
I'll keep this short. Suffice to say that transcribing fieldwork interviews offers an excellent professional development opportunity in addition to reflecting on content. Listening to myself asking painfully long-winded, multiple clause questions complete with sub-questions and asides has considerably improved my interview technique! Notes to self:
- everyone benefits if the question word (how, what, why, when) is introduced early on;
- don't be greedy - ask a maximum of one question at a time. The point of follow-on questions is that they follow on;
- cut the clauses! Otherwise you both forget how the question started out.
That's all folks!
Welcome to the first post in a new series of blog posts entitled: A-Z: An alphabetical journal through the doctoral experience.
WARNING: this post is entirely subjective and not in the slightest bit generalisable.
A is for AUDIENCE. As we all know, a 'good' academic conference is dependent on the coming together of multiple factors: location, venue, regularity of coffee supply, quality of the food/mattresses, how friendly the crowd is ... And the brilliance - or otherwise - of its keynotes.
Truth is, we all spend a significant proportion of our time at these events, in the audience. How do you behave? Are you a tweeter (tweeting 'key messages' uncritically, every 2 minutes to your 40 followers to prove you're at the conference and haven't gone shopping)? Or a noter (eagerly recording summaries of keynote presentations in files you'll never find again)? A zoner (having established the irrelevance of the presentation to you, zoning out and unashamedly checking emails, sending texts, reading papers for forthcoming sessions)? Or a zealot (spending most of the presentation barely containing yourself until questions are invited and you can shoot up your hand to make - at length- the point you have longed to make for the last 30 minutes concerning a minor issue relating to your own research)? How often do we simply sit, listen, absorb and reflect, taking advantage of this valuable thinking time?
Of course, the likelihood of us doing that is significantly dependent on the quality of those keynotes. To that end, calling all Presenters - the key point to remember at all times is that you HAVE an audience and that, other than your reputation, the point of inviting you to present at the conference is for you to a) communicate something b) meaningful and c) relevant. This means that even if you are personage of significant standing and eminent reputation in your field, with a trolley-load of qualifications, accolades, titles and major research grants, please do not assume this entitles you to:
a) refuse to use the available and working microphone when asked;
b) ignore the copious good practice advice for presentations and put 20 lines of closely spaced text on each slide;
c) read out those slides word for word;
d) begin your keynote by saying how delighted you are to be invited to speak at such a worthwhile conference but that you want to use the opportunity today to talk about something completely different;
e) pay no attention to time, assuming that your audience (or at least those that can hear you) will be so interested in what you have to say that they will joyfully forgo 20 minutes of coffee/networking/lunch/paper sessions.
Let me conclude by recommending a couple of Nick Hopwood's handy blog posts on the subject:
making academic conference presentations more effective
is your conference audience really listening?
Since I last posted on this blog, I've moved out of my home of the last 6 years, relocated and changed one of my supervisors, following the first year of my PhD. Significant changes, enough to justify radio silence you might think? So perhaps I don't need to mention the fact that having taken a break for a couple of weeks in the summer, I returned to 'work' and immediately felt saturated with blogs/twitter/linkedin...to the extent that I just decided not to engage again until I felt I had something to say. Amazingly, life carried on regardless.
I suspect that another reason I haven't posted is that I had become aware of a degree of self-censorship about my PhD supervisory issues, wasn't happy about it but didn't know quite how else to proceed. And I haven't had a lightbulb moment, I'm still unsure. But I think that in itself is worth saying.
Good stuff is happening now. Into the second year and the primary research phase of my PhD. More confidence in my abilities to research my topic. Opportunities offered by both a new location and a new supervisor. About to head off to no doubt freezing Sweden to give a paper. Breathing spaces are valuable. Perspectives change.
I'm in the process of relocating (really not to be advised during a PhD, but life carries on regardless). As part of this process I'm putting some of my stuff into storage. This is raising the 'if you can do without this for 6 months, why do you need it at all? type of question, not to mention the 'what the heck is in all the cupboards/spaces behind those brightly coloured doors? Who is storing stuff here and why? What's going on in those people's lives, that they need to put stuff somewhere and pay for it while they go somewhere else/do something else? type of questions? No doubt those questions have something to do with the fact I'm wrestling with Draft 807 of Chapter 1 of my thesis on quite another subject and welcome any distraction.
I had mini 'light bulb' moment yesterday, when neatly arranging another 3 boxes, two chairs and a tube of posters I just can't seem to send to recycling. There are some similarities here to the way I'm storing information as part of my doctoral study. I looked at the 10+ boxes I'd carefully packed and stored two weeks ago and thought - what the hell is in those boxes?! Then I looked more closely at the cryptic label I'd scribbled on the box and thought, ah, yes....I remember - that box contains the crockery I'm not yet ready to dispose of/the diaries I wasted two hours reading/the photo albums I just don't have the time or energy to digitise. Probably because I'm on draft 807 of my chapter, I'm keenly aware that there's a mass, a partially-digested mass, of information, literature and theory, that my mind is simply too miniscule to keep hold of. I access it through my (pretty excellent) filing system, or by riffling through the tower of books next to my desk, or by sitting very still and trying to channel that particular author...(not always successful)...
