Really the Last Supervision!

Sometimes you get things wrong. My previous Supervision was actually my last supervision before submitting and today I had a pre-viva supervision. If this sounds different to last time then that is because the time between submission and viva. Firstly it has been longer about four months as opposed to just six weeks last time. Secondly there has been a lot of difficulties with the arrangements. So much so that there is a Small chance that it will be cancelled on the day itself. The reason being that my external examiner may not, for legitimate reasons, be able to make it.

Today I overslept, partly due to waking with nerves in the middle of the night. I did set my alarm but did not really register it until half an hour after it started going off. It is one of the dawn simulators and I am such a light sleeper that usually the click of the bulb starting to glow wakes me.Not so today. l did not realise how late it was until notices for the day started going off on my phone. However, I realised that I had plenty of leeway built into the day. As it was I got to the station in plenty of time to pick up my ticket. I then discovered that the train before mine was running late. The question was whether l caught it or waited for mine. I decided l had the time and I would risk my train being held up by the late train. As it turned out the delay was negligible.

Birmingham New Street is in the final stages of its transformation which meant I was disorientated again and there were workmen everywhere. Still found WH Smiths were selling Graze products including protein nuts and as I was not feeling like lunch this was a useful substitute. I then caught the train out to University and set about finding the ERI Building which took me down the road by the hospital which is lined with horse chestnut trees. It is the conker season and inevitably I picked up a pocketful. As I was ridiculously early (12:30 for 2:00 meeting) when l found the ER1 Building I walked past and went on an explore. Well, sort of, the next building l encountered was the Computer centre which I had 'visited about 3 years ago for work. So I had obviously been in the area before.

Walking on past l encountered Winterbourne House and Garden. The opportunity to sit quietly in the garden seemed to be ideal so I paid the entrance fee and went in. They have a popular restaurant but the quiet of grass and big trees were more important to me at the time. There is also a path from the garden to a large pond with ducks on. Most ducks were at the far side and without binoculars I could not identify the actual species. There were a couple of coots nesting near the path. I also found the loos so used these t prepare for the meeting then realised it was a quarter to two and I needed to get back to the ERI.

I arrived at the ERI building at about 1:55 pm and got to the meeting place about five minutes before my supervisor. He had not booked a room but, fortunately, it was the week before pre-sess so no rooms were booked! That meant we just went into the first available room. I think that Martin had realised by the time that we got to the supervision that quite a bit of my being awkward was actually strategic rather than me just being contrary. The talk was mainly on the discussion for my viva including the need for me to have to know pretty well what my corrections were as if the examiners went beyond that I had to pull them back in line.

That does not mean that I have a lazy two weeks although I was pretty quick on answering questions today. I need to be up to speed on the major thinkers in my thesis. I need to know my thesis and I need to know what correction I have made. It was also clear that while the thesis was there, there is also work that needs doing before the whole work is publishable. Quite often in a book that is a book of the thesis there is a ghost of the thesis hanging around. Here I am going to have to exorcise the ghost rather more thoroughly as there is new material but it is only becoming accessible now which means it cannot go into the thesis.

Finally, I gave my supervisor a secondhand book. It was one of those occasions when something had come into my possession and I knew that it was destined for someone else, I was but the carrier. Oddly when I normally get these I pass them on as quickly as possible but this time something stayed my instinct until this supervision. The passing on of the book today did more than it would have done earlier and I was right about my supervisor valuing it. 

The supervision over and me feeling happier about my viva than I have done for several weeks, I went to Costas and got myself a meatball wrap and a soya latte before catching the train home. The train home was busier than I was expecting but then I do not normally get the train on a Friday. 

So twelve days to my viva!

The owls in the pictures are  the two of the statutes that are part of the Big Hoot that I saw today.

Last Supervision

I am in Costa surrounded by exam anxious students. I have about half an hour before I need to head off for my superiors leaving do. The department at the last minute decided to invite his Phd students Normally l would send apologies but as I was in Birmingham for a supervision it felt churlish not to go. So I am off for an Indian with a group of people I vaguely know.

