Point of Reference

Last night I dreamt of doing interviews. Well, of waiting in front of the elevator to do an interview, and talking to one of the other interviewers about building security at the various buildings we were interviewing at and how easy it was to get to the apartments. Kind of scary, but appropriate enough, I suppose, since I spent most of the weekend doing interviews. Or rather, I spent Saturday curled up in a public library waiting in vain for my interviewee to show up (damn those no-shows, although it's partly my fault because I forgot to call and remind her that I was coming), and Sunday doing interviews with time in the library in between. The Sunday interviews both went well, although the second guy wouldn't let me record it, which meant I spent the two hours frantically scribbling notes. There was some interesting stuff about not knowing how to use a computer and still being in the workforce, and some interesting stuff about immigrant use of computers. I'm a little concerned about my own section of the interview. I've done twelve of nineteen interviews (we have five and one-quarter interviewers and we're aiming for 100 interviews in total), and the data I've been getting has not been very enlightening. I'm thinking I may have asked the wrong questions, which is a common enough problem in this field--every study ends with a list of questions that didn't work and a list of questions you wish you'd asked instead--but I haven't figured out exactly what I should have asked instead. It's a good thing that my section is just a government report/possible publication and not my dissertation.

Doing these interviews has increased my already great appreciation of public libraries. The interview location is far enough from home that when I have two interviews that are only four or five hours apart, I prefer to stay in the area rather than trekking back and forth. Public libraries have my been lifesaver on those days because even the most lenient coffeeshop tends to get antsy after you've been there for a couple of hours, and February (or even March) in Toronto is just too damn cold to hang around outside for four hours.

On another note, I met with my supervisor (NetworkGuy) today and found out that he doesn't feel like he has time to be my supervisor. Disappointing, but not a big surprise. He recommended someone else who I had already been considering for my committee. The only problem is that the "someone else" is an assistant professor, and only tenured professors are allowed to chair dissertation committees. What this will probably mean is that NetworkGuy will be my supervisor on paper, but new prof (CultureProf) will be my supervisor in fact...assuming that he agrees to it. I'm going to try to set up a meeting with him later this week (after I've read more of his stuff) to see how he feels about this. I'm feeling fairly positive. I don't know CultureProf well, but we've gotten along the few times we met, and he'll have a lot more time for me than NetworkGuy (who currently has at least five grad students under his direct supervision plus at least another three or four students who he works with closely while serving on their committees). On the other hand, I'll still have NetworkGuy's support if I need it, and his name behind me when I'm trying to find a job. I should also be done before CultureProf comes up for tenture review, so I won't be faced with losing my supervisor part way through (and if I am, NetworkGuy has promised to step up to the plate). This probably isn't the ideal situation, but I think it could work out.

NetworkGuy also gave me some ideas on how I might be able to get funding for the research that I want to do instead of settling for what I can do. I need to sit down and plan out my ideal research project while I'm still feeling optimistic. And he thinks we might be able to get a four month extension on a report we're supposed to be writing, which would be really helpful since the original contract calls for the report to be done by April 1st and we haven't finished collecting the data yet, never mind transcribing, analyzing, or writing it up. Oh, and they're going to pay me more money for the report, which is also good.

As I was reading through a few cultural studies articles for my interdisciplinary knowledge media design class last week, I slowly became aware of just how much nine years of studying sociology has influenced my thinking. The awareness peaked when I found myself screaming at the screen "But where's the evidence? For the love of God, give me some facts to back up your statements!" while rocking back and forth. Or not. But there was definite frustration with authors who blithely cast off statements like "the putrefaction of industrial spaces" without backing them up. At the time, I attributed it to differences between disciplines over what constitutes scholarship, but now I'm wondering whether it isn't less a difference of opinion in what constitutes scholarship as a difference of opinion over how much weight we should give to polemics, manifestos, anecdotes, and other non-scholarly writings. Or maybe it's a different frame of reference and "the putrefaction of industrial spaces" is a well-established point in cultural studies/postmodern feminism and it just strikes me as questionable because I haven't read the fifteen key articles in which the consensus was reached. My conclusion is that I ought to read more outside of my field in order to get a better sense of how disciplines vary--my ongoing interest in alternate possibilities. Now I just have to find the time...

(And yes, I do realized that facts are also socially constructed and our measures of the world, especially the social world, are imperfect and the results interpreted, and science and scholarship both exist at least as much in our subjective heads as in our intersubjective reality. But I also believe in an obdurate world that pushes back and constrains the range of interpretations we're allowed, and I believe that an imperfect measure, used conscientiously and with acknowledgement of its limitations, is better than no measure at all.)

On a related note, at a panel I recently attended on balancing family and an academic career, one of the panelists said that grad school tends to be hard on relationships because the point of graduate school is to change how you think and so people often come out of it very different from when they entered. I suppose this is one demonstration of that. The question now is how far has it infiltrated the rest of my life?

(The other main point I got from the panel--all relatively young parents who were balancing their kids and their academic careers--was that if you really want children, the end of grad school isn't a bad time to have them: babies are relatively cheap, your schedule is flexible so you have less need of childcare services--the main expense with any kid when you work--and students can often get discounts on childcare when they do need it. This advice was the complete opposite of the advice I've received from older faculty members, all of whom recommended waiting until we got hired before getting pregnant. I suspect this might reflect a general change in attitudes towards faculty and family life, probably as a result of the presence of more female academics and the desire of many male academics to become more involved in their children's lives. One of the assistant professors speaking to us noted that seven of the twelves assistant professors in our department have kids and so the department has been forced to make concessions by doing things like moving the faculty meetings forward an hour so that parents can get out in time to pick their kids up from childcare centres.)

