Week 13: I think I have the theory of space sorted out

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far: 26,746
Words typed this week: 2354
Words lost this week: 0
Total increase: 2354
Days I managed to write this week: 4

As you will spot I have not been editing this week, I know, I said I would but by Friday I was really getting impatient with the theory of space, or rather my lack of understanding of it, so I sat down with For Space by Doreen Massey and a couple of other books and had a good go at getting it sorted. Doreen is making an argument for a specific understanding of space but probably more usefully she has gone through the previous arguments and so has enabled me to go through them. Not that I relied totally on her. What she also gives in an understanding of space that happens to work particularly well with my thesis. I am not saying she is infallible but it is enough to be working with. The stuff to do with space and religion was much easier as I had come across that in my reading.Having done that I then had to deal with the tradition. That was a lot easier than it seems, partly because this was not the place where I am spelling out the matters of the tradition rather it was a matter of picking up some themes and working them through. Now I have to do the data work that builds on this! So next weeks writing will be the factual demographics or maybe the bit on relationship to space. I need to think.

Week 12: Start of edit of Methdology Arrgh!

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far: 24,122
Words typed this week: 2560
Words lost this week: 1861
Total increase: 741
Days I managed to write this week: 4

Guess what, I am jolly disappointed I did not manage to get rid of more words today. I need really need to loose around another 7,000 words from my Methodology chapter. I was supposed to be reducing it but my word count has actually gone up by 741 words. One's methodology should not be quarter of the total thesis. I am sorry but that is unbalanced. I know I am a methodologist at heart but really I could do better than have it as long as it is. I want ideally to get it down to about 15,000, that is about another 7,000 words to loose. Oh dear but  I have also come to the conclusion that it is a blob for each hundred words written whether or not they make the final thesis so you can see quite a bit of purple has gone on this week. Anyway click on the small Wordle below to see a bigger wordle of what is in my Methodology chapter. It would be nice to be able to tell it when to read words as separate and when to combine, for instance Ethnography really does not need separating off from ethnographer nor congregation from the plural congregations . However I feel it is a fair portrayal

The good news however is I have found books that talk about sociology of space. So I feel a bit dumb for not realising that I should have looked at social or cultural geographers! That said they are a lot easier to read than the French philosophical theorists and I am actually enjoying the one book I have been reading and suspect another will be as good. Treating space rather than as a set field but made up of the arrangement of objects. An interesting idea. Only thing is I could have done with having these read over Christmas but I was not aware of them then. Writing something four days a week really makes for a discipline in reading. More and more I am using Pomodoro to get bits and pieces done. Next week it is back to trying to write about location.

Week 11: Hard settling to a new chapter after writing break due to holidays

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far: 23,408
Words typed this week: 2071
Words lost this week: 0
Total increase: 2071
Days I managed to write this week: 4

Right this is my second attempt at writing this and that is about par for the course of this week. The figures look fine but everything has felt like wading through thick oily mud, whether it was sitting down to write for half an hour or the editing up session today. Writing just does not seem to have been on the same steady flow it was before Christmas. This might have to do with the fact that I had the break from formal writing. I was still reading and writing sketches based on my placements but I was not formally writing up. It may also have to do with the fact I have a cold or maybe just that this week is jinxed.

Anyway the good news is I am on the first data chapter, this one is on location/space and place and at present I am trying to gather the literature together and present it. The main problem is that I am not sure that the literature is talking to each other, but I think I am at last managing to build together something that makes sort of sense for a social understanding of space.  There are also some sociologist of religion dealing with sacred space and even others in congregational studies who deal with space and location. I suppose the good news is that I am increasingly becoming confident that I am going to be able to build the thesis I want to into my thesis. Perhaps more accurately that I am beginning to find the complex ways that congregations use tradition to shape their identity.

Next week I am back to writing methodology basically because I need a prologue to what I have written and then the rest of that weekend and the next will be spent knocking the methodology chapter into some sort of form where by it can be laid to down to mature while I get on writing other chapters. I also have more books on space and still others I need to read and write about.