Today is anyway my last supervision so may be there is something of an end term feel about it for me to. I made the mistake of trusting the Met Office forecast and I brought a coat. It has of course been sunny all the time I have been here. Oh well perhaps I will need it on the journey back.

The supervision consisted ofworking through many minor edits. The biggest one is the requirement to assert my originality. It is no longer good enough to be original (my examiners are quite clear that I am) you also need to be prepared to shout to the world that you are. Anyway the abstract needs rephrasing to say so and l need to add one paragraph to the belonging chapterand rewrite a section in the epilogue to cover this.

That does not sound much but I have to cut 20, 000 words from the thesis. This is going to be a painful tedious edit as there is no extraneous sections. Thus, I will have to edit the whole thesis cutting small diversions and trying to shorten sentences. I will do it at the same time as working though the minor corrections. As this is pure editing andnot rewriting I am giving myself a fortnight to do it. So I am looking to submit early June.

Onwards and Upwards!

Heads down, time to get this thing finished

I have been to supervision today, sorry no pretty picture as I did not see anything I felt like photographing. I have managed to redraft the three data chapters, and it was time to review progress with my supervisor not least because my supervisor has a new job that he will start in May. I needed to check my broad assumption that because I was so close to him leaving I did not have to do anything. Universities are not exactly quick on the uptake when it comes to working out how research students are affected by staff changes. The result is they probably will not have noticed that he legally should not be supervising me without special permission. There is no way they will have worked out whether to give him special permission (preferred option) or what alternative contingency arrangement should happen. Also, my notice to submit will have gone in before he leaves;  we did the signing part today.

Anyway I caught a nasty bug last week, I am describing it as a cold officially, but it seems to have been more of a sinus infection with earache and headaches the dominant two features. It was particularly bad yesterday, and I was expecting today to be surviving on decongestants and pain killers. Fortunately, I hit crisis about midnight last night. I still required pain killers to control the throat/ear pain but no headaches!!!! These were not migraine headaches; I could still speak coherently, but they were painful.

Anyway over the last four to six weeks I have revised the methodology and the introduction chapters and make the changes to the data chapters. These were relatively straightforward changes. I was supposed to:

• upgrade the usage of the literature slightly (the main upgrade being in the introduction and the belonging chapter), 
• include stuff from the flows chapter that they wanted cutting, 
• put in quotes from the interviews. 

These tasks are relatively mechanical as writing goes. I was surprised at the way quotes worked. The request was for quotes from interviews to be included. I have problems with quoting out of context. I have heard too many diatribes against doing that with the Bible to happily do it with another source. So I had to find a way around.  It is not entirely satisfactory. However, as my supervisor pointed out having found a way around I need to explain why I am doing that in my Ph.D.

My supervisor also wants me to reference the place in the interview that will be intriguing. There are two options. Firstly to allocate quote numbers to the segment. If done this way it allows you to put them in order, but gives no idea of spacing. The second is to put in line numbers within interviews. The line numbers gives more detail of position but would mean exporting all the transcripts, putting them into work and then getting it to number the lines.

I have finally sorted how at present to deal with food. The last few times I have been buying food and then not wanting to eat it. Sometimes I would eat it and other times I would throw it out. Today instead I decided to buy when I wanted food. The result was that at about noon I had a soya latte and some trail mix and I had yoghurt and green tea about tea time. Neither was really a meal but neither was totally unhealthy and I had a meal waiting at home to be eaten.

The other nice thing was that with the cold when I bought my latte I left my credit card in the reader and the Costa Barrista on finding it called me and returned it to me! That was enough to persuade me to use a Costa later in the day. Needless to say the sun was shinning and it was a pleasant day while I was in Birmingham.

So with all that out of the way, I need to get my head down and write the Belonging chapter and the Epilogue.  I have started on the Belonging chapter and have spelt out in minute detail the difference between faith membership, institutional membership and community membership.  It feels a bit like giving the primary school guide to congregational structure but as my examiners do not get this when I made more oblique reference I am having to spell it out in detail. The Epilogue is where I need to assert originality which basically means that I am going to have to relate the argument of the thesis back to the literature in the Introduction plus maybe one or two other items.

