It is a somewhat weird week in some ways. After discovering my finishing was closer than I thought (see previous blog). I have finally managed to get another chapter off to my supervisor, which is the last of the substantive chapters and I have just to pull together the conclusion and that actually looks like being quite straightforward. I just have to remember what I was writing the last time and update that to reflect the development in the thesis that this last round of revisions has brought.
I also had to fill in the annual progress review. It has always been a matter of all righteousness. The review has slowly got more and more stringent. This time they decided to ask if the thesis had been through an ethics committee. The answer is "No". Now this has nothing to do with disliking ethics committee. Indeed I can remember an early supervision when I asked my supervisor "Do I look for a placement first or prepare for ethics committee?" His answer to that tells you precisely why I have not been "You look for a placement as no ethics committee exists at present if I become head of School I will immediately set one up." So I started my practical work before the ethics committee existed. When they set it up, rather than make it retrospective they allowed people to come if their were ethical issues they wished to bring. However, I had taken the other approach of being exceptionally thorough on ethics. There were several papers where I worked through different aspect of ethics. I have all the forms and permissions. I also set up, at the suggestion of the minister at my first placement, an "advisory group" who were there for people to go to if they did not want to make a complaint but wanted to check it out. However ethics informed many of the decisions and I have written a good section on my thesis. What I do not want to do is to have to stop now, sit down and write and ethics proposal for the work that I have already done. Apart from that filling in was silly. Training was that I should do the Viva course, plan was to submit by Easter.
That brings me to the other thing. When I first realized I was close to finishing there was a sense of disbelief. This has been replaced by a fear. I have worked for somewhere close to fifteen years (that is seven years of prep and eight years on PhD) and it has slowly but surely taken over more and more of my life. The effort has been over riding this last year. I am beginning to realise that a person who does this sort of concentrated study does not come out the same person as goes in. The problem is because I have been externally focused I have lost some of the insight into what makes me tick. Somehow I have to find out what those things are again, reorientate myself and decide where to go next.
The weekend before last I did some examiner academic stalking, that is I read a book by her. It was interesting and tangential to my PhD but it has started me asking another question. This question asks about what it means to belong and how that connects into belief. Is belief some how separate from belonging or is it a sub discipline within belonging. That is that belonging involves the sharing of common ideas. If so is this becoming a rarer form of belonging and rather are we coming to rely more on relationship belonging? If so how does the church adapt?
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