Fond Farewell

When I started this blog I wanted to explore the borders of public and private. It seemed like quite an adventure. However, what I have learned in the past days is that there is a serious side to this. As is my wont, I set out full of hope and excitement and in joyful expectation of the learning that lay ahead, little imagining the mischief some may make of this. I wish wisdom would join me as a travelling companion. Or even common sense. I was aware that 'putting myself out there' would expose me to critical scrutiny but I did not anticipate it would also expose me to personal scrutiny and attack. This has been salutary.

This blog was an academic production - even the posts about my life outside study and the academy were included because I felt they contributed to my project. It was a way of 'doing' reflexivity. I have looked again at my aims and I am pleased with them and I have learned a great deal by addressing them. I will certainly include an account in my thesis of my blog-keeping days and how it has expanded my understanding.

As you may have gathered by now I will no longer be keeping this blog. I did consider keeping it because, in the end, a bit of venom can actually act to fortify one's immune system. However, I did a posting yesterday and was aware that the happiness and joy I had felt in keeping it was no longer there. I actually closed it down for a day or so. But what I have decided is to leave it there in cyberspace so I can use it in my thesis - tinkering with it now and then to keep it 'active'. I'll close it down when my thesis is done.

None so deaf as those that will not hear

My good friend N (and she is a great friend), also doing a PhD at 50+, described doing conferences as 'talking at a load of bored academics who then grill you mercilessly'. I must say that has also been my experience. It has also been the case that I get questions that totally floor me because they seem to have nothing to do with what I was taking about. What I have come to realise is that most people bring their own frame of reference and will ask questions within that paradigm (I have tried to avoid this word but, darn it, it is spot on here). So for example, my work is situated within what can broadly be termed 'narrative research'. So I was once asked about what 'genre' I thought the stories I am writing belong to. Well that threw me coz they don't belong to any genre. I would be horrified to think I was shoe-horning these rich and wonderful and complex tales into some pre-ordained framework. I was even more horrified when it was suggested they were 'fairy stories'. When I got back from conference I spent days researching this 'genre' and could not comprehend what might have prompted this observation.

What this tells me is that when writing my thesis I will have to make sure I explain my view that stories are stories. I do think that we draw on prevailing cultural discourses to tell them and these in turn are dependent on even broader historical circumstances (or 'zeitgeist' if you will). We also tell the stories according to certain specific collaboratively generated but individually enacted scripts (Ivor Goodson gives the excellent example of the script of the 'scholarship boy'). Taking account of this turns life stories into life histories in my view. And this is a country mile away from saying this turns a story into an example of a particular 'genre'. How disrespectful to the storyteller.

Academic Time Travelling - part 2

I have never been one for wishing my life away - time goes too fast as it is. But right now I find myself wishing I could go forward in time. The 'circumstances' and 'situations' to which I sometimes refer in this blog are overwhelming me at the moment. At times I worry I'll never complete the PhD coz there is too much else to distract me. But I will. I find myself doing the same thing as when my mum died - shut everything else out and focus, focus, focus. So I wonder what kind of dried out old prune I'll be at the end of it?
On a much breezier note I've spent the day thinking about my quilt which will be the visual representation of my methodology. As well as a lot of visual work I've also been writing about whatI'm doing and writing so I get a clearer idea about what I'm doing. I haven't yet got as far as ordering any fabric but I'm getting close - then comes the sewing. That will be fun. But the more I do it the more I appreciate the similarities between doing the thesis and doing the quilt and although I sometimes rue the day I decided to do it, it becomes more and more apparent why I did and that following through on this will enrich my project no end.

Academic Time Travelling

I'm going back in time, to the 70's in England to be precise. Several things have converged to make this happen. Firstly not only am I 50 this year but loads of friends are too of course. I'm very proud of the fact that I still have friends from school and that we still get together from time to time. Now Belinda has sent out invitations for a 70s-themed party - 'pop on your platforms and boogie on down'. So I'm off shopping in cyberspace for a suitable outfit. I knew I should never have got rid of my yellow and purple smock dress and matching platforms. Secondly, at our last supervision meeting, Pat (Professor Sikes - the most amazing person and a wonderful teacher. I totally love her, have total respect and am totally in awe) suggested trying to call up the 70s zeitgeist (coz I'm talking about women who went to uni then and was looking for a way to 'contextualise' the stories they told). So I'll be talking to my friends, surfing the net (get me!), getting out the old photos, watching 70s films (like I ever stopped watching Saturday Night Fever) listening to 70s music (again - like I ever stopped). I already have a pretty good idea what the 70's zeitgeist was for me and putting that across is going to be difficult. I have no idea how to do it. Not least because it wasn't any one thing - it shifted and changed. But, thinking about it, what links the strikes and blackouts to punk, flares to feminism is that it was a time (perhaps - I'm thinking aloud here) when there was a thirst and a hunger for change without any clear idea of how to satisfy them. There was a restlessness about the 70s, a boredom too, and the co-existence of tired old ways with a kind of mad trying on of anything that seemed to break with those. There wasn't much focus to the 70's I don't think, but it was the decade I grew up in and it's going to be hard for me to stick with the zeitgeist and not slide down into nostalgia and sentiment.