St Andrew's Day End to Acwrimo, but not finished

Well I am writing to the line as today is the Acwrimo. I technically have failed to get through what I set myself to do. I wanted this chapter finished and I did not get there. It will take me the next two weekends to get to the stage when I can send it to my supervisor. This was the original plan before AcWriMo  but I was hopeful as I have useful ways to spend the extra two weeks. I have however finished expanding the section on Congregational Studies and am largely happy with it. Indeed it has become a lot stronger and more interesting. All I really need to do is think whether I need to give one of the questions of my thesis around what role worship plays within the identity.

In some sense the easiest bit is the bit I have left to last. So I hope that next weekend  I can expand the literature review on the theorising of identity so that it looks and feels more like a traditional literature review. In some parts that is the easiest point as it is the stuff that I have revised most often in the process of putting this thesis together. Ironically it is also the most wide ranging of reviews.

Time wise however next week is time poor with respect to thesis. This week for work I am at a focus group in London.  It is a once in six month meeting and it just happens to be next week. It is in London because it is winter, and coming further North in the UK is fine for Southerners when there is a chance of decent weather but not when it gets dark early in the evening. So all us Northerners (some  have to travel over twice the distance I do) have to head down to balmy London. I wonder if the Scots fly down to these events. Then next weekend my nephew is coming to stay for a weeks work experience. So I need to fit working around him as well.

Anyway there are some good aspects to having had a go at Acwrimo as well.

1. It got me writing again and I am enjoying the writing far more this time. I have not got the space in my timetable this revision I had when doing the original writing, but  I do find that writing expands to fill the time I allow it.
2. I learnt again that I need to have music on when I am writing but not Ravi Shankar. I automatically get up and do something different every time he comes on my play list. I guess I better remove him from it before next weekend.
3. Jogging is good for writing. Now I am slightly jogging phobic. This dates back to my late teens when I tried to get into jogging just before I became ill. The result was I associate jogging with being ill. However, as part of my getting fitter, I need to be road fit as well as generally fit. That means I actually need to be either walking or running on tarmac surfaces for quite a distance. Well walking for miles just does not fit into my timetable most of the time. So I gave in and am trying jogging. The surprise is that I have a better writing day if I jog first thing in the morning. It seems to get the antsy mood out of me and I settle quicker into writing.

So yes I have not completed what I set myself to but I am pleased with what has been achieved.

Well New Introductory Section Finally Drafted

It is interesting sitting down and watching my drafting approach to writing. I will start out with a pretty broad remit and go off on lots of tangents. The topics I normally find interesting. I will then spend quite a bit of time deciding what to write. Then I will start writing.

Now that sounds as if it is all drafted but it isn't. Normally I will only gain clarity of what I want to argue when I am drafting. Therefore there is a process of going through and through my text to get it not only to cover the area it has to cover but also to get the argument clear.

I had two things I wanted to argue in this section. The first was pretty clear and that was that there was no right dimensionality to religiosity and the use of apparently simple terms such as "belief" and "belonging" hide as much as they reveal. The simplistic reason for this is that often in the literature they are used in a technical way by the writers but interpreted in a non-technical way. There is also no agreed technical meaning. For instance belonging could mean:

• has formal membership of a congregation
• regularly participates in public worship
• identifies themselves as belonging to

The three are not the same. A paper that takes one of them might differ completely from a paper that takes another. The habit of not clearly spelling this out means that there are difficulties in dealing with the literature but we do not want three dimensions for belonging. The problem really is we think of belonging as a binary, either you do belong or you do not.  Therefore, we feel there ought to be a simple test, but in reality people negotiate belonging in a complex way.

"Belief" is even more complex but perhaps is closer to adequately theorized.  I am not sure whether I should take a "belief" as uniform or "situational". In fact as in a sense the situation is singular this study cannot determine that. However I do think there is elision in Belief between accepting proposition and a performance of belief which has more to do with confidence/trust/allegiance that with propositional truth. In the second sense I can actually see it playing within the congregation. It fits with the occasional comments on an individuals faith that came up in interviews and in conversations. These were not people who usually went out of their way to make statements about what they believed but were people who acted in certain ways.

The later half of this month has to be spent expanding the bibliographic sections of the thesis which basically means writing more about what the people I have cited actually say.

800 words out of a thousand and half the topic not written

Its been one of those frustrating weekends thesis wise.  The task in hand is to write a thousand words on Believing and Belonging and situate my thesis against that debate. Problem one, is that while I have something to say about Belonging I have very little to say about Believing in my thesis. Problem two there is a vast and complex literature which is bigger than the papers in the topic in my discipline indicate. Problem three my thesis is primarily about the third b and that is behaving. Belonging just happens to connect with their behaviour and the topic. What is more that is an ethnographic finding.

Well due to the amount of literature I have spent quite a bit of the weekend going through and back through. Firstly I have to set up why this is relevant to my PhD, which I have done. Then I have to take each of the two concepts Belief and Belonging and discuss them as concepts. The big problem is that I would like to say "Belief" is simple and then consign it to a few lines in my thesis. However, it isn't  and I think my thesis may just have as part of the conclusion some reflection on the absence of belief statements from the context of the ethnography.

I am also beginning to puzzle out the way first person pronouns are used to signal group identity. The use of the "we" pronoun seems to signal a sphere where orthopraxy is expected by the congregation whereas "I" is used when it is acceptable for changes to occur due to the surrounding culture. The problem is that this implies that "you and me Jesus" lyrics are no longer about emotion, but rather a way of signalling wider cultural norms can be brought into the choice of music. This is interesting.

The other thing I am doing now is writing so I have enough to accurately recall the citation within the text. This will expand the literature review quite substantially and I think satisfy my examiners on that score. The interesting thing is that it might also explain why I felt so at a loss at how to engage from my thesis. Unfortunately, this also means I do close reading.  Most writers and readers are not used to this. I have already struck one significant oddity which  I have demonstrated to be odd. If you have two dimension one called "belief" and the other "belonging", then there are problems if "orthodoxy" gets into the belonging one!

Anyway I did not get as much written as I hoped and would at least like to have most on Belief written and have a rough idea where the concept of belonging is going. That means I think that I am going to claim one of my few thesis days tomorrow afternoon from work and see if I can get further on.

Well I think I know what I want to argue

I have spent quite a bit of the weekend just churning through various bits of literature. Let me say that there are three different sets of literature that are relevant to discussion Believing and Belonging.

The first set is the literature that is relevant to the discussion of what is religiosity in the broadest of terms. Grace Davie has set off a plethora of B alliteration when she coined the phrase "Believing but Not Belonging". There now is: 

• "Neither Believing nor Belonging", 
• "Belonging not Believing", 
• "Belonging and Not Belonging" (no I did not make that one up),

 although no-one seems that interested in Believing and Belonging. However, people are also extending the Bs so we now have "Believing, Belonging and Behaving" or even "Believing, Belonging, Behaving and Bonding" only you will never guess what Bonding is. At this point I say stop as the Bs are too disjointed from their actual concepts to make them memorable. I will therefore use the none alliterative form that is also in the paper and turn it into an acronym to remember it by.

