All but the Bibliography

Today I have sent off my conclusion, appendices, abstract and title to my supervisor. That means he has everything that is part of my thesis. That means he has been looking at it this weekend to see if it hangs together. Now the re-write has been about working through all the chapters in order so as to create a narrative that holds them together. I could not have told you at the start what the narrative is, but by the end it was there. Indeed it was so clearly there I was able to write the abstract. The abstract is a real challenge as it has to be under 200 words. My thesis is around 80,000. That means the abstract ism 0.25% of the length of the thesis. To condense the thesis down to that length requires real focus on what are the essentials of the research.  So I am pretty confident that I have a decent last draft.

It is not perfect. The major defect at this stage as far as I can see is part of my final chapter is at present in the conclusion. It needs to go into the final chapter and then the conclusion actually needs stuff in it that is a step back. The reason is that I am talking still about what I am finding and not stepping back and trying to spell out what I am contributing to a topic. What I hope I am contributing is a way to start to treat social systems as if they are dynamic particularly congregations. Oh Social Sciences know that the systems are dynamic and that they change with time. Theorists such as Kuhn and Gramsci have done that for the large scale shifts and many people have suggested that small scale also change. However the work when it comes about is mainly static, we are trying to capture what happens at one instance and think that direction does not matter.

My conclusion therefore is we need to deal with direction, it is never enough just to look at where we are, we need to have some idea of where we are going and how we are going to get there. Actually let me reorder those questions, only through knowing how we are moving can we begin to know where we are heading. I have discovered just one process among many that are in action to shape the congregations identity. The process is not determinative, it does not say we will definitely go in a particular direction. Indeed I would argue that eventual destination is unpredictable.  However it does start to look at what is going on and why it is going on.

I wanted to take one of the primroses that are out in the local park but by the time I had the pieces sent to my supervisor it was raining. So I have taken an old daffodil photo I took a couple of years back. Daffodils are not out here yet (unlike crocuses and primroses but their leaves are showing above the ground).

The Point when I realise I am scared of Finishing

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?

A lo-ong weekend on thesis

Part of a local bench

Well this has been a long drawn out weekend working on thesis. It started on Thursday, and I really go back into work tomorrow. Two of the days were thesis days from work. These will be some of the last I ever do. I now have the text largely in proof! It is weird. This whole afternoon I have felt as if something very scary, but very exciting was happening. Now that I am actually pretty close the relief of having a proof version of the thesis text is like bubbles of champagne running through my veins.

It has not been easy even this weekend. I had a friends marriage go through major ructions and the husband ended up briefly sleeping on my floor for one night. I had a migraine at the start of the weekend, and I have had a mild infection or hayfever so did not go over to my parents.

Thursday and Friday only slow progress was made although I got the Worship chapter into proof. Saturday I tackled the Methodology chapter and I can see why my supervisor thought it was good. It was by far the easiest of all the chapters to refine into proof. However in the last three days I have struggled with the introduction and the conclusion. These are the shortest chapters of the thesis, yet they have taken more time and effort than some of the longer chapters which I was doing in a day and a half each,and these, at about the same length when put together, were took three.

However I still have to write the abstract, sort the appendices, put the text together and format it in the right form for the thesis and so on. I have a little time over the next three weeks to put these final touches in.

Now to put the whole thing together

Train coming into University Station

This was a strange supervision in someways. Not least because this month I was half expecting with the struggle that was going on over previous weeks for my thesis to be delayed again. I really had only had the last weekend as solid writing and though I had played with the introduction in the first few weeks and I had done some reading while sitting my Mum. (For those that do not know there is more info in my previous blog post). So I did not feel as if I had got time to work on it. Indeed unlike last month when I spent a couple of partial weekends not drafting my conclusion, I sat down yesterday with the idea that I had to get something down and ended up with a half way decent draft. It needs some more connecting with the literature which will connect it back to the introduction and the rest of the thesis.

That means several things. Firstly I need to put in my notice to submit in the next few days giving my submission date as 31st October. Secondly I have to pull the full thesis together, go through doing all the proof reading, minor editing and creating the bibliography, page numbering, add the appendices etc. It has to be with my supervisor by 16th September. Finally one more supervision in October to have a full review of the thesis. In other words if life does not bowl me another curved ball everything is in order for submitting in the middle of the autumn much to my surprise.