Well it feels like progress

When I got my to do list it felt like a huge mountain to climb and I was already exhausted. There were only ten of them but some were huge and with some I was not sure how much underneath would need changing once I started. My supervisors kept telling me that the corrections were not that huge. I did not believe him.

Well I am prepared at the moment to accept a bit of humble pie. Since Christmas I have done a second edit on the the two chapters with major corrections that I saw him about before Christmas and I have also sent him two other chapters. One chapter does not need any changes although I may just do some for the heck of it well actually I have some nice quotes from interviews that might just go in.

The work since Christmas has persuaded me that I did base my findings on my observations. I have put in quotes all through two chapters and they provide strong evidence for what I have concluded on many points. They also do something very interesting as I have not worked them into the text (many are too long for that and others are tangential). The quotes interact both with the text I have written and with each other. The result is far closer to the thesis my supervisor originally wanted with multiple voices working through the text. I have enjoyed creating questions and patterns that placing the quotes next to the text creates. I know many ethnographers suggest this as a method but when I have read texts set out like this the interaction seems minimal. The texts remain largely separate and linear. With my thesis this has not happened. For instance I assert one thing in the text and there are three snippets around it. One is a senior member saying what I have said about another, the next is a junior member who addresses the senior member and final one is a story told by the person the other two are talking about. It shows without doubt the inter-textual nature of the interviews. I could not read one separate from the others.

However I am also very glad that I have used narrative fact-ion within the thesis. These set the context for the happenings within the thesis and for the exploration. They also bring to prominence the anthropological element of the thesis rather than the interviews.

However I suspect my examiners were wanting a linear thesis and what they have now got is a tightly woven one instead. I am however enjoying creating the weave although I expect I will not find rewriting the chapter on Belonging nearly as much fun though I know where I am going with that.

Just after Twelfth Night

Entrance below Old Joe

Well, these posts seem to have become like buses. That is there are long spells where there are none and then you get several all at once. Anyway today I had a supervision and that meant a trip to Brum. l had sent a couple of chapters to my supervisor; one was sent just before Christmas and the other last weekend.

The trip down was good for birding with a flock of fieldfares in the bushes as I walked through the estate, a flock of geese flying along beside the train at one point and a flock of swans feeding in a field. Although I suspect the geese were Canada, the swans I suspect were not Mute. This is simply  I have not seen flocks of Mute swans which contained over a dozen swans feeding in a field. Otherwise, the journey was uneventful and I arrived at the University Railway Station without incident. The temperature was a degree or two warmer than Sheffield. I do not know whether this is due to longitude or height.

Key fob

The university was in pre-exam mode.There were students around but not as many as in full term mode. Also, those that were there, were quietly studious. This gave a quiet feel to the campus without it being too clattery and echoey. With my supervision being an hour later than usual at 3pm, I had time to prepare and to have lunch despite being slightly later than usual.  On going to the ladies to get ready for supervision I noticed the following key fob on the shelf below the mirror.

The supervision took the form of working through the chapters and looking at changes. Most of the changes I need to make are minor: one or two times when I have lost the thread or edited out too much, some correction of detail and the occasional reordering of paragraphs. There is one section which needs adding which will require more work on self, going native and emotion.I need to think if I need to pull a section which I wrote later on Foucault and put it in the introduction. If I do I need  to write something on Amelie Rorty and her analysis of person.

The supervision took an hour and a half and it was dark by the time I left irth a decided chill in the air. I was hungry so called in at the fruit stall and bought a banana before I made my way back to the train station.

The aim this weekend is to get through the revisions of these two chapters. I then need to code up the interviews and get on revising the three data chapters. At present, I am skipping the tradition chapter. It really needs a change of tone but as it is a change in style rather than substance, I can decide not to make it. 

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.

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.

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.

Pre Christmas Supervision

A Welcome Mug of Tea at New Street

Its been a long time since my last supervision, the one in October which was suppose to be the last before submission, only it wasn’t. I have been doing a lot of work since then but also had a holiday. The combined effect of having to restructure my thesis and a holiday have led to me being far more creative than I have been for the last year. Creativity is not a process at present of creating out of nothing but far more akin to putting together a collage and changing it from being something that is just a collection of used bits into something that feels a cohesive whole. This is harder than you would imagine not least because I seem to insist on collecting the most disparate of things.

Since last supervision I have reversed outlined my entire PhD using Scrivener, tackled two of the dutiful chapters (introduction and methodology) and also worked on the chapters on flows and traditions. All these had been sent to my supervisor even though at least the traditions chapter was anything but finished.

Well I have been back to see my supervisor today in Birmingham. The place was swarming with the Winter Graduation candidates. I am pleased to note that the University of Birmingham seems to require people to dress semi-formal which for women means either black/grey dress or black/grey skirt and white blouse. For someone whose first degree had the formality of St Andrews this is copable with, and there is little chance of clashes. Actually there was a real beauty about the red brick campus against the frost cold of a bright December day.

However I was not graduating, I am just reorganising my thesis prior to submitting. My supervisors assessment of where I am at and where I thought I was at agreed. He does feel that this time things are fitting together in a way that was just not the case in the previous version and this shows in what I am doing. Two chapters are now in final form (well bar one small change in the one part that can’t be finalised until I have finished in the introduction i.e. the description of the chapters to come).  So that is Introduction and Methodology put to one side until final edit. The other two  under review today require quite a bit of work. One of these was not a surprise, it really was not ready for review but because it showed how my thought was developing I thought it well sending it to my supervisor. The other perhaps is, but it felt a bit skinny as if the bones were there but not the sinews. This is in part because the sinews I had on before had to be removed as they no longer worked, but I need to create new stuff.

The programme now is to get the tradition chapter back to him before Christmas and then to go back to flows after Christmas. The aim being to get the majority of remaining six chapters to my supervisor by 29th February. I may need extra time, but I think it is doable.

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!

Drafted and Bound

 A bound copy of current draft of my thesis

I am in a strange place at the moment. After over a decade of working towards my thesis, I am in the position where I can not do anything for almost three weeks. It feels weird.

Over the last week I have been pulling my thesis together, sorting out small details, such as the bibliography, front papers and a list of figures, plus getting it in the right format for the University of Birmingham for when I submit it.

Of course as with all theses, just as I got to the end of the first print out the printer threw a fit and not one I could sort. A friend, thanks Dave, came and fiddled with it, eventually turning it off and on again and it started working. So on Tuesday afternoon I actually took it to local binders. This was to basically get a binding that enables the two people (my supervisor and a proof reader who has not read any of it before) to work easily with a paper copy of a long document. All the proof reading and correcting effort that has gone in over the last few weeks should pay off and make it a readable document for them.

Today I collected it from the local binders and put one copy in an envelope to send to my supervisor. The only thing was while doing that I went to demonstrate what happened if you changed computers and did not check through when working with Word (Word formats changes with printers that you are printing to, it is why much to my supervisors annoyance I have not numbered pages until now). However in doing so I found the figures were on far more different pages than I would expect. The reason being that I had actually changed the margins slightly and not then gone and checked the figures. Lesson learnt.

I then stopped off at the local Tesco and bought some reasonably priced sparkling wine. Then went along to my Local Post Office. It was shut for the morning. RETHINK.

So I went home and searched the web for alternative Post Offices. I found one in the city centre and so headed down there and put it in on special delivery. It is addressed to my supervisors official address, not to his actual office. So I sent him and email saying where I had sent it. Hopefully by Monday it will have been delivered to a place where he can collect it!

This blog is now going to go silent until my next supervision after which I will let you know what I still need to do.