However, there are then problems with the literature on Believing.  Grace Davie deliberately does not define what she means by believing and belonging. There is good reason for this, there is a whole literature about what we mean by believing. Ideas that I had up to now accepted as part of the religious/theological discourse around belief are very clearly present within the sociological discourse. Have the sociologists taken it from the Theologians or visa versa? I do not know. This brings me actually to the reason I had steered away from tackling this whole topic in my thesis. I am no longer sure what it means to believe something. Please do not try sorting this out by giving me definitions. The problem is not lack of definitions, but that I have multiple conflicting ones and they do not give a cohesive middle ground. Any further definitions will only add to the confusion. I think I am getting closer to an idea, but it is not really fully formulated and it certainly does not sit anywhere close to the simple taken from granted presumption that was my starting point. Perhaps what I like most about my "new" formulation is it actually asks hard questions of myself and what I do about belief. Then of course there is the whole faith development literature as well.

So we come at finally at belonging. Well this is where the focus of my thesis is. However, though there is some agreement that identity and identification are important to belonging yet there is not much actual definition. However, here too there is a distinction that needs to be brought. Most questions of belonging are directed at belonging to a particular type of religion. I am really not addressing that. What I am addressing is what does it mean to belong to a specific congregation. To answer that question the talk of many of the sociologists of religion about belonging is not useful. The discussion is that of social psychologists who ask what it means to belong to a group. They have a very different formulation. I also think I am going to have to sit down with Amartya Sen again and see if I can find his levels of belonging. This changes belonging completely in that it is no longer a binary (in/out) but some members are more equal than others, that is they have more power to direct the group. These are a useful theorisation along with the dimensions of that the social psychologists bring. The question then is can this low level belonging be transferred to the larger scale of religion.

Plan from here is to write out more fully my argument in the mornings before going to work this week, then to actually write it up formally with references over the weekend. So far as Acwrimo is on track!

Finished the Transcripts now onto Rewriting proper

I know it is a long time since I wrote anything on this blog. All I can plead is that I have been busy. There is less time than I would like but actually having a time limit is focusing me pretty well. Today, I sent off the last of the transcripts to my supervisor. Now I can say that they are all safely transcribed. So that is part of the revisions done.

So now I start working on the thesis proper. To get myself going after the break from actual writing I have signed up for #acwrimo. I have been debating whether this is a good idea. My experience is when I do join in this style of competition I promptly perform less well than normal. On the other hand, I really need some trick to get the brain engaged in the hard work it needs to do. The thing is to choose a challenge that will stretch you. I think I have chosen fairly well. The challenge that I have taken is to redraft my introduction by the end of the month. This weekend and next to concentrate on writing the bit on believing and belonging which the three weekends after wards are to concentrate on filling out about the main theorists in my thesis. The first has some new reading in it, while the second part which is three times the length is actually me drawing on stuff I already know. The advantage of this is it will allow me to redraft my methodology before Christmas. Having that out of the way  would be pleasant, as it means that I can then spend the time between Christmas and New Year working on the interviews (editing and coding). Thus, I would be better prepared for tackling data chapters in the New Year.

That said another pressure is I have decided I need to get fit and that means exercise. So I cannot spend all my weekends solely working on  the thesis. I need to be efficient. There is a method in this madness. By the time I got to being examined in June I had become so caught up in the process of finishing my thesis that there was a danger that it would swamp me. The idea is that with the increased exercise it will mean that I have to disengage from my thesis and keep it within bounds.  I also have aims and ambitions for my attempts at getting fitter so I have a focus for that as well. As my plans become more settled maybe I will introduce them to this blog.

Strategy Supervision for doing corrections

I had a supervision yesterday and think it is time I actually filled people in on how things are going. I have been transcribing interviews  as demanded by my examiners simply because:

1. It is pretty straight forward, the task is to capture in enough detail what other people say
2. It is a major piece of work to do.

I have got all the ones from my first congregation transcribed and sent them off about a couple of weeks ago to my supervisor as I was supposed to see him the following Tuesday. This did not happen as he had a tummy bug and probably just as well as when I discovered that I did not need to go to Birmingham I went to bed and slept. Indeed at present he seems to be running through a set of misfortunes because he did not make Society for Liturgical Studies conference either. This was noted because he was the opening speaker. Having the delay proved psychological difficult for me as my body registered I had sent things for my supervision and refused to work on other interviews. The first weekend was frustrating but I persuaded myself that I should draft a paper last weekend instead. As I had to do that soon anyway I think it is probably stopped me from wasting that weekend too.

However, the meeting was rearranged to yesterday, which was the only date he and I could make until late September.  His conferences and mine neatly dovetail to block out the early part of the month. So I got my train as usual to Birmingham and then transport wonders started happening. The connecting train at Birmingham was just further along the same platform as the train I arrived on. This was more than usual relief as New Street Station changes layout every time I go there at present. The result was that I was at the University about two and half hours before my tutorial (you have heard of cautious, well in my family it sometimes gets ridiculous). I spent some time looking around the John Smiths Bookshop and must admit that its range of books made the former Waterstones store look good, but the computers on sale had me coveting. The books tended to be full sets off reading lists. Somebody needs to design a piece of software that allows people to order books through the bookshop and then notes what books people are ordering and what buying and tries to suggest related books for the store to stock. After a while I could well see people dropping in for a look as store browsing is still a much more enjoyable experience than browsing online.

I went up for my supervision. There are a lot of staff moving around in the Arts Tower. The law department is now where Music was and it looks as if American Studies are moving off the top floor. However my supervisor is stationary.

The good news is that I think his assessment of my result is the same as mine. That is they wanted to give me the time rather than it actually being a reflection of the quality and that if I had wanted to I could have challenged the result on the grounds of things they said both in giving me the result after the viva and in the reports. However as the work would still have had to be done, there was little point in doing so. He also approved of my attitude that the task was to view it as references for a submitted paper. The changes needed doing and I should just get on and do them.  We went through the revisions and discussed them. Some it was actually a matter of putting back some of the things I had removed. I was told that I needed to assert my originality (there was not question about me being original, I just needed to assert it). That basically means putting back in the first person pronoun that I had carefully gone through and removed. Some I am realising I am actually relieved to do, in that I was sometimes brief because I was short of space and their revisions have created space to expand these points.

There are some points which are not corrections specified by my examiners but are rather a failure to communicate through the thesis. They have treated the thesis as if it is an interview based ethnography. It is NOT but rather an Ethnography based within the Social Anthropological tradition that depends quite heavily on the participant observation and conversations naturally arising out of the research setting. Therefore I am going to have to strengthen that element within my methodology.

One of the difficulties is that I am going to have to explore again how I treat Weber. It is problematic, Weber is a big theorist but he is also decidedly shaped by the Reformed tradition. I recognise his thought as coming from the tradition and at times the "mythos" of the tradition leads to him cutting corners so as to get the results of his thinking to fit with that of the tradition. The result is that there is a good fit between the general tradition and much of what is in Weber theory.  The difference between Church and Sect works pretty well for those in the Reformed tradition, so much so that it has been picked up by a variety of Reformed Theologians (Troelstch and Richard Neibuhr for starters). It does not fit nearly as well within other traditions.

Anyway we have a basic forward direction mapped out. The first thing is for me to spell it out more clearly. I hope to get the interviews done by the end of October. Then by Christmas have most of the work done on the introduction. This gives January and February for pulling methodology,tradition and the three data chapters into their final form with , March  for Belonging and April to the proof readers.  Its tighter than I would like, but it is doable.

