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.