The State of  Higher Education: This was formerly the
University Branch of Waterstones!

Today was the day when I had the supervision after sending a full draft to my supervisor just over two weeks ago.  Today was also the day bins are collected locally. As I set out one of the bin men was sheltering from the rain in the bin shed while the van came round and took the bins which were neatly lined up by the pavement. It had been raining over night and although it was already easing it was still pretty wet. This is unusual for a supervision but by the time I had arrived in Birmingham the weather was dull but dry.

The journey was largely uneventful but the University had a council meeting this afternoon and my supervisor being now a deputy pro vice chancellor was expected to attend. This meant that the supervision had been brought forward and hour to 1:00 pm. The choice was to have lunch before or afterwards, afterwards being approaching 4:00 pm because the supervision was for 2.5 hours. Tricky but decided that a coffee and flapjack before I went would get me through while eating before hand would be tricky indeed.

At 1:00 pm I was knocking on my supervisors door. The plan was that this should be a thorough review and then a month to go to finalise. Unfortunately as I knew when I sent it although I could not quite put my finger on it, that there was something that was not quite there.  The metaphor was that I used was that it was like jam that was not jelling. It was good enough to go over ice-cream or such but not really set. The problem is that it is not simply a matter of finessing what is there but requires some substantial reworking in order to sort.

My supervisor agreed with this assessment. His suggestion was that I brought the final chapter to immediately after my methodology. That sounds the work of minutes, in actual fact it means quite a large re-write of six chapters. This makes sense. Indeed in my questioning of why it was not gelling, it had been part of what I considered doing, but rejected it due to time restraints to get the thesis to my supervisor by mid September.

My supervisor was quite wary of suggesting of it, I think I would have been floored if I had not already half thought of it. As it is, I am aware that I can call up the energy to do it this time, however I just have to hope that it works as I think it is highly unlikely I can get it up to do another re-organise after this. That said already I can feel bits and pieces dropping into place, but I think I am not going to be able to do this in Word, so may have to learn Scrivener.

There are a number of small bits of writing I need to do as well. Among them is an odd piece. My supervisor asked me to describe the method that I used to produce my results. One problem is that my method neither falls into classic inductive or deductive approach. Surprisingly I was able to explain my method of being very similar to the process by which I write poetry. I now have to write a short section, but oddly enough it gets me out of a lot of the problems with my referencing and debating which I was getting into. Well I did not expect to create a new approach to reasoning for the Social Sciences when I started this process. Actually I do not think I did; there is the performance of deductive or inductive reasoning within a thesis that is established but my experience suggest most use a combination. What I do think is that my experience of working in a vast range of research projects through my day job has put me in a position where I have the confidence to say “Actually it worked like this…”. It is quite something for a young researcher to do, but I am not new, it is just about being honest about the approach.

So the story is that I will not be submitting at the end on this Month. It is going to take two to three months to work through this supervision. I need to rearrange and ask for extension leave from one group in an attempt to get this. I will also need to give up a course I was planning to start in January but doing the course and finalising a thesis is a non-starter. However,I actually think after this summer and the effort it has taken I will need to take my holiday in November and just take the time out. The good thing is that I have a bit more space to do things around the end of the month which was looking very crowded.

Before anyone thinks I have a down on Costa, they supplied me with a soya latte and flapjack to keep me going during supervision and a peppermint tea with space to write on the way home, so no I am not, I am just missing having a handy bookshop to drop into!

Supervision August: Another chapter in “draft” and another three to write

Notice outside the main library, no I did not go in,
but I liked the textured and weathered look of it

I know it is only the last day of July but this supervision was early to take into consideration the holidays and my next supervision is early September.

Right I took my documents to my supervisor this time, amongst them was a think piece. I do not usually do think pieces at the moment, but I was struggling with the fact that while I was writing lots of description, I was not finding it easy to integrate the theory with it. This struggle was particularly intense with the last chapter where the theorists were very few and far between. When you say you are having problems finding anyone to your supervisor and his reply to paraphrase is “Apart from me there isn’t really anyone” then this is not surprising. I have found a useful writer on ritual, I can use ritual not directly but I can talk of form, and form in worship is very closely related to ritual. What is contained within the form is not always the same even when the form looks the same. So you get within worship even that that is not hugely ritualistic a binary stars system where form and understanding circle around each other without being exactly the same.

Anyway I decided to instead start drafting an overview of the theory of my thesis. That started to get my supervisor excited, so now we have split the data chapters from the theory chapters and there are three of each. The three theory chapters mark an outward trajectory that goes from Tradition, through Belonging and on out to Flows within Identity. Anyone know a popular book on fluid dynamics that a way out of practice mathematician would understand? So where I thought I had one chapter to finish and another on Tradition to write I now have that chapter signed off (the change actually means that apart from a drawing together of threads that chapter is fully written). I also have a major selection job to do as I need to reduce my chapters down but I know now how to and writing my theory gives me the tools to cut it down effectively. Actually I pretty confident that I can write the chapter on tradition pretty quickly, maybe by next supervision, the chapter on belonging may well take longer though I think that is pretty straightforward to, which means the big challenge is the chapter on flow. This will need to bring together the various strands of the thesis and create an understanding what the whole thesis is.

Yes I am happy with this, a lot more happy than I was with the previous structure as it allows the descriptive analysis to appear in its own right although more selected rather than letting the theoretical discourse shape the whole thing.

Otherwise two unusual things happened today, it actually rained on me while I was in Birmingham, this is a big rarity, even on wet days I seem to dodge the showers and the wet days have been the minority. The other is even more surprising, I as usual booked a seat on the train but only yesterday and not only did I get a seat but a table seat and facing the direction of travel. For once the 5:00 pm train does not have every seat foll on leaving Birmingham (usually very few standing but all seats full).

Week 22: Major editing work on the location chapter

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far:36,185
Words typed this week: 0
Words lost this week: 1814
Total increase: -1814
Days I managed to write this week: 3

Yes that is last weeks photo and I am nearly 2000 words further behind than I was last week but it feels like progress! The truth is I have probably lost twice that number if not more words and put back in a fresh two to three thousand. However as it was not a case of just delete huge amounts and then typing in fresh but restructuring the old and using the new stuff to give it structure, I don't know what I deleted so can't estimate what I added. The task was a big one and I would say I was 90% of the way there with this chapter.

The real reason I am feeling more hopeful is I am beginning to see the way the thesis will hang together, the metaphor I started out with is developing and making a lot of structural and theoretical sense when applied to the data. This is important the scale at which I am working is a little explored scale in sociology. There is plenty of stuff that looks at big societal issues and there is plenty of stuff that looks at how individuals do things but groups have relatively little attention except as subsets of bigger society at least as far as identity goes.  I probably need to do more work on the actual metaphor, so I have ordered a book on fluid dynamics and am going to return to one of the fractal books I tried earlier.

Yes I know I gave up applied maths at Christmas in my second year of my first degree although if I am honest I did bits and pieces of it right through to final year thanks to having applied mathematicians as close friends and finding the department kept dropping the pure and statistical courses I wanted to do so having to make last minute changes. I think I skipped Prof Priest on the Sun but ended up doing a course on solving partial differential equations. You would also be  right in thinking that I never expected to have to use maths to complete my doctorate. However the one thing I have learnt is the more you understand the thing you are using as a metaphor the better you are able to work with it.

The next week is not going to produce a startling amount of progress as I am working on an appendix. My supervisor suggested that when I wanted to write up something in detail (three times in the whole thesis) that actually I should take those out and create case studies in the appendix. The thing is these actually need very very detailed writing and I need to go through two interviews at least to make sure I have the details right.