First Supervision 2012

Arts Building University of Birmingham

Today has been spent at my first supervision of 2012, The big challenge for this year is to have my doctorate written by the end of it. However at this stage I am just about getting to the stage where I have a first draft of my first chapter.  I am now at Birmingham New Street drinking a coffee and waiting for the next train to Sheffield. I accidentally booked myself on 17:30 to Sheffield, but this is to the good as the 17:00 is delayed by about twenty minutes, so will be highly crowded as all the day commuters get on it at least as far as Derby.


Well this late return balances my being not out as quick this morning as usual  due to needing to write one of my half hours for the week as I was bombing a cold yesterday and so ended up catching the 11:00 a.m. which got me into Birmingham University about 12:30.However, as I did not feel like lunch at the time , I went to the small computer room on the ground floor and spent about an hour checking for papers and such. A couple of interesting ones, one on Chinese Baptists in Serbia and how they sustained their identity, another looking at the ecological niche that tradition has within denominations, Admittedly the second is from an American perspective but it is someone looking at something close to what I am doing and using similar terminology.


My supervisor felt that I had covered most things but the major problem seems to be that I am writing for the wrong audience, starting to late in and writing at too basic a level. That and the need to incorporate antithetical thinking. My approach to theory is synthetic in that I ask how does this affect/alter what I think and then use it to refine what I am thinking, so building up a cumulative ideas. Antithetical instead works by arguing against a person and making clear the points of disagreement. However most of western academia values the antithetical approach above the synthetic so I need to build that in at least to the introduction and the methodology. Not so much in the results chapters.


However I run into a second problem at this point in that I know the standard criticism and I cannot with integrity use it against the other approaches. I reject as a caricature of people who are very complex often finely nuanced researchers I have worked with in my day to day work. The fact is being a statistician and a social scientist I am supposed to be in other camp, but when have I ever done anything straight forwardly. In fact I am participating in a major research bid where it is exactly that sort of approach that the other camp uses is going to be taken. So I can’t with integrity rubbish them as an approach, it is one I will use when appropriate. So now I have to go and find a way of taking through the reasoning that led me to choose discursive ethnography as a methodology. Rather I looked at the methods available and the range of approaches and asked what is likely to be most fruitful, and in the end it was discursive ethnography.


So this month the challenge is to do an edit of the full methodology chapter putting in that bit and incorporating it into the reasoning that goes through the rest of the study. That means quite a bit of time and effort as well as trying to find my feet in the next chapter which is on space and location and the way it impinges on the congregations. There is nothing simple about this, but it is one of the big themes that have come out of the ethnography so far. I will also be creating the databases and coding up the mentions of place.


The date of next supervision is 23rd February so I have a bit of extra time until then to do the work, but perhaps I need it with what I have to do.

Getting back into pace in the New Year

The brain storm for the next chapter

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far: 21,720
Total increase: 383




I have been working less intensely over Christmas and the New Year. The change of 383 words is due to editing and so forth. So yes I have been doing bits. I also have been reading about Sociology of Space. There is surprising little stuff out there and what there is, is very disparate. I have found out about Psychogeography, some on the narrative of space and a Marxist on the production of Space. Within my research tradition there is plenty on Sacred space, a bit on church ecology and maybe some work on localisations. Not a lot but there was lots about situation, place, use of space and so forth going on in the congregations. So today I brainstormed space and came up with the following sheet. It allows me to create a structure that is a first draft. There is something exciting about starting this draft as it is here that I finally start to create my style of writing about the congregations. This is far more central than my previous work.




I have also got to the situation where I have submitted at least a first draft of my first chapter to my supervisor. It is nowhere near finished. There is stuff I will not be able to write until I have finished my thesis, it is methodological chapter, one piece has only just gone to my proof readers and I have not put it together, and it is too long and needs a pretty strong cut doing to it but at present I need to do a final tidy up and then leave it.