I then started to make my way back but got distracted first to look for a cardigan that I had left in a coffee shop and then to get a bottle of fizzy water as I thirsty. The result was that for the first time ever I was too late for the train I was booked to travel on to New Street. However, when I got to New Street I found that my train was delayed. It looked like half an hour so I decided to miss it as it would be full of commuters. I went up to the main concourse bought a magazine and decided to get ready for catching the later train. However, when I was back on the platform I found that my train was still in and indeed many of the commuters had decided to catch the train that was on time rather than try and save a few minutes by catching my train. Therefore, I got on it and got to my seat in a half empty train.  The journey home was much pleasanter for this although I must have been about three quarter of an hour later than planned.  However I was only back in Sheffield after the social for  my writers group had started and I was tired and emotionally overdrawn with a migraine rumbling in the distance. So I did not feel up to writing yesterday.

Progress has slowed but still steady progress

This is just an update on how things are going. Last week I ran out of time with doing one interview. It is perhaps the longest interview I did at about two hours. The one I did this week was an hour and twenty minutes and I managed to get started on another one. I wonder if I should try and sit down on Thursday night after work and have a go at transcribing part of the next interview. It might mean I am more settled on Friday and I will get more done. I get a lot done in very short bursts, but I am too easily distracted and I really need to get on. If  I can finish the current one and get another one done next weekend then that will be all the Edgerton interviews transcribed.

However, the software I am using is still causing problems. Although I can save work! When I try and close either a document or the whole project it tends to have difficulties. Also, I am periodically needing to switch my computer off and restart it as the sound system is playing up. It goes really slowly and booming. Well it has given up completely now, I am not sure why but my guess is that by the time I next want to use it, it will be functioning fine again. I have long known computers do not like the heat and am putting it partially down to that.

Otherwise, there is really nothing to report. Oh I have found another book in the tradition I am working in. It was published after I did my literature research into the area. It is called "The Anthropology of Protestantism: Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen" and is by Joseph Webster. I would say that his approach is most similar to that of Timothy Jenkins in that he looks at the whole town with all its churches and does it by spending a considerable time in Gamrie. However unlike Timothy Jenkins he does not do it from the privileged position of the Parish Vicar/Minister but as an attender. In his case he attended all Protestant churches in Gamrie something a Parish Vicar/Minister could not do. What has struck me so far is how similar his experience is to mine. He talks of falling in love with Gamrie and wooing them, that was my experience too. He talks of being mistaken for someone who was seeking ordination; again something I experienced in both congregations. As it is he sits someone between Anthony Cohen and mainstream Congregational Studies. There seems to be something intriguing here. Within Anglicanism there is a tendency quite often to have the model of the priest as anthropologist, within the British Reformed tradition there is no equivalent. Indeed most people doing it congregational studies seem to be unaware of the tradition at all and are doing it as part of their own academic tradition. Joseph Webster therefore writes as a social anthropologist doing what social anthropologists do. I have also come across a cultural geographer who has done this. So I need to be reading this as well

Settling Back down

Last weekend should have been my parents golden wedding celebration (my Mum got the whole do cancelled as she cracked her pelvis the morning before) so it is time I settled down to sorting out my thesis post exams.  There are bits that annoy me about the report such as me admitting that on one reference I could not find the original and thinking therefore there were lots. There are exactly two pieces I could not trace and the second is not actually referenced in my thesis. I have now found that reference and found that the reference to it was wrong. The other remains a mystery and if a historian wants an intriguing puzzle I am willing to set out what the problem is. There are other things I will struggle with such as doing a literature review without a topic. My thesis draws on a wide range of literature and doing a review over the thesis would be as long as the thesis.

Anyway today was the day to settle down and get something done. Actually some weeks back I made up a table of the interviews I did and I will send that to my supervisor. I have also found a paper by Voas and will trace others. However, today I sat down and began to go through the audio recordings. I am actually transcribing them. This was something I was thinking I was going to have to twist and only transcribe in parts. Then a couple of weeks back I went to a session by QSR and they talked of three levels of transcribing:

1.  The highly detailed favoured by conversational analyst, which often uses the Jefferson Transcription System. This is what I started out using.
2. The medium one tries to capture words but turns it into good enough English. I tried this and most of the interviews I had transcribed in this was done using a system suggested by Catherine Kohler Riessman book Narrative Analysis 
3. They third is the notes one and just tries to capture the gist of what was being said in the interview.

It is the third form that I am now using. I am leaving out most of what I said and just trying to capture the essence of what was said back to me, although that often means working in the interviewees own words. It will give me enough to code to for the analysis and I will be able to select bits that I want to include into the thesis and then transcribe them up to the second level. My analysis does not justify taking them up to the first level. The difference is remarkable I have transcribed two interviews this weekend and I would have got a third done but for software.

I am transcribing in QSR NVivo and need to because that gives me the ability to select the precise bits I need to code and the ability to link these to the tape recording to later produce the precise transcripts of the relevant pieces. However, the software has crashed most times I have tried to close an recording with a transcript I have been working on. I have checked the software is up to date. I have removed the first recording this happened with and brought it in again. I have waited up to an hour for the software to do its bit. It will fortunately save the transcript just as long as I do not close it! The result is yesterday I transcribed about half an hour of interview three or more times and I have had losses today as well. Now as I finish a section of the transcription I save the project. 

Anyway I hope to get this sorted this week and I have ordered a foot pedal so I do not need to use my hands to control the audio player on the computer. I have also found another book that needs to go into the thesis as it deals with an area close allied to my thesis although not overlapping. I think it was published after I reviewed congregational studies in the Reformed churches and found two studies. This makes a third.

Viva - Not A Good Result

Yesterday was my first viva, even that should give you a clue to the result. I did not write yesterday as there was too much emotion working through me. However after a second disturbed night with signs of anxiety attack around it I decided that going into work today was not sensible and that I needed for the sake of work as much as anything to put some work into getting the emotion hormones out of my system. After a lie in therefore I am going to try and give as clear an account as I can of what happened yesterday.

Pictorial Map of Thesis

I think the story probably starts about 5pm on Monday. That was the time when I stopped working on the pictorial map of my thesis. It is not finished and you will see lots of places where there is only a pencil drawing and towards the end the page references and the theorists are much more sketchy.  The aim is to give me a way to think through what is where in my thesis. Anyway stopping it then was to allow me time to organise myself for yesterday. There  were a number of things I needed to do; not least of which was get the pictorial map down to my table.  The other thing was to pack my bag, make sure I had the details of things like train times, have a bath and get an early night.

In a sense that map makes the basic problem with my thesis visible. There are at least three separate ideas worthy of a thesis within that map which accounts for its business. The first comes from Congregational Studies and is well within the normal sort of theses arguments. Basically, it is an argument that even in a situation like those I studied it is not possible to separate community from worship without doing damage to your understandings of a congregations Identity. The second is a methodological one that seeks to explore more fully the way that scientific understanding of flows changes our understanding of congregations if we explore it. The third and final one relates most strongly to Congregational Identity, is the most developed of the three and is the one I intended to go with. However, the other two muddy the water. The result even though I was not admitting it was that I was not confident in my thesis and felt it needed another go through. Indeed had even started to think about doing this.

Anyway I awoke at 6:00 a.m. yesterday quite easily, although the night had been disturbed, mainly by stomach ache as if I had been doing too many sit-ups on a full stomach before bed. Not good but also not my normal night before nerves which are sort of flurries of excitement that twirl like dervishes in my abdomen.  Getting up at 6:00 a.m. meant I had lots of time to settle myself for the day, and dress with extra care.

