New Year, Same Pandemic: PhD journal months 4 & 5
The last two months have gone by in a blur of lock-down-three sameness. Boy will I be glad when I can work somewhere other than my house for a change!
January was mainly about redrafting my RF1 (approval of research programme) and getting it submitted. Comments on the RF1 came back from the rapporteur in late February with some useful points to think about, and one query to do with how I'll be accessing a particular dataset for secondary analysis which requires a response. My next task is replying to that query and then that's the RF1 process done!
February was a lot of reading and writing on discourses of widening participation for a section of my literature review. No doubt what I’ve written will need to change massively when it comes to actually putting my literature review together, but it feels good to write something that could end up in my final thesis. That 80k word limit looms large in my mind...
With the exception of the RF1, which was around 1200 words, this is the only academic writing I’ve done since finishing my MRes dissertation. Which sounds... mad! Obviously, I write all the time - summarising papers, taking notes at events, getting down any ideas that come to me and noodling about with them on the page - but sitting down, outlining a plan, and writing academically in full sentences for several thousand words; that I haven’t done since last autumn. With such a gap, I actually found myself a little phobic about getting started. Two things that helped massively: getting together with others PhDs for virtual writing retreats on agreed dates; reading academic writing advice like Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day (sadly that is just a catchy title, but getting started by writing for 15 minutes a day can certainly get you well on your way).
My reading log tells me I read twenty-four new papers/chapters across January and February and made notes on twenty-two of these. Two papers that especially got my cogs turning this month were Kim Allen (2014) ‘Blair's Children’: Young Women as ‘Aspirational Subjects’ in the Psychic Landscape of Class and Louise Archer (2007) Diversity, equality and higher education: a critical reflection on the ab/uses of equity discourse within widening participation. Both papers examine the discursive landscape of education/higher education policy and, although the Archer paper in particular is a little old now, identify discourses of diversity, social mobility, aspiration, and meritocracy that are still very much current.
January and February development
General doctoral skills
- Getting personal with existing qualitative data WRDTP
- Advanced quantitative methods taster day WRDTP
- Advanced qualitative methods taster day WRDTP
- Data management and open scholarship WRDTP
Subject related events
- #DataImpact2021: #IdentityInData - Who counts? Visibility, voice and culture in data collection and use
- Contemporary Social Theory - MRes module