Or, The Thesis That Ate January
Just a quick entry to let people know that my blogging activity will be a bit sparse for a while while I bring my PhD thesis to a state warranting submission.
Rejigged bits of the thesis may pop up from time to time, and I’m really grateful for any feedback. I apologise if such posts are a bit more abstruse than readers have the right to expect, but hopefully they might stimulate some interest. I’ll only be doing this if I judge that posts like this are of general interest, and are related to the themes about politics and participation I’ve been developing in some of my Troppo writing. Incidentally, the interchange, feedback and conversation has been immensely valuable to me, and I hope also to my readers and interlocutors. Aside from that, I would anticipate writing only a few short and occasional posts.
I also wanted to note that I’ve set up my work email to delete all incoming messages and respond with a form reply saying more or less “QUT isn’t paying me at the moment and I’m finishing my thesis so I’m not responding to mail til February”. Up until now, I’ve been using the QUT email address for blog related mail as well as work email. But any Troppo folks and other blog friends who want to email me can do so by contacting m (dot) bahnisch (at) bigpond (dot) com
good luck, Mark!
Oh, the Politics and Desires Entry is “rejigged” bits of your thesis. I’m just a mere lay person but I shall look into that post more in the future. It shall be interesting.
Cheers, Vee. There might be more to come before the jig is up.
I’m well aware of the irony of my rather frequent posting over the last couple of days. I’ve got a bit of a cold and can’t settle down to heavy writing, and Don’s been doing me a big favour by allowing me to write about stuff that’s in my thesis in response to his posts – thus combining two of my great loves.
More use should be made of email discussion groups and blogs for working up theses and other writing projects.
Even if people don’t help much by feeding back comments and criticim, the exercise of writing shortish pieces to a more or less defined audience can really get the words moving.
Slow reading of key texts has the same effect. I did some slow reads on a discussion group and ended up with 40 thousand words of fairly coherent text, written in spare time over a couple of months. A leading academic on the list said it was a great pity that there was not more of that kind of thing. Admittedly his book was one of the slow reads.
I agree Rafe, if I was starting again I’d be writing the whole thing on a blog. There are some interesting research blogs out there, which seem to work well for the participants. Compared to some academic schools where there’s bugger all intellectual life, it’s very refreshing.