I walked down to the station for just after 9:30 a.m. although the train did not leave until 9:55 a.m..  I picked up my ticket. I got on the train and instead of getting out my thesis I got out my Kindle and read "The Solace of Fierce Landscapes". It was deliberate, I rarely settle to fiction these days, the entry into the narrative is something that feels too difficult/dangerous to do. I find myself actually pulling back. So I chose a book on spirituality and I chose one on deserts because there is something within me that is attracted to them. Yet I am not sure that it was a good idea on the way to a viva.  I think it challenged me too much when I needed just diverting.

I got to Birmingham New Street and the first sign of nerves occurred. I found that I could not drink coffee from Costa, officially because it was too hot but also because my throat constricted as I tried to sip it. I did give in a go for half an hour or so, but it did not cool down enough so I left it on the side and went to catch the train out to the nearest station to where my viva was to be held. I crossed across the road (very busy) and had a sandwich at the local Sainsbury's supermarket. I checked email and such and put my phone onto silent. Then at 1:00 p.m. I walked up the road to the venue and arrived at 1:15 p.m.

a tree in the grassland

This was too early so I went for an hexplore (basically a diversion around the area to keep me from turning up too early, I spell it with a "h" to differentiate it from proper planned exploration trips). I found that just down the road is a piece of suburban grassland. It had a stream passing through, a path, quite a few trees and a couple of benches. Really not enough to really be a park but enough of space to have a brief walk and to sit in the sunshine for a while. I also had a chat with a man who was out walking his dog. Well he was sitting on a bench and the dog was enjoying exploring the surroundings.  The tree in the photo caught my eye,  possibly because it looks like a tree costume  with its short sprouting foliage after clearly having had its main boughs cut off.

Anyway I returned to the venue and let the reception know I was there. I asked if I could go to the loo. That was a mistake as it was past the dining room just as my examiners were coming out. This fussed me somewhat. Then went to sit and wait  in the lounge to be called.

It was not long before the chair came to collect me. The welcome was fine, but the setup was adversarial at the start with the table wider than was necessary. I would also say that both my examiners looked grey.  The first question was one of the ones that you expect in that it was a question about the importance of my thesis. Sitting back now I realize that I made mistakes right out at this point. The reason was that I focused on the third concept. What I should have done is placed that within the terms of doing an ethnography!

Another problem I ran into was their interpretation of footnotes. They thought I was dismissing people if I put them in footnotes, often I was not. The problem was that to deal comprehensively with that person would actually have taken three or four pages of diversion into material that was not directly relevant to the thesis. Two debates within sociology of religion that are actually so strongly connected with the tradition that a straight sociological reading of them is not possible and I would have to spend time unpacking the way that it interacts with the tradition. Yet I want to indicate I am aware of the debates. Therefore, the footnotes are not dismissals, but signs that there is a larger and much more complex debate here to be had that is not within the scope of the thesis.

What also happened is this linked into my insecurity about the main point of my thesis. This was poor going. I should also have corrected my external when she started talking about believing and not belonging. My thesis is NOT about that, even though hers was. My argument would be that basically if you want to understand belonging you actually need to look at people who do belong. After all it is not good investigating women's experience by only talking to men! I also am aware that my ability to give a succinct definition of a what I meant as a technology was not in the thesis draft.

In the methodology, I did not transcribe all my interviews. I did do about the first half dozen. There are pretty good reasons. I have a mild dyslexia related problem, and this has implications. First I have a very strong mental recall, I have to have, I cannot rely on myself to pick up books to do it. Secondly I find listening to the recordings easier than reading the transcripts. Yes I have used them even when I have not listened to them for months.  Thirdly transcribing is difficult, ten times the length of the interview and the length varies from 15 minutes to 2 hours with most around an hour. With working four days a week, trying to be in the field as much as possible and keeping the reading and writing, I am afraid that transcription took a low priority. What I did do was often write extensive notes when I got in, this often reviewed the content of the interview as well as the context.  I felt justified in making this decision.

Anyway I was shown out to the garden room where my supervisor was marking scripts. My view was that I had actually enjoyed it but that I expected to be given three to four months revisions.

I was then called back in and my supervisor came too. The faces of both my examiners were a lot healthier colour. I have got to get the next part right.

Firstly I was treated as an "experienced ethnographer".  That is not just an ethnographer but one with some maturity. It was also clear that they thought that my thesis contained "originality" indeed part of the result was to allow me to clarify and strengthen my assertion of that originality. They also were struck by my use of the word "grief" to describe my leaving of the congregations and felt I was still too close to the fieldwork. They however had ten major recommendations to make. Of these three involve a significant amount of work. The largest and the one that I can think of least gain for is that they want me to transcribe all my interviews. To reflect this they want quotes within my thesis from the interviews and also a table with an account of who was analysed. I am seriously thinking of putting quite long quotes into the thesis (not full interviews), but times when people have told a whole story that is relevant to the thesis. This gives the reader more context and indeed will be able to see what was said and what I thought it meant next to each other.

The second significant part was a section doing a literature review on the topics of believing and belonging. I think I will need to do some theology of belief and see if I can explain why I find questionnaire approaches to belief decidedly lacking.  I can only write a personal creed if I can destabilise it and if I can't my honest creed is "God". Everything apart from that needs an essay with footnotes on footnotes to try to capture the nature of God. I am not totally apophatic in my theological bent, but I have been involved in metaphysical theological discussion since a teenager and my concepts of God reflect this. So if I honestly answer the questions "Do you believe that God or gods exists?" then my answer is "no" because existence is a property of the created not the creator. This sort of causes problems.

The final major change they wanted  was for me to take the chapter on flows and incorporate it into the other chapters and cut it by about half. That actually is only a couple of weeks work, it will take some care and I will need to decide which part of the flows chapter to the three descriptive chapters. That gives another shape to them and I will need to think this through.

There were seven others, some of them were fairly short pieces of work; some of them I could sit down and do tomorrow without difficulty, some are quite expensive but do not actually require a lot of extra work by me. None of the requirement in anyway suggested that I should change the basic thesis.

Anyway Martin and I left after brief greetings between Martin and my examiners. We then spent an hour debriefing. It took some time. If I really felt like it I could I think of asked for a major re-write instead with the same corrections to be done!!! The grounds being that on the basis of what the examiners had said I had met the examination requirements.  In many senses the only advantage of this would be less work for them and me not having to have a second viva. There will however come out a two or three reports and one thing they were clear about was that I needed a break to gain distance from my fieldwork. I am therefore taking one until mid August by which time I hope to have properly digested the reports and will meet with my supervisor to discuss a way forward. In some sense the debrief the discussion was very like the talk you have once a paper was rejected and I am pretty used to doing that. In the end you have to sit down and make the changes. This took an hour or more and I then walked back to the station and caught a train back to New Street. Actually remembered the Station has a loo and also sold Coke which as I was exhausted was what I needed at that point.

At New Street I bought a bacon butty and a bottle of water and sat down to inform the world of the outcome. I was using my tablet and my personal wifi network hub not my mobile phone. There is a corner by Costas on the new concourse I tend to sit in. I also realised I did not want to sit down with the book I was reading this morning so I went to W H Smiths and bought "And the Mountains Echoed". It was the best there was in that small W H Smiths and I did not spot that it was another desert book! I think there is a theme there, but it really too much. I would join the narrative only to find that I could not sustain it. So I got the train back and at Sheffield station bought a G&T from M&S then got a taxi home. Then rang my parents as my mobile phone was indicating its battery was low when I got to Birmingham New Street and I knew they would want to talk. A friend rang later on to check how I was.