However I am fighting a battle with University of Birmingham administration to get registered for next year. You would think that Universities would be eager to take money and get students enrolled but at present they will not even investigate why I can not enrol. This means that come September they start hassling me to do things when it is them who have been the delay.

Not to have a proper grump, the rennovations at Birmingham New Street are a total pain at present. To get home I had to:

1. Come up from platform 8
2. Go through two ticket barriers to get to WH Smith
3. Go to where the lift to platform 12 was only to find it out of order
4. Walk back through both ticket barriers
5. Go back down to platform 12 and take the steps down

On the way down I saw a disabled person on crutches struggling to get up to street level. To put it mildly I was not impressed.

Anyway despite the ridiculous amount of hassle this month it looks as if everything is still on line for an October submission.

Sabbactical

This plant is growing at the top of a wall not too far away from here. The wall is about five feet tall! I am not sure where it is getting its nourishment from but it is there. Writing my thesis was beginning to feel like this plant. This blog has been more scanty of recent week. One reason for this is actually I have not been making the progress as I was before. There was very good reason for this, I was not getting the time.

Now I have cut back drastically on a lot of things in life in order to make time for thesis. I have not been going out to events, I have not seen my parents for months and I have not planned a holiday. It simply was not enough.

There are three big commitments in my life at present and in order of priority for attention these are thesis, work and church. I should explain I work 80% in a job that could easily be 100% and if I am ill the work still needs doing and the only one who can do that work is me. When I started my PhD the job actually did fit into four days a week, however two to three years ago that changed. I am working flat out and not keeping all the balls in the air. On Monday I have to go into work and explain why I have taken a nine month break from a project. Simply no time gov honest!

So with thesis not going as quickly as I liked and work being demanding, I found that the expectation that I would be getting more and more involved in church a difficult situation to negotiate. It would work like this, something quite small would be asked of me but then as I explored the ramifications the job would get bigger and bigger. Some of this was deliberate hiding of implications, some of this was my personality. If I am involved in doing something I like to see it done well. Actually it felt to me at times as if people were either plotting to find ways to get me more involved or were using me as a default person to ask to do things.

With my job I edit my thesis at weekends, I find that I can read during the week but I do not have the concentration to do editing. Editing is not easy and involves holding lots of strands together and not dropping any. If you think writing a PhD is just writing three masters thesis then you have got the wrong end of the stick. Not only do you have the practical work of three theses, you also have to integrate them together and find something new to say that runs through all three.

I suspect there is actually no shortage of new ideas in my thesis but it has felt at times as if I was trying to corral at least semi-wild horses. The result is that at this stage of my thesis I need coherent times. I can not just switch onto thesis for a hour or two in an evening and do worthwhile work. If I attend worship on a Sunday that really means sitting down at around 4pm to my thesis if at all, days like today when I was table elder take me longer to settle after church. Basically a day lost and when I have only 2.5 days anyway a day is heck of a lot to loose and to loose that regularly (one for five out of the last six is adding up and the sixth was taken with work). If you wonder why 2.5 then half a day goes with shopping and doing household chores.

Basically I got to the point where the time I had for my thesis was not allowing me to make progress.  Something had to give and the only thing that I could give that would allow the time was church. I was clearly not managing me involvement with church in a way that would enable me to finish my thesis. Seeming as the trying to keep a low level involvement going failed. I could not keep the commitment level low enough. The only other option is to opt out completely. There were people who helped me manage my commitment well, there were people who did not. Some of my keeping going so long was the loyalty to the people who were good at not pushing boundaries.

This was actually decided almost two weeks ago, but there was a communion service and only two active elders available for it, apart from me. To do communion in the style my congregation likes we need eight. Therefore dropping out at short notice seemed unfair especially as I was Table Elder 1. If you want that So I have basically just had communion to do. Today was communion and now I should not be back at church until after my thesis has been submitted, so in November.

That said I have been working on it. The big problem is that to write the introduction I am having to trace books and many are not available directly from Amazon, nor would they be in the University Library as they are far too specialist for that. So it would either be inter-library loans or me purchasing them from other dealers. That means I am writing in the expectation of having to include other work. This is tricky. So for the moment I am going to concentrate on writing a conclusion instead and hope that I can write it pretty quickly.

Hopefully next weekend I will get the 2.5 days and be able to make some good progress.