A Wet May Supervision

A Wet View from the Train

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

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

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

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

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

Supervision on what turns into a lovely spring day

Daffodils out at Birmingham Uni

It was grey and threatening this morning when I left Sheffield. Rain clouds hung heavily over the city centre and the air contained a light drizzle as if they were not quite sure whether they were packing up or just testing to see how we’d cope with some more rain. It was just enough to keep my brolly up most of the time as I walked down to the station. When I got to the station I found I had booked the wrong train, but decided to get the train I thought I wanted instead of the one I was booked on, and I managed to get a table seat in a quiet carriage which is my ideal situation. However whereas I normally find that the train is one point that I really get a chance to read, today I was anything but focussed. Not quite sure why as there are a range of contesting items. Easter was hectic, not only was I trying to get what time I could for writing my PhD, I had three chapters in the last six weeks to my supervisor but I was First Table Elder on Easter Sunday which was also our Ministers last service! Then there is the fact I have been teaching a new course at work and that always takes energy. Finally it is one of those times when my energy levels drop and I have quite a bit on this weekend as well. If I am also honest it was one of those supervisions where I needed to talk to my supervisor about something. Not something nasty just something important.

The weather was still overcast when I got to Birmingham and I thought the day was not going to get any better when I spotted that the Waterstones at the University House is closing in a week’s time. This has been one of my post supervision haunts, a place to gather my thoughts amongst the quiet whispers of books, where nobody thought it odd if you spent half an hour just browsing the shelves and then bought nothing. However my brain is also saying that there are very few students around. I do not mean none, but not term time numbers. When I go to the cyber cafe that does as a common room the cafe is not open, the drinks machine is sold out and it is about half full of students. Quite a few are working on computers, indeed a quiet industriousness hangs in the air, socialising is conspicuous by its absence on the whole. Beside the computer I used to check the Google alerts for papers I found a penny on the floor. I eventually decide this has to be the last proper day of the Easter vac, which feels odd as Sheffield has been back for almost a fortnight.

Just before 2:00 pm I wander up to my supervisors office, there is a notice pointing to Starbucks at the other end of the corridor, I go to the other end to see if there is a clever way to get but realise that if I did go out by the doors I would need a parachute to arrive safely at the Starbucks cafe below. I think it is classed as misleading directions. The supervision of the chapters goes well. Two of the three chapters (one actually before the supervision) are in second draft. The third my supervisor sorts the structure of the argument out for me but I have to pull one that was in second draft out and will have to redo for it to be in second draft. My apologies to James and Ruth, who are going to have to go through the Worship chapter another time.

Then we got to the conversation I was dreading. It was a biggie on who were possible examiners. Now all PhD students spend time wondering about this. Internally you are always pretty limited, and I think my supervisor was well aware that there were certain members of staff who I would not want. I am however perhaps one of the easier students to place as I expect to open up my thesis to the range of academic discourses rather than working solely within a particular church tradition. By the way in passing I got confirmation that the problem former supervisor in the department was exactly who I thought it was. Then we turned to external. There were two options, one was to find someone from the URC who could examine me. At a pinch I could think of a name, but it is tricky, not least because many of the obvious names are theologians and few are sociologist and if I use a theologian then my father will be the elephant in the room. The other option was to choose a sociologist and it is that line that we have taken at least to begin with. What was even more interesting is that we went through the exact names that I had occasionally gone through. There is a bit of a problem in that many of those who have done Congregational Studies in the past have moved on so my work is almost the only recent stuff. There are several of names that just do not fit with what I am doing; at least two of them could have done if I had done a slightly different thesis. That leaves three people, all of whom would do. We picked one, probably the most senior and someone who I believe I can have an interesting conversation with. There was two good things to come from this; firstly it was a good test of whether my view of where I stood with respect to wider academic discourse was right, secondly my supervisor thinks that my thesis is worth someone I regard as being one of the current leaders in the subject. I am not naming them as they have not been asked. I need to finish the substantive chapters for next supervision and then have a good go at the methodology if I have any extra time.