Last night I did not sleep very well, a weird mix of nerves, the old fashioned thrill dervishes, anxiety attacks and a racing mind. One of the reasons for writing this at length. I decided that this morning I was going to ring in sick, the combination of being exhausted and on an adrenalin rush is not a good mix.

My reflections so far are that I need to have over prepared with my writing. I have to be confident that it is more than good enough before I am well able to stand up viva situations. Secondly I wonder, it is just a vague possibility, that the resubmission was to give me the full year to make the corrections as my examiners feel that having time is important for the changes they want.

Viva Prep at Birmingham

Today I went to see my supervisor at Birmingham for a Viva Preparation session. He offered me one when I submitted my thesis and I took him up on it. However the only date that we both could make was today. Today's session was more relaxed than a normal one

In the weeks since the last blog I have been working through my thesis. The process has focused on annotating the text with post-it notes and pencil. There are three different sorts of annotations. Simple textual correction are corrected in pencil. l will produce a list of these corrections for the examiners, but they can then be put to one side. Then there are the explanations and more in depth corrections that cover actual substantive errors. These are put on yellow post it notes. When I really need to make sure these are mentioned I have also put a yellow tab mark at the top. Finally, there are the key points of the thesis. These are on pink post it notes. However, these are divided into major and minor with pink tabs for the major ones. There are far more pink tabs than yellow, but I suspect about an equal number of post it notes in each colour. I am also doing mindmaps of each chapter. I will also do a diagrammatic picture of the thesis and produce an index for my own use.

Anyway the reason for me writing this is that today I went to see my supervisor to do viva prep.l needed two things from him. First was local information on how vivas work at Birmingham. I know the general stuff, but each university has its own idiosyncracies and thus I needed to know what these were for Birmingham. There is nothing off the wall, but the detail was important. Indeed we got at one stage into a discussion over the affiliated colleges to Sheffield University. The second was to get me talking around my thesis. It actually seems to come quite easily in that I can put things into words. My main difficulty, as Martin spotted, is referencing my thesis. I am going to have to do some thinking. Up today l have assumed that page number was the sensible way to do this but I am realising that there maybe a more natural way. I suspect that the full thesis diagram might produce this and therefore becomes more important than the indexes.

The day was as sunny as it usually is when I go to Birmingham. Many students were out on the grass and few were in the computer rooms. I suspect that it is a pre-exam week although some exams were in progress. It is now less than a fortnight to my viva and as l walked back to the train station it just might be my last time as a student. Birmingham New Street is still a mess and I am not sure whether I should be glad that I will not have to deal with it regularly over the next few months or sorry that after putting up with it in this state I will not automatically see the new look when finished.

Starting preparing for Viva

All right I realise I should have posted here when I heard, but I forgot in the long list of places to post. My viva is on Tuesday 3rd June. That is relatively quick, the University of Birmingham gives two months to arrange for dates and actually my viva is within those two months. In fact it is so soon that my supervisor had advised me to only start chasing my internal the week before if I had not heard.

For those not familiar with the viva process, there is no reason why outside academia should be, it is an oral examination that is the final part of the examining process.  It is based on the thesis that is submitted and it also an assessment of your ability as an academic in the discipline your thesis is in. There is a description of  the precise procedure on the University of Birmingham website so if you want more detail.

I took a fortnight off, well except for agreeing to the examination date, the examiners and sending an electronic copy for my external examiner. It is daft, I have printed and bound two copies at around fifteen pounds each and then the examiner wants it electronically. I actually did that twice as the first time I did it the old fashioned way by printing the Word file to pdf (No I am not going to send my examiner a Word file, as sure as eggs are eggs, if I did when she opened it on her computer it would muck up the layout on several pages immediately).

Before I submitted I wondered how submitting would hit me. I have a friend who submitted in November and she took to cleaning the house completely. I thought if I did that it might be a good thing. However it has not. What has happened is I suddenly have been wanting lots of exercise. The major desire is for walking, but lots of walking and working do not mix. I find if I mix fairly frequent walks with other exercise I just about have it under control. I have therefore been on two long walks in the last month (and have another planned for tomorrow), been swimming thrice and joined a gym and got a routine to help me get fit. I just hope I can keep it going through viva preparation and revisions. Actually in the run up to viva there is a good incentive to keep me going as exercise lowers anxiety levels. There were signs that anxiety was getting to silly levels prior to submission so I did need to do something and the choice was between seeing the doctor or taking exercise and exercise won.

However this last week I have started the viva preparation. It has been fairly relaxed to date, I have set a date with my supervisor to do Viva preparation. I have also started a bit of examiner stalking and went to training at the University of Sheffield (my employer) on Viva Preparation. The training was Viva Survivor led by Nathan Ryder. I was the only part timer in my session (he led two sessions at Sheffield on Friday).  I was attending in my own time as Friday is my day off. The session was good in that it gave us some idea what a Viva might be like. Let me explain, despite the information above, there is very little information given to students on what the viva is actually like. This left me in a state of anxiety/excitedness that is not dissimilar to the state when you are hauled up in a cart on a big dipper before a big drop. You know the drop is coming but have little how deep or how twisted it is. Now it is as if someone has offered you a rough sketch map of what is ahead.

I am also reading Rowena Murray's book How to Survive your Viva which is good and gives very different information. The two do not really overlap, at least as far as I can see, except when discussing what you should take into your viva. Then the lists are identical.  Also, I have been doing some gentle examiner stalking. This has been purchasing some books by them. Several times during my thesis I hunted for books involving Peter Collins. There was good reason for this, from the book chapters of his, I knew that his PhD thesis was probably the closest to mine of any researcher. So I am slightly miffed to find a book published in 2008 that seems relevant, and to only find it when I am stalking one of my examiners. A hint that came up at Viva Survivor, but not from Nathan, was to actually search for podcasts from you examiners. I have found that both of mine have done podcasts and there is a sense in which listening to the podcasts you get a feel for their thought that going through books does not give.

I also have been out to buy paper supplies to start annotating my thesis. I hope to get that started this week and buying clothes for it. Nothing special really but I have not bought summer clothes this year for work and last years are beginning to look tatty. Actually I am aiming at the top end of Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes but not party stuff or highly formal. Being dressed well and comfortably is for me, as for many females, a way to boost our morale.

Oh the other thing I had not realised is how much talking there is to be done in a viva by the candidate (I am glad I am in Humanities as two hours sounds quite long enough). I am going to have to check out techniques to deal with a loss of voice; as one of my anxiety symptoms is that I loose my voice. I have techniques which I have developed over the years; slowing down, deliberately projecting (so treating a small room as if it is a lecture room with hundred of people there) and making sure my face can be clearly seen.

I will add the picture tomorrow after my walk.

 

Submitted

The Library at the University of Birmingham

Well I have finally done it.