All but the abstract drafted but little actual progress

Alien from post it notes in window
of Computer Science at Birmingham

A bit later than usual, a mix of catching the earlier train home because I am not quite sure where to find a place to write with the building work at New Street and needing to do something when I go in.

The last two weeks on my blog I have failed to write up about thesis work. That was not because I was not doing some, when I got the chance I did. It was that rather the work has been unfocused and I know when I am unfocused that I am usually not producing what I need to produce. Now do not get me wrong, my supervisor actually felt what I wrote was not bad, it just was not what I should have been writing. Indeed he felt that I probably should include the central bit of my draft conclusion in another chapter. It just was not conclusion. He has now told me what to put in a conclusion, not what are my findings but what are the tasks I need to do.

At May’s supervision my challenge for the month was to get the methodology into shape and to get to second draft the introduction and conclusion. I think I did the methodology but the introduction and conclusion were still only in first draft. This has added a month onto my time it will take to finish my thesis.

However there was good reason why I was unfocused, and that was that I was distracted. In April I was so absorbed in my thesis I felt as if I was never without working on it in the back of my brain, May I got by because there were plenty of bank holidays and those allowed me to spend enough time on my thesis for it to absorb me. However June has been a lesson in being over committed. What really happened if I am honest is I did not let go of my last chapter and work out what I had to write for the conclusion.  Therefore because I was not focused on what I needed to write for my conclusion I just continued to writing the last chapter.

I find that I can not just sit down and start writing, I need to spend a while mulling the ideas around, and generally not producing very much. After a while I seem to enter into the writing and then I find that I can actually produce good work pretty quickly. I need to think through what I am writing and if I do not then I do not produce what is required. This last month I tried to do without that time and I FAILED to produce so basically I am back where I was at the start of June with what I need to do.

The good news is that we worked out a submission date for my thesis. I can therefore start to make plans around how things fit together. I may even book holiday for while it is being read by my examiners. Also my supervisor does not expect substantive revisions of my thesis. It really is about getting thing sorted. The one thing that must not be allowed to happen is for me to enter a state where I am endlessly writing up. That will not do me or anyone else any good.

So despite Birmingham being dry and even having time to sit in the sun, it was my toughest supervision to date.

A Wet May Supervision

A Wet View from the Train

I am sitting in the new part of Birmingham New Street Station having just got myself a bottle of water and packet of crisps from Costa. The changes had had me confused all day. This morning I could not even find WH Smiths but the women’s loos were free. The other thing was Waterstones was still open at the University. So I bought a notebook there rather than at WH Smiths.

For once the weather has been wet. Fortunately I walked to Sheffield Station during a let up in the showers and the distance in Birmingham is not far. Just from the University Station to the Arts Building. I know Birmingham Department of Philosophy, Theology and Religion is not in the Arts Building but my supervisors office is and as a result I have not been there since it moved to the Edgebaston Campus.

Well I think I now have all my substantive chapters in second draft. My supervisor actually said he was pleased with the way my thesis was shaping up. However it is clear that I need to work harder at engaging with the literature than I am. I think however some of that is clear because I have not written my introduction and conclusion. Ruth and James I think that means I will be sending you three chapters soon, plus two bits from another chapter which are major reworkings but only of those section.

Equally I am going to have to trace one or two of the books that are Roman Catholic Congregational Studies. I just need to be able to check out their take on tradition. If it is as I expect, then they are actually talking about something different when it comes to tradition than I am in the Reformed sense. What becomes interesting is if that, I have my conclusion, albeit very much in the verbal form at present. I may well need to do a writing brainstorm in order to get it down but it is there. However it does mean my thesis is Foucauldian, in that he is the main thinker that I have interacted with. I am not a disciple, but his ideas do become useful and intriguingly I must admit I have a Foucauldian attitude to Foucault and my discourse with him is pretty wide ranging and eclectic. However where I see Foucault as providing an over arching technology for knowledge systems, I tend instead to see what I am providing is the ability to generate tools that can be useful in the analysis of such systems.

Next month’s challenges is to redraft the introduction, cut by over 50% the methodology and draft the conclusion. That should keep me busy. I may even need to avail myself of the offer of extra time for thesis from work, the only problem is that I am busy, busy at work and finding it difficult to fit things in at present. There also is more I need to do at home.