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Working day
Jul. 29th, 2003 01:05 pmI finally finished rewriting my application for the collaborative program. Now I just have to edit it. And then back to the thesis!
I was reading an interesting article by Craig Calhoun about imagined communities and indirect relationships. He argues that imagined communities help to mediate the transmission of tradition, thus helping to spread common values and a sense of community across a larger population than can effectively be reached through face-to-face communication. He also argues that this reliance on mass media favours the elites in the propagation of tradition. Meanwhile direct transmission of tradition is becoming increasingly difficult because it's nearly impossible to use it on a large-scale, and on the local scale direct transmission is undermined by open-ended social networks that lack the density and multiplexity needed to reinforce and reproduce patterns of action. I think his argument has merit, though I'm not sure I agree with it on all points. It seems to ignore the interpretion that inevitably accompanies the receipt of any message and the willingness of individuals to ignore parts of any message that they disagree with. In short, I'm not sure that we're as culturally unified as he seems to indicate in his article. Nonetheless, I'll probably use it in my thesis. Yes, this is how I spend my days.
For my fellow academics, there's an interesting article in University Affairs about the single ethics policy. Apparently more than one researcher in the social sciences and humanities is unhappy with the way the policy has developed. They believe that it's been colonized by a biomedical model that places unnecessary and unreasonable restrictions on non-medical research and fails to take into consideration the differences in research methods and goals. Since this is something that my fellow grad students and I frequently complain about during our regular bitch and moan sessions, it was nice to see the issue receiving some attention. It probably won't change anything, of course, but at the very least it gives us something to send to the local research ethics board the next time one of us tries to explain yet again why he or she can't go into an unstructured, open-ended interview with a pre-approved script. Did I mention that our REB doesn't even have policies in place for how to conduct appropriate and ethical qualitative research? 'Cause it doesn't.
I was reading an interesting article by Craig Calhoun about imagined communities and indirect relationships. He argues that imagined communities help to mediate the transmission of tradition, thus helping to spread common values and a sense of community across a larger population than can effectively be reached through face-to-face communication. He also argues that this reliance on mass media favours the elites in the propagation of tradition. Meanwhile direct transmission of tradition is becoming increasingly difficult because it's nearly impossible to use it on a large-scale, and on the local scale direct transmission is undermined by open-ended social networks that lack the density and multiplexity needed to reinforce and reproduce patterns of action. I think his argument has merit, though I'm not sure I agree with it on all points. It seems to ignore the interpretion that inevitably accompanies the receipt of any message and the willingness of individuals to ignore parts of any message that they disagree with. In short, I'm not sure that we're as culturally unified as he seems to indicate in his article. Nonetheless, I'll probably use it in my thesis. Yes, this is how I spend my days.
For my fellow academics, there's an interesting article in University Affairs about the single ethics policy. Apparently more than one researcher in the social sciences and humanities is unhappy with the way the policy has developed. They believe that it's been colonized by a biomedical model that places unnecessary and unreasonable restrictions on non-medical research and fails to take into consideration the differences in research methods and goals. Since this is something that my fellow grad students and I frequently complain about during our regular bitch and moan sessions, it was nice to see the issue receiving some attention. It probably won't change anything, of course, but at the very least it gives us something to send to the local research ethics board the next time one of us tries to explain yet again why he or she can't go into an unstructured, open-ended interview with a pre-approved script. Did I mention that our REB doesn't even have policies in place for how to conduct appropriate and ethical qualitative research? 'Cause it doesn't.