On Sunday I had just done the electronic submission via Turnitin which produced a flurry of emails. It seems that my email of thanks for letting me know that my notice to submit had been received has led to a change in response and now I included in official emails about me. Maybe it is just l included my supervisor in it.
Then it was into work to print my thesis out. This took longer than seems it should. There were three basic stages. First a final proof. Mainly small changes to layout. The most common was changing the exact font of the numbers in my footnote. g guile often changed them to Times Roman or did not superscript them. However the real reason and absolute pain is Microsoft Word is lousy at handling figures in an academic text. The result is at least an hour fiddling before each attempt at printing and that is with nine in total. The second stage was the actual print. I spent most of the time standing our the printer. Birmingham University prefers to have 100 gram paper if printing double sided. The paper at Sheffield University is 70 grams. Thirdly there was the filling in of forms.Full marks to the person who created the Abstract and Access form which was in Word and could be typed in. The other forms were all pdfs. It took me well over an hour to get everything correct on three forms including a final word count, 78577 by my calculation. Then it started raining So I ended up being in work until after 5pm on a day when I was not officially in and then left my train tickets for today in the office so had to go back to collect.

So today, after a disturbed night, I got up early, showered, and breakfasted before l headed for the station. µ was only when l got there I realised that my seat was on a later train than the one I planned to get. Fortunately the first cheap train was not busy and I get a seat in the quiet coach. When I got to Birmingham New Street I bought a ticket to Kings Norton where the University Bindery is. The web said that they did a drop in service for temporary binding. I can happily report that they are as good as their word. G took lessthan five minutes between me handing overmy thesis and them being returned bound.

The a slight diversion as I went up to see my Supervisor just for a chat.It was really weird to walk out of his office and realise that there was no date to set. For the last seven and a half years I have always made sure that I had the next date to see him in my diary and even the last time ' had a 'provisional' submission date. It was good to chat. He has offered to do a viva preparation session when I know the date of my viva.

Then it was off to the library to actually formally submit. In the seven years I have been in a University library four times that I can recall: once for a course, once a failed attempt to borrow a book, to sort our my registering last year and finally today to submit. I used online Library services a lot and bought books from Amazon, Abebooks etc.However it does show the change in Libraries in the last thirty years. I was also fortunate. The girl on the desk was training another girl so everything was done very thoroughly except I was not careful enough with checking my repacking and left my handbag behind. Fortunately a student had handed it in.

There that is it. It is in and I have the afternoon and evening free in Birmingham.

I am Submitting: or the final stages

This will be brief, there will be a much longer post on Tuesday but I have been off work since Thursday and been finishing off my PhD. There were bits and pieces to do. The first couple of days was spent on the bibliography. I had to do three things.

1. Make sure every time I had referenced a text that was linked to the Bibliographic database. At various stages in the editing some referenced links had been lost. I therefore had to make sure all were active.
2. Make sure I had to make sure that every reference that I referenced was correctly and fully entered in the database. Unfortunately about three websites had disappeared. Two do not matter as they were esoteric denominational stuff. The third site was a very nice introduction to a theme. I did find it, but it is behind a paywall and it is an old version. 
3. I  had to make sure that the way the citations were happening was fine. This was a problem as the information my supervisor wanted me to put in was not standard and he was quite precise over several details. I needed to include original issue date, I needed to have page numbers just as numbers and I needed with book sections to bold the book and italicise the chapter title. I also for my own good practice standard needed to include the date when I accessed any webpage (see previous point). This involved me using CSL editor to create my own style.

After that it was layout.  It has taken me the best part of two days to meet the University requirements. The biggest pain of the whole lot is the requirements for figures. They want the figure number above and the caption below! You'd be surprised how many ways Word can mess this up and decide it is not going to behave. Anyway that will have to be sorted tomorrow in work where I am printing before I do anything else about printing. I also will need to redo the contents and the figures listing at the front of the text.

The other last minute thing was writing the acknowledgements. I have written them but just realised I should get them sent around people so that they had a chance to object. So I am hoping that they are happy as I really cannot do much editing.

Getting there, or editing is now over

Paper Ready for Printing

Well I went wild on Friday and bought two reams of paper for printing out my doctorate. That was my way of encouraging myself to actually finish the proof review of my thesis.
Friday I spent quite a bit of time getting the chapters on Community and Worship up to standard. Then Saturday I spent the whole day trying to remove words from the chapters on Location, Community and Worship. In the end I gave up and removed a section. However, I shortly afterwards spotted that my chapter on Belonging length included the Bibliography at the end. This gave me enough space to put it back in and I am about 500 words under my word limit of 80,000. Actually I might be quite a bit lower than that as I am at present counting labels to charts and graphs but I would say less than 0.5% off the total is not bad.

Oh one little detail, I describe at one point someone going out for a "fag-break". Now I know that technically that should be "cigarette-break" but I have never heard that used by anyone. The break is always a "fag -break" whether it is people going for one or people talking about someone going for one. So my decision was to leave it in that form in my thesis.

Today I have been working through the chapter on Belonging and the Conclusion. These were far more finalised than the rest although it looked as if my English was more unconventional in the Belonging chapter. So the text for submission is now finalised, now all I need to do is the mechanics of laying it out, getting all the papers in the right order and printing. Oh I do have one more piece to write and that is simply the piece that is for acknowledgements. So one of my jobs this week is to look through other people's acknowledgements and to record them.  Apart from that I will be doing my best not to become hyper over referencing styles and layouts. One job next weekend is to check every single reference in the thesis and make sure the references look right. I have well over two hundred references.

This feels very strange and I suspect the feeling will continue to build as I go through the next ten days that are before submission.

Starting Submission Proof and Tough Decisions

Raindrops from the storm this afternoon

Well I am further on than I thought I would be although not as far as I hoped at times this weekend. However my brain has declared that it is not going to do any more tonight thank you. In particular it is not going to do any more complex thinking about how different parts of my thesis link together.

I am also beginning to get the process of submitting under control. I have now found out that I belong to a class which allows me to submit my thesis (and I have until 31st August but I want it in before Easter). I have also discovered that my mail account at Birmingham was full. This was why I was getting emails in my GMail box saying an Outlook account was full. It made no sense to me at all until I looked on a tablet and realised they were redirected from my Birmingham account. I have it set up to automatically redirect to my GMail account so I do not miss anything and as I never use that account apart from receiving email from Birmingham it never occurred to me that it might be full. So this morning the first half hour was spent deleting email that I had read when forwarded to me.

However proofing is interesting. There are more changes than I would like despite everyone assuring me that it is just proof reading. Also I am 2.5k over my word limit. Now there are two ways of dealing with this. Firstly to go through the whole thesis and remove bits that are embellishments. I have to be careful as if I do too much it ends up loosing cohesion.  The second is to loose specific bits. I have identified one bit that can go and would take me just under the limit. It adds something to thesis but not much as most of the argument is established in the previous section. This just demonstrates that the process happens within as well as external to the premises. I need to think about it.

Anyway with 5.5 chapters in proof I am on track for finishing proofing the chapters next weekend and sorting this out so I have a final text. Then I can start collating everything and working through that to get it into a final form.

Hopefully the changes done

Daffodils bought by a colleague Sue to mark the fact I had permission to submit

This weekend has actually gone pretty well despite the kettle dying on me. Kettle dying is a major calamity as it makes it hard to make the copious amounts of tea, herbal teas and coffee I drink while working on my thesis. So yesterday I had an unexpected trip down to Waitrose to buy a new one. I know that at times both of the small local supermarkets sell them but I could not recall any recently and it is not quite the time of year for them.