We also talked of finishing date. It looks like I will be submitting late summer, early autumn. That is still tight but realistic, we actually did a time thing. I came out and finding the building stuffy, went outside. The sun was shining and the daffodils were out as were what I think were current bushes with daisies flowering in the grass. I got a diet coke and liquorice toffee from the Spar before going into Waterstones for the last time. I ended up buying three different note books, a mug (for Dad) and a book of T.S. Elliots prose. That was actually a serious piece of thesis work, as he wrote an article on culture which a couple of the theorists I semi-read this morning referred to. I wonder what I will make of it!

Please note there will be no further blog this weekend, I am taking an extended weekend off thesis!

Last Supervision Poetry, this Month Hiking

Union Election Placards outside the University Library

Another month gone and supervision tackled. The weather was contrasts again, this morning in Sheffield I had sweatshirt, gilet and coat and while walking through the fog to the station I was wondering if I would need to get a scarf while I was out as it was that chilly. I got to Birmingham and it is sunny, warm, very definitely spring and I am peeling layers. I had sent three chapters to my supervisor, hoping to get two into draft and a reworking of the third with ideas for the fourth in outline. Well the two are in draft (Ruth and James expect them soon) although the worship one is still needing reworking. The tradition one has gone through on a single draft. Things are moving on.

However belonging if anything has gone backwards, or rather with other chapters coming into focus, this as lost its focus. The result is that I need to do something pretty strong on restructuring and working through. This is where the walking comes in. The first stage is to get myself into the literature on believing and belonging (Grace Davies). Not that I am talking much about the same thing which is why Grace has not appeared much but she is arguing that people have real problems in belonging. There is therefore space to discuss the way congregations create belonging. There is definitely something going on but at the moment things are separate and the only way to get further is to immerse then create space. I did this a while back by drawing a labyrinth, for a previous one. It was semi effective, this time I think I am going to have to get myself out for a walk. I think given space and time it will be to the Dam Cafe and back, which is the only walk that really starts from my front door. So I am at present holding thumbs that Saturday is a fine day.

The rest of the month, I need to tackle flows, although that was the good news this time. The structure I wrote for the chapter on flows is far better than the structure of the chapter on Belonging. Then I need to do a lot of work on the chapter on Community. The last is really only there because I am not seeing my supervisor until 16th April so definitely have six weeks to work on this. That is not to say the weeks are not busy, there is also St Andrew’s AGM, Sarah’s departure and Easter to fit in. So busy but I think manageable.

A None Writing, Thesis Week

No picture this week, Sorry but I forgot to take them earlier and I have new glasses and am getting used to them at present. The actual progress on writing has been slow this week. Indeed I have probably spent about four hours in total working on it and the word count is zilch. That is because the actual work I have done is on reviewing the chapter on Flows rather than writing anything. It is a much clearer chapter than the one on Belonging was which has the advantage I can see a lot of the junk. The big challenge is to chop down the initial bits which are decent but long winded and get to the core of the chapter quicker.

That said I have not been doing quite a bit of thesis related work. This week the URC held a conference (that was their word for it, a consultation may have been better) on worship called Opening the Gates to Heaven. It was a very typical URC event with worship leaders of all colours there, including trainers, ministers, and lay preachers. Then there was me! The only one who would probably claim that her interest in worship was from the perspective of someone in the pew and not that of an organiser. This contrasts very starkly with the Society for the Study of Liturgy  where the dominant group were the critics of liturgy. Yes the normal Reformed bias also showed. If we get our theology right then our worship will follow. The problem I have is that I suspect that our more ceremonial traditions have it right in that it is "Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi"or that as we pray, so we believe and so live (which is a rough translation). The other thing is that I see not the words per se as determining the belief but the way the person sees themselves through the words. In other words unlike many who use that phrase that think it is enough to get the words right, I actually think it is important to understand how people understand the words. Well that took up two days this week. The conference was very packed full with sessions. I think we got through seven papers and two group sessions plus about five or six worship sessions and two story sessions. That was all fitted in with sleeping and eating into less than thirty hours with sleep and meals but it was two and half hours drive both ways to Northampton.