One week away and I'm behind on everything. This week is all about scrambling to catch up with coursework while keeping on top of interviews. Next week I'm going to actually try to get ahead on stuff, and start going to the gym again.

I did enjoy my week away, though. The abridged version: I got into Tallahassee in the afternoon on Valentine's Day and B picked me up from the airport. We hung around his brother's place, then went out with his brother and his brother's girlfriend to dinner at a farmhouse (more of a collection of farmhouses really) that had been converted into a restaurant. The food wasn't too terribly southern, apart from the boiled peanuts, but the steak was excellent. The next day it was over to Gainesville to meet his parents, and then we headed off to St. Augustine and Orlando to play tourist for three days. Or rather I played tourist and he played native guide. We did all of the usual historic sites and museums and Disney and had a blast. We ended with a relatively relaxed weekend in Tallahassee helping his brother move, and then I flew home. Yay warmer-than-freezing weather!

The topic of last night's class was race in cyberspace, which led to some interesting discussion both online and face-to-face about the way the internet affords people the opportunity to avoid the topic of race, and how they can serve to reinforce existing power structures by allowing those who already have power to continue to deny power to a group while pretending that the group they deny power doesn't exist, and that it's all a question of individual merit. One of the issues that came up was the way that white is often treated as a homogeneous category. White is white, and differences in region and class and gender are often ignored, and to complain and demand attention as an individual is to be labeled a whiner or uncomprehending because, after all, white means power.

This point got me thinking, because while I believe that I acknowledge the role of region and class and gender in the formation of identity (I've never lived in a place very different from where I grew up--a rather sad limitation on my experience--but I've met enough people from other places to have some sense of the range of differences possible), I do think that I tend to ignore race if the individual in question is white. For me, being white really is background noise. And thinking about it more, I suspect part of the reason for that attitude is my own mostly-white heritage.

( I look very white. )

I'm falling behind on scheduling interviews, though I'm reasonably up-to-date on actually carrying them out. I'll have to call the rest of the list tomorrow morning and see if I can book them for this week. These are the times when I wish I had both license and car, because having to rely on the TTC means that I need at least one hour free before/after/between each interview, and that basically means alloting five hours per interview (or four if they're close enough that I can stay in East York in between).

I was very non-productive schoolwise this weekend, but I managed to run a bunch of errands that needed to be run, so that was good. This will be a relatively light week for reading, which I'm hoping will leave me time for everything else that I need to do, including interviews.

Prepping for tutorials today. Last week one of the students requested that we spend time going through sample multiple choice questions, so I think I might divide them into groups and have them make up some multiple choice questions today. I have a few of my own as well, but going through those gets boring pretty fast.

Tomorrow is my first interview for the big project, with another on Friday. I scheduled the Friday one for an hour after class ends; I hope I have enough time to get there. Tonight I need to personalize the interview a little--make sure the questions are all relevant to the participant based on his survey info--and practice the name generator, because it was changed and the new sampling procedure looks fairly complicated. I also need to read for my knowledge media design class. I'm still seriously contemplating dropping the course--actually, I'm not even sure I'm officially in it at the moment--especially if all of my friends drop out, as they've been discussed doing. The only problem is that then I'd have to pick up another course over the summer, and I would dearly like to be done coursework after this term. Plus, the course doesn't require a final paper--just a conference presentation. I wonder if she'd let me do a variation on the paper I'm going to present at the CSAA conference? I suppose that might be a little sketchy, but it would be nice to have a chance to do a public run-through before I present it for real.

It's 9:00 on a Friday night and I'm sitting in my office, revising a paper and prepping for next week's study groups.

I also got to hear a very engaging talk this afternoon about the way the Internet is being used in Singapore to challenge, in very small ways, what the lecturer referred to as an illiberal democracy with a surplus of oppression. The ups and downs of my life.

( Stuff about Singapore that I probably should have known, but didn't. )

MasseyPrincess threw me a birthday party tonight. (We would have done it last night on the actual day, but we both had to go police the soc 101 lecture.) Pumpkin curry and cake, yum! Guests comprised thoughtfreely, 1_k0m0d0, stillvisions, FrenchWriter, AmericanAnglo, and TorontoActor. I don't know what it says about me that five of my six guests were gay men, except that it probably goes a long way towards explaining on perpetual singleness. (FrenchWriter very thoughtfully included a pack of flavoured, lubicrated condoms in the giant bag of chocolate that he gave to me, but I think he's being overly optimistic about my chances of using them.)

We ended up spending much of the night watching Internet videos, which I suppose says something else about us. (Badgers and mushrooms! Lions and tigers! The nettipot! And happily, no saladfingers.)

It was a good night, with an early end because several of my guests are not students and actually have to go to real jobs tomorrow. Which means, I suppose, that I also ought to return to a regular schedule of work tomorrow.

Oh, and I think I'm going to do another semi-celebratory and entirely social thing on Friday. If any of you local people want to come along, let me know!

My parents found a little tiny baking sheet for my little tiny oven. I'm very excited. If my mother hadn't sent me home with a bunch of leftover Christmas cookies, I'd be baking cookies on my own. But she did, and so instead I used the tiny little sheet to roast part of a turkey breast and a sweet potato (cubed, with a little olive oil and honey and ginger and cardamom) for supper. The oven door actually closes with the baking sheet inside! Tomorrow I want to cook something with garlic so that I can use the fancy new garlic press my grandmother got for me. Oh, and I'm also excited by my discovery (courtesy of Food TV Canada and my parents' extended cable) that ginger grates much more easily when frozen. So I need to hunt down a recipe that calls for garlic and grated ginger. Probably something Asian. (Yes, it's possible I need to get out more.)

Tomorrow it's back to a proper schedule at school. I'll be reading the articles I collected on Internet & culture, and Internet & