thinking is the new black

Scenes from the hard work this week. Back in the game.

Greetings, after a bit of a hiatus from me may I present a wordle word-cloud of my thesis in its entirety. Woo hoo!

I’ve had a crazy e.o September updating, re-drafting, and proofing, working late into the night most nights. It really brought home the notion that writing a thesis is sometimes an endurance test. By Thursday morning of last week when I was sat with the reprographics guys watching it fly off the press, I felt v wobbley; something close to acute jetlag. ( note to self: don’t try and make an original contribution to knowledge on 4 hours sleep).

And, I was so tired after I signed off all the paper work, I celebrated by going home , eating a take-way curry with the Italian, and sleeping for a gargantuan 14 hours.

Finally 2 bound copies of the actual thesis  are with the academic registry. Yes sireeee! And just in the nick of time with only 3 days off, before teaching started.

Hopefully in the next few weeks or so, I shall post some reflections on the process and the trials and tribulations of submission.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I will do when I finally sit my viva and become Dr Peacock. What will life be like post PhD and what is next on my research agenda? 

I went to Cuba in 2007 to stay with a family in a casa particular in Verdado a nice suburb of Havana. It had been a major ambition of mine to visit the country and the trip was fantastic. But ever since I’ve been dying to get back and spend more time there, exploring the rest of the country.

Last  week I went to watch Che: Part I . Mainly because I’m a massive fan of Benicio del Toro. It’s an unusual film, not quite what I was expecting to be honest and if you have little or no prior knowledge of Che Guevara or the Cuban revolution, basically you’re f***ed. Coincidentally I heard  yesterday that one of the artists from Buena Vista Social Club, Eliades Ochoa – the one with the cowboy hat, is coming to

perform in Feb in my home town.

I’m so giddy. All roads are leading to Cuba. I see it in the dregs of my mojito – my future is in Cuba. 

I’ve recently been diagnosed with celiac disease which sounds much more dramatic and serious than it is, but one of the symptoms is an intolerance of wheat and gluten which has been making me feel very tired and nauseous.  This is an extreme blow , as one of my other passions in life is cake. I love it. Lemon drizzle, macaroons, fairy cakes, scones, you name it I can make it and eat it. Yessirree I take cake very seriously indeed. But you’ll know this already if you’re a regular to this blog and all about my future plans for a tea room called the Public Sphere after Habermas’ great work. I envisaged sparknotes on critical theorists and their key works on the menu, and a free weekly salon for debate on culture and life, in the Raymond Williams sense of the word. I suppose I could still do this and make all the cup cakes gluten free – but the wheat free flour doesn’t rise very well. No Cuba is where I’m headed in my dreams.

Since a lot of my research and growing expertise is in the field of identity formation and brands, I have been fantasizing about making an ethnographic film on such things.

One of the things which fascinated me so much during my 2007 trip to Cuba was the almost total lack of  marketing, and miniscule references in popular culture to consumer brands (Cuban or other) that we experience in The West.  Not suprising given  wages average about £15 a month and because of the embargos food and goods are rationed. Literally there isn’t anything to buy.

During my time in Cuba I recall seeing only a few billboards in Havana with government messages and political slogans, but no commercial advertising. I seem to remember there being 3 TV channels – all state owned. My land-lady made me watch universidad para todo every morning, which was on 1 of the 3 an educational channel. I saw one shop in the foyer of the hotel national selling palm olive soaps and some L’Oreal shampoo I think, and just one other store in a very smart touristy area of Havana selling trainers  There were definitely some real or fake Adidas and Nikes in amongst them, and that’s the only form of branded goods I recognized during my stay. However, I found something online which quoted

Business Week (August 6, 2001) ranked the top 100 global brands and stated that of these 64% were available in Cuba

So much of contemporary identity in the UK is signified through our relationship with consumption and engagement with the brands we choose. And yet Cubans have  a strong sense of identity that is both individual and group – national and local .To me a non cuban, this seemed to be in part constructed through music,family, baseball etc.

But Cuba is changing, and especially in light of Obamas’ hint at new policy on Cuba I feel this will alter soon. Who in Cuba will experience an increase in material culture if embargoes are lifted? Will this result in a a semiotic glut and how will this effect class relations?

So now I’m day dreaming about learning ethnographic film making techniques and looking for crash courses in Spanish…

What doing a PhD feels like sometimes.

So I promised an update on the state of the per her der back in October, and so far I’ve managed to avoid following that up, because I HAVEN’T FINISHED.

I have been working on my PhD since April 05 and am grimly aware that I’m approaching the end of 2008 and I HAVEN’T FINISHED. 

Yes, despite having 3 months at the beginning of the year where I holed myself and renounced pretty much every other aspect of my life to write, I HAVEN’T FINISHED.

But why haven’t I finished? I’m really not sure, because I worked all day last Sunday whilst all around me were Christmas shopping, watching football, drinking beer and having fun. I worked until 21:50 last night whilst others watched crap on Living and ate chocolates. At this rate I should’ve finished by now surely?

This is the point where if I were in a film of my life (staring Scarlet Johansson as me) there would be a big focus pull. Spooky voice-over would rasp accusingly  ”where has your life gone?”, as something truly tragic composed specially by Morricone sets the scene, the heroine is finally caught out  by the truth; that she sat around all day, eating chocolate, playing with kittens, reading Vogue and attending light lunches.

But hang on…

A really depressing fact, which I came across today is that 3/4 of PhD students in the UK take 7 years to complete. Man oh man. I started the PhD in April 05, so I’ve been at it a total of 3.5 years and during that time I changed my status from FT to PT. When you’re registered as PT you only received half the supervision hours and are only expected to work about 16 hr p/w on the thesis. So, a year consisting of 2 PT semesters only counts as 0.5 when the trajectory is calculated. Following that logic, if the PhD took me another year I’d still meet the national average, and I could actually take another 2 years to complete it. God forbid.

Mulling all this over, I started to think quite seriously though what have I been doing? So I had an audit of sorts. In 3.5 years of doing a Phd (nearly 4 years in terms of my life, time and commitment)  I’ve presented at 4 conferences (one international)  & attended another international symposium. I went to Cuba, Morroco, Thailand and Vietnam, Spain and Italy. I’ve ended a long-term relationship, started a new one, and moved house. I’ve written 2 papers and had one published, taught for 5 semesters, held a FT position as an analyst for 3 months, followed by another period as an analyst later in the year for 5 months, and this semester I’ve begun supervising  undergraduate dissertations. And yes, I have not missed reading one monthly addition of Vogue. 

Phewee. I feel so much better for this little audit; I’m now able to say I haven’t finished in lower case. So joy to the world, and peace on earth.

I think it is quite common to worry about the big bad deadline, and especially given that people are constantly asking me when I’m going to finish. It’s very hard to impress on people who are not doing a PhD- quite what it is that one does, when doing one, and all the to-ing and fro-ing with supervisors reading drafts, redrafting, progress reviews, transfer vivas, selecting externals.

But I’m rather cheered that I’ve discovered some fantastic PhD blogs recently. It provides a great deal of comfort to know that there are other people out there experiencing similar things.