Friday I did the bit I could not do last weekend because I did not have the books. It was quite fun and as always the nuanced take in the book had been vastly simplified by the literature around. So while I did not need to alter my argument I did need to alter precisely what I said about this author.  I also think I made other corrections to the worship chapter than my supervisor wanted.

So yesterday and today were making changes to the next but last chapter. I found today I have lost an article I read, it was definitely by Fredrik Barth, it was fairly recent 1989-2005 I would guess, and it dealt with boundaries and the negotiated nature with boundaries. What makes it stand out from other work from him is that it included an account of the renegotiation of a boundary by a woman who had struggled. I remember her story and the way she was able to define herself in a different way particularly vis-a -vis her mother-in-law. However it is not in any of the four books/articles I have to hand that are clearly by Fredrik Barth.  I have a possible place of one but that is £70 and while if I knew it was the right one I might pay that, for something so chancy I am not.So I have altered the text.

Any way the major work was making explicit when I was using ideas from the flows chapter to work later in my thesis. This can be done a number of ways. I have opted at the moment for putting references back to the chapter and using the language deliberately when I am using the ideas. However my supervisor may want me to do a section on flows. Other than that it was making the corrections my supervisor wanted and generally tidying up. One funny story, I had to put a page reference in for a "Religion since 1945: Believing but not Belonging" by Grace Davie, I started hunting for it and found a section that would do. Then realised the book I was looking at was "Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates" also by Grace Davie. So I got out the right book and found the section which was a lot easier to find.

I have also this evening have emailed my volunteer proof-editors (James, Ruth and Margo) checking where they are up to, sending a copy of the belonging chapter as it had lots of small changes to it and hopefully Ruth has not started it yet. Also I emailed them the form that has to be signed by them and handed in with my thesis. As I know their character I also sent in a copy of the regulations that requires it.

So next weekend I take pedantry to the next level when I set about creating the submission version of my thesis.

Starting the final straight to submission

Well after the excitement of getting permission to submit this weekend was time to settle down and start the process. It is one thing to have permission it is quite another to get the work done. I have had one day off (as after the stress of teaching and a supervision I worked out that the chance my brain would do anything productive on Friday was zilch and my guess was about right).

I have had one productive day which was Saturday when I managed to get the chapter of tradition worked around as my supervisor had suggested and back to him to check that it was ok. For those who are proof reading please do not worry I am not going to expect you to proof read these last set of changes. The interesting thing is it involved the removal of a piece. I have mixed feelings about this, at this stage I accept I needed to remove it. The other option really would have been to expand it considerably as the actual problem is I need to give a lot more information for it to work. However, I am right up against my word limit so doing that was not really an option. Actually I cut it out then saved it in another file so when I go from writing a PhD to writing a book (I hope) I can use it as a basis of the expansion that I will need to do. I have rather a large chapter on  methodology and probably could turn it into a couple of papers but it will not be part of a book.

The final day has been poor and I am going to have to catch it up during the week. I need to write a short piece about a specific researcher somewhere  in my thesis. It needs to be there because I use him a significant amount and I have not put what I am using in context. That means a paragraph or so maybe 500 words. Sounds easy with a thesis 80,000 words but it isn't. The thing is that the piece relies on a specific book. My supervisor insisted I had the book, checked today and it was as I thought, no sign of the book. What is more there is a good reason for that. The book is out of print and I think when I have looked in the past pretty expensive to buy secondhand. Of course it is not on Kindle and Google books has managed to chop all the bits I need to read out. So I have bought it. Actually I have bought it twice and I hope one copy arrives. I have also been distracted looking at stuff on the sociology of Prayer for a friend. (Hint: the stuff is very limited.) Actually I have written most of what I want to say and I think that it will be the matter of an hour or so next weekend if I manage to get some reading done in the week.

The other thing for this week is to book time off so I can actually go through the process of submitting it without glitches. That will be several days at the start of April. So a busy thesis week ahead but no excursions out of Sheffield.

Permission to Submit

Today I have had a supervision again. l know December is a long time ago.However if you have been following this blog you will know l have been anything but inactive. The last few months have seen me rewrite seven chapters of my thesis. Today therefore was tine to review these and indeed the whole thesis and see if it was ready for submission.

The day dawned fair, and I woke early but not ridiculously so. It is funny how if you start early then you run early for a good part of the day. The result was that despite taking a leisurely pace down to the station I just missed the train before the one I planned to get. I did not race to get it choosing to drink a coffee on the platform after all the trains seemed to be running time. The next one left on time, and I found my seat. However l had forgotten that there were rail works around Dronfield and therefore the train took the scenic route around South Sheffield. Now the problem with being late on the hints in if less than 10 min you keep your slot but longer than that and you start to get delayed by other trains. We lost just over ten minutes by the time we got to Derby birth the result that we were over half an hour late into New Street. So I emailed my Supervisor to say l might be late. However, the train came in onto platform 11a and the trains out to the University often go from 11b. l think l must have had close to the shortest change time possible at New Street; I got off one train, ran the distance of about a carriage length then got on the next just before the doors started to beep for leaving. I would guess less than one minute all told. The result was I made up most of the tune I had lost.

The supervision was long. A lot of checking is needed as o need to do things such as reference back through the thesis both when I use ideas I have already talked about and when I muse a reference to an idea by a specific author. l also need to go through and put quote marks around a lot of technical terms used by theorists. There are three pieces that need doing.

• There is an introductory piece in the chapter on the Reformed Tradition that needs largely removing.
• There is a small section on Anthony Cohen that needs putting into the chapter on worship 
• There is a the need to hook through the Belonging chapter to make the connections with earlier chapters clear. 

Then it is proofing, Bibliography and layout. So my plan is to submit the 8th April. I think that gives me five weekends to get it into a final form for examining.

The rest of the time was talking about what next.It is a bigger problem than most people think as l do not fit any of the standard patterns for Phd students as I am in some ways a mature researcher with many years experience from my day job. l certainly have fresh questions that l would like to explore but how? l will need tin to think over the next year when my brain is not totally consumed with academic study.

The daffodils in the photo were tiny about four inches high. That said spring was definitely More advanced in Birmingham than at home. However you can see Old Joe clock tower the in background so definitely Birmingham.

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?

Yikes - Another chapter almost there and the finish line is nearer than I thought

A rainy view

The photo is a cheat I have not looked out of my window often enough to take a photo this weekend but it has at times been quite wet and I felt a picture of rain was appropriate although I took this one years ago.

The first piece of news if you have missed it just under a fortnight ago I got an email from my supervisor. This is highly unusual to start with, we tend to communicate only at supervisions but that is partly me. I have been sending him stuff. Anyway the email said that he was making "minor corrections" and that we should book a supervision.  This was a double panic. Firstly I had a supervision booked for the start of next month. Secondly my supervisor only does minor corrections on the draft before supervision! I thought I was a draft before that. So an exchange of emails and I seem to be submitting earlier than I was expecting.

However working in between has been frustrating. I got a cold last weekend and colds mess with my brain. I also decided it was time to do some examiner stalking as my examiner has written on a topic loosely related to the chapter that I am writing. I read the book and it does raise an interesting question but I am not quite sure how to deal with it in the chapter. I was also supposed to go to a study day in Birmingham. My brain did not come back until the Monday indeed most of the weekend I was doing the stare at screen and try to recall what I was doing. Everything I had written felt too hard to read and complete gibberish. Having a cold is a good way to loose all faith in your ability to write a thesis. However on the Monday my brain clicked and I started sorting out the structure for the last substantive chapter. The thing I had not realised is that I had started dumping everything I could not bear to get rid of into this chapter. Having realised that it was time to start cutting.

Thus I really started editing this weekend and indeed those scissors were necessary as there are whole sections I rewrote from scratch. Not so much using the theory as getting the data stuff into a form where I could use it. The major thing was I needed to put into the chapter a section on how historically the tradition had sort to answer the questions "Do I belong?". Surprisingly this time through I have got to the end of the last substantive chapter and I actually feel I have got to an end of the journey and all I need to do now is actually look around and find out where I have arrived because as with all journeys your destination is never in reality the place that you imagined however well you know it. With a thesis you really do not know where you are going to arrive it maybe to be where you started out at the beginning or it maybe somewhere completely different. I need time to look around the landscape. I have for a long time been too involved in the process of traveling.

Admittedly I did not get the chapter on Belonging off to my supervisor and it will take another full day to do it. It needs proofing which in this case involves working with Grammarly to actually check that what I send to my supervisors is actually in something approaching correct English. I do have proof readers who will check the final version but putting through Grammarly means that they have chance to see where I am going wrong. Then I have to put in citations which are in as notes at present. I have learnt this takes a day.

Worship chapter off to supervisor, later than I planned

Blue Sky through my window

Thought I would start with a picture of blue sky that was outside my window this morning. We do not get much of it so it is nice to have a record of when it happens.

This draft of thesis is definitely on the homeward leg now. I have got my chapter on worship off to my supervisor. The strange thing is the way it came together. I am happy with it for the reason that now I have got to the end I find that what I wrote now makes sense at other levels apart from the academic. This is a state I like to get to when I am doing statistics. The findings once I have gone through the process appear to be common sense. The feeling of "of course that is what is happening".  There is something though which is important being said and I think it has been missed in the literature. If that is the case then I think we may need to go back and rethink our approach.

Another thing I think I have learnt is that if people have not the power to change things themselves then they will lobby to get those with power to change things in the way they want them changed. Lobbying is a complex process with both positive and negative lobbying. Positive lobbying is not necessarily about lobbying for, rather it is lobbying that aims to make it pleasurable for the person with the power to change things in the way you want. Negative lobbying aims at making not complying with what you want a negative experience for the person with the power. It is very easy for positive lobbying to become bribery and it is very easy for negative lobbying to become bullying. Therefore it is essential to understand that lobbying originates in wanting a changing and not being able effect the change. They therefore reach for the tools by which they can affect it.

This means that when we get to situations where either bullying or bribery are present we need to ask questions about the power structures in the situation and why people are not happy with them. Sometimes the reasons can be stupid. I know of a situation where people were upping the anti with lobbying to affect a decision while not exercising their right to be part of the decision makers because that meant they would have to acknowledge that things had changed. Equally quite often what is driving them to desire a particular change is not what is presented.  Therefore, I am not necessarily in favour of giving people the power always but I am equally pretty sure that a simplistic attitude of centralising power when this sort of thing happens is just a form of wanting teacher to come and sort things out at best and calling on your big brother at worst. There is something in me that is beginning to ask how do you make direct democracy work.

That said next week will be interesting. There is a Society for Liturgical Studies student study day happening at Carrs Lane in Birmingham. I am not presenting a paper due to finishing thesis but I am going as it is chance to hear what others are saying. There is a paper on studying liturgy historically, I have questions to ask about how well that can be done when a liturgy is as ephemeral as the historic English Dissent, and if it can't cover such cases is it perhaps dealing with a very partial perspective. I would expect folk devotion within Catholicism to be largely as ephemeral as well. Another one looks at "Anglican Mission and Identity: Liturgy and Transformation". This means some moving around of things but I still hope to get pretty well the two plus writing days I am managing at the moment.

Well not quite there with Worship

My aim a fortnight ago was to get my worship chapter off to my supervisor by today. I have not achieved this and it will have to wait now until next weekend. That said it is now in a full draft but I need to go through and do the grammar checking and the bibliography. I have the feeling that I am going to have to cite people a lot more often than they are in the text already. I reference ideas by phrases repeated and suspect I need to cite the originator every time I do it.

There are reasons for my delay. Firstly most of last weekend was taken up with writing the an appendix which took very straightforward stuff out of the chapter that was comparative between Ulverstane and St Andrew's Edgerton. This involved a statistical analysis and a detailed qualitative one of hymns.

Secondly just before Christmas I got back my notes from the majority of the sermons I listened too while on placement. This meant I could finally do some sort of an analysis of them. It was interesting, my notes are pictorial (the picture is from one of them) . There is however a symbolic system in them and by spreading them out by time with images used I got a feel for themes and how they were spread through the year. For instance Easter day always had an empty tomb. Sometimes it was obvious that they were exposition on a single passage, other times they worked around a theme.  However because they were pictures I was making links between elements in the drawing and also across drawings. Actually by the time I had spent several hours on it I had plenty to write.

The third reason is I decided last week that is was time I put some effort into sorting my finances out. No real problems but they have not been as efficiently managed as I would like. That took up a couple of hours on Friday and left me very tired and whacked.

If I am honest it is a lot better than it was and now I think has a cohesive story. I also think it has got shorter. So I am hoping that when sent my supervisor will be happy with it. I have been doing pomodoro and on the whole it has kept me relatively well focused. However that does not work when referencing and doing the grammar. I expect that by next Saturday at the latest I will have the chapter off to my supervisor.

Another chapter off to Supervisor

Been working: therefore an untidy desk

Sorry about not writing last weekend. No I was not taking a break, but at some stage over the weekend my brain clicked and I started to know where I was going with my chapter on community. The result was that I worked late on the Sunday on the chapter and really wanted to continue working on it on the Monday but worked called and it was a busy week. I was straight back into teaching even though it is not term time (I train researchers not students). The odd thing is that even when I am not actively doing my doctorate I am still working on it. Anyway in the middle of this I decided I need to put a statistical analysis into the appendix rather than leave it in place. However that is for the worship chapter.

I have a problem with my next chapter and the way my supervisor wants me to edit it requires quite a bit of rejigging and a change of focus, especially if my edits on my previous chapter have worked. The thing was that it was like suddenly finding my voice and knowing how I wanted to write. This makes editing a lot quicker and more enjoyable. The odd thing is that in some ways I have started doing what my supervisor originally wanted me to do. That said I was also right, writing like this is not easy, I needed all the pedestrian writing I have done in the months inbetween. The thing is that I had to familiarize myself with the material to a far greater degree than I think I suspected.

That should not have been a surprise. The fact is that ethnographers say that familiarization is essential. However, most people do their familiarization in a very different way to how I did. They do it by repeated reading of notes. I took to inhabiting imaginatively and theoretically the space that the notes created. My method of doing it was to write. Indeed I probably have still under written, I probably needed to write about double my word count for my first draft. The theoretical stuff needed only to be written about the right length as it is the stuff you keep returning as you do further drafts but the descriptive stuff probably need a doubling or more in length. I did not realise when I started writing my thesis that I would need to overwrite.

Anyway I have sent the communication to my supervisor. This time because of this step up I have asked him to give me some indication of what he thinks of the chapter as this will mean that I will know what to do with my next chapter. There are two options: he likes it, in which case I do the same thing with the next chapter, he does not like it, in which case I need to do a massive rethink. The problem is that I know there is really no middle course.