The point I'm trying to make is that it's all there somewhere, a year's effort, even if I've forgotten it's there. I may not need it now but I might need it later. It's ok to put it in storage. I may never need it, but I don't know yet, so it's ok to put it in storage. There will no doubt come a time when I collect and sort out my boxes and send half of the contents to recycling/Freecycle/the tip/the bottom of the cupboard. But the other half I'll unwrap and be surprised and delighted by and know immediately how that particular item (spatula, cushion, DIY manual) fits into my life at that point.
Along with the definite whiff of autumn in the air comes that 'back to school' feeling as September approaches. I'm tidying my desk and sharpening my pencils in readiness for my second year as a PhD student. In fact, pencils really have become an important part of my toolkit - during my first year of doctoral study I rediscovered my love of stationery: pens, pencils, notebooks. By the end of these three years there will be a stack of once beautiful but dogeared notebooks full of lists, ideas and scribbled references, tracing the halting and haphazard journey through my PhD.
During my first year, those physical tools of writing offered a welcome alternative to the sea of virtual wordage which seeped onto my screen on a daily basis, threatening sometimes, to overwhelm me. Earlier this summer Charlie Booker wrote a Guardian article entitled 'Too much talk for one planet' http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/28/too-much-talk-charlie-brooker. in which he bemoaned the 'vast cloud of blah ... events and noise, events and noise' to which he had been contributing and from which he had decided to take a break. I was ready for a break myself - from the 'events and noise' associated with PhD study (journals, papers, books, updates, alerts, blogs, twitter...). I spent two weeks living in minimalist fashion in a tent in the South of France. It took twenty minutes to make a cup of tea (I'm British, of course I make tea in the South of France!) and I developed a new appreciation for the minor miracle that is a chair.
Since my return, it's taken almost two weeks to reluctantly dip a toe back into that sea of words. But the new year is upon me and I need to get swimming again. On that note, enough of this reflective blah, time to dive in..!
I've just emerged from a six week writing bubble, working on drafts of my first two thesis chapters. They were submitted to deadline and I've re-entered regular life - temporarily at least. Drafting each chapter was challenging in different ways. I find writing about themes and ideas comes more naturally than writing about numbers and facts so at times, the context chapter felt dry as dust. But while writing the theory chapter flowed more easily, I was continuously assailed by the fear I was only scratching the theoretical surface.
The day after submitting the drafts, I was rewarded with two stimulating posts on different blogs: Pat Thomson on emotional research and Arlene Stein on intellectual craftsmanship. Both spoke to different aspects of my recent writing experience.
Pat Thomson's post considers the place of emotion, including anger, in research and how this can motivate the researcher to produce engaging, compelling work. I feel fortunate, a year into my PhD to be more not less interested in my topic (part-time, mature undergraduate retention). I'm researching it at a time when part-time enrolments in HE have dropped 40% thanks to the funding reforms. What's happened has made me pretty angry and especially when I read the words of those writing after Dearing in 1997, who felt hopeful about the potential for the HE system to encompass lifelong and flexible learning. The sometimes dull, sometimes fascinating work of uncovering the context of my research - and my own industry - has fed my motivation further.
Arlene Stein's post addresses the instrumentalising of intellectual activity, the pressure to 'produce', leading to 'the production of routine work that fails to inspire oneself or others'. She advocates a return to craftsmanship - an engagement with our work, seeing writing as craft requiring technique and playfulness. My struggles with sense, flow and even elegance have been part of the crafting process, an engagement with my research, my topic so that others might engage with it too.
Both posts addressed motivation and engagement - key ingredients in this doctoral process - in different ways. What both made me realise is that whether I'm writing about numbers, facts, themes or ideas, compelling, well crafted writing is absolutely necessary because both chapters are doing the same thing: telling the story of my research for a purpose. Arlene Stein quotes C. Wright Mills' from The Sociological Imagination - and perhaps I'll put this up on my wall: 'I am trying to make it damm good all over'.
For the last three days I've been cocooned within the leafy surroundings of one of England's 'plate-glass' campus universities, a product of the Robbins era and very much a major player in the contemporary higher education scene. The campus was devoid of undergraduate students but teeming with the people that make the university business model work...conference delegates.
Conferences are changing...these days at least 50% of delegates have their heads in their iPads during keynotes and presentations, another 25% are checking their phones as if their sanity depended on it. Are we bored, lonely, curious, or simply unable to leave the office? This conference had live tweets beamed onto the big screen during the introductory speeches. It provided a distraction when the speeches flagged or disappointed, but really, is this polite?
The best thing about the last three days has been reconnecting with the other students on my scholarship scheme. We're based at institutions around the UK and last met in November at an induction event. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then and it was good to catch up, eat together, drink together (some more than others!), compare notes, share woes, welcome new members. We're all on the same track, deadlines biting at our heels, juggling study, work, personal lives. There's something to be said for a bit of group solidarity now and then. Keep it up guys!
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