I was already a day down this weekend, I had taken it earlier in the week but then spent it getting specs. Well I need to be out of the flat and that meant that I could not really work and I needed to do some preparation for the meeting. Not that I did what I should have done, the effort of last weekend left me ill focused. Then I also needed to prepare for my supervision this Tuesday. That actually gave a focus as I needed to review the flows chapter for the supervision. Not that there will be any lack of stuff to talk about. I have sent three chapters this month!

Snow, Sun and Rain at February's supervision

Bench Sheffield this morning

Bench Birmingham this evening

 Today was supervision for February, the weather was to say the least variable. The benches illustrate just how different the experience was in the two places. There was some snow fall in Birmingham but the snow was about two inches deep when I set out from Sheffield and so to get to the station snow boots had to be worn. The result is that I have been ridiculously over dressed in Birmingham.

The other snag today is my voice has decided it is time to take things easily. It was fine as far as I know first thing this morning but when I got on the train I realised that all thaht was coming out was a whisper.  Given that my supervisor does not write anything down and that therefore the supervision is very verbal and you have some idea of the difficulties this brings about. It did appear to have decided that a partial return was a good idea by the supervision so I was audible. I still would not like to project it.

I had the worship chapter under review. Actually the changes suggested were quite limited when we worked through but included adapting it so it is coherent with the tradition chapter.

Problem the tradition chapter is only getting there. It is going to be interesting to write. The problem is that what I have is a series of images that work analytically for parts of the tradition but none of them work for all of it. He wants me to extend further the range of the images, I am tending to use mechanical ones and he is preferring organic ones. The only common thread seems to be that they are all chaotic systems. His challenge to me is to write something that is more poetic. I wonder if he realises exactly how difficult it is to write poetically. I say that as someone who has written poems. It can take me several hours to put together a poem that is not twenty words long. My poetry has an almost opposite style to a thesis in that it is very spare. That and the fact the Reformed tradition is highly rational but you can not rationally describe it without simplifying the complex interactions that make it an active system.

Any way this month I will spend this coming weekend (three days working on the tradition chapter) and hopefully getting it into another draft. Then back to the worship chapter before I move onto the chapter on belonging. After that I think I will need to go back to community and location, then onto flows and so it goes. I need to keep going and get this done now. Once it is done I can step back and start thinking where next creatively.

A Bright Sunny Day for a Supervision

I set off to Birmingham on a cold foggy morning and arrived there to a day that felt it had got misplaced from April, not too worried about that, there are normally several days in April that could well have been misplaced from January, it is nice to have some traffic in the other direction as well.

The train down was emptier than usual although I ended up sharing a table with a mother and two girls.  There was clearly a technology divide with the mother, who was around my age, asking her younger daughter about working of an Ipod. I happened to mention Open Office as an alternative to Microsoft Office for her older daughter.

Anyway I got to University of Birmingham easily enough and went into Waterstones where I found OS maps on sale including the one for Glen Luce. Since mine had gone missing I bought a copy. Actually had an odd minute when I "knew" the store better than the assistant. A guy came up and asked about a statistics book, he was directed to the bottom of the mathematics section. My brain was  going "Hang on a tick, some of your statistics books are in research methodology". He fortunately said that he wanted the book by Andy Field and I said "R or SPSS", by this time another guy was joining in. Guess what it was in Research Methodology. Yes Andy's books are good and I soon will be developing a second course that uses them as a text book.

Any way I got to my supervision.The seriousness of Supervision has increased markedly even from December’s. That is it is now becoming focussed on getting things right, rather than getting things down. This meant a couple of serious editing suggestion but today was very useful. Before Christmas I had sent in a theory piece for the worship chapter.  The main reason for writing this was it was the missing gap in my thesis and I knew that it was becoming a hurdle I was feinting at writing. That is I was continually looping in circles around writing it. It was more useful than I thought, because it allowed my supervisor and I to discuss in depth the argument from that chapter. It is one of two tricky chapters in my thesis. It is technically labelled a “data” chapter but it has strong theoretical elements in it. The other tricky chapter is labelled theoretical but has strong data elements within it. No, a direct swap of classification does not help! In the worship chapter the description of worship is the central part but there is far more than just that. What I am doing is theorising the nature of tradition based on the character of the Reformed tradition. This is more difficult than with a tradition with a strong central core. There is however a huge amount of synergy between sociological theories of ritual and Reformed theories of worship or rather each often mirror each other with respect to tensions. This is despite the fact that the meaning in Reformed worship is not really contained within the ritual. Rather ritual is the vehicle onto which meaning is mapped. This explains why despite wide diversity within the tradition and no central core yet the ritual form of worship remains surprisingly similar.

The other thing that is becoming clear is I am battling the multi-headed hydra theology who thinks that my thesis should be all about her. In Sociology the suggestion is normally to pretend she does not exist. This is simply not possible for someone like me who is working on the Reformed tradition but if I give her too much attention she swamps the whole thesis with her workings and it will take me another ten years to complete as I have to go back and sort out credibly the Reformed tradition as a theological tradition. Even our thinking of worship is in the form of a theology of worship. The argument is get your theology right and you will get your worship right. However it became clear that the tensions within worship are often reflected in tensions in theology. So you just end up tackling the issue at one remove instead of directly. Another area she is raising a head is through the tension between Culture and Christ. Now Culture does not mean what I mean by culture but can be mapped onto surround secular society; if that is the case then Christ somehow refers to that in the church that is not of secular society. I really must check Richard Niebuhr’s definition of terms here because they are almost certainly stretching both the concepts of Christ and Culture.

The schedule I now have is a very tight one and if I keep to it, it will be June before I finish. This is later than my congregation would like but is going to really involve me in working very, very hard to reach it. What I am hoping with my plan is that by tackling the big tasks first, then the other parts would start falling into place and the editing would become more straightforward as I progress.

December 12 Supervision: I am officially writing up

The photo was taken as I was leaving Birmingham University Edgebaston Campus. The tree was a casualty of last winters storms and has since been carved. Today it worked as a focus of this photo in the increasing dusk as after 4:00 pm I headed to University Station. I rarely see the dusk in Birmingham as my supervisions are middle of the day, so this and the January ones are the limited.

Actually this supervision was a lot harder work than many of mine since I started writing up. That is not to say my supervisor thought the work was not good enough. If anything he thought that what was coming was good but there is a huge gulf been good as an idea and right for submission and he wanted to go through the ways what I was doing was not right on the page. This included my need to interact more with the theorists. It now appears that it is only some theorists that I need to do that with and those are the crucial ones. I can do it with a couple a lot better than what I have done quite easily and that will make it a stronger thesis. Then there is developing what the thesis is dealing with. Part of me wants to go back and do that right now but I think I have other items that need removing off the to do list..

This chapter as my last substantive actually means that I am now officially writing up, and  that means the finishing line is in view. The only snag is that due to changes with my home congregation, our minister is leaving, my decision to return to the eldership no longer looks as if it is soft but as if it is hard. I also may have other responsibilities that may come out of this event that may need fitting in around what I am already doing although I suspect they will not start until the Autumn if they do. Therefore I am really needing to get this in a state to submit around Easter. This I know is optimistic given the work involved. Some of it is still drafting, indeed I have a piece of drafting that I need to do before Christmas. This unfortunately means that I will give less time to St Andrews Sheffield at present than they would like. This is coming particularly hard for them as we are going through a period of other losses and expect will continue to until our minister leaves.

So this year Christmas will be another working Christmas. I still have to decide what work I will take up with me at New Year but I know I will need to as I have a supervision on 9th January.  Before I stop for Christmas I need to write a piece on what the Reformed tradition "thinks" it is doing in worship. This is intriguing mix of theology and sociology but I think is possible to pull off. The problem being that most sociology of worship concentrates on ritual. Reformed worship is not without ritual and symbolism but the style is Rational, which makes an analysis based on the ideas of ritual difficult to use as analytic tools. So if it is not ritual, what are we doing? I think I have an answer but that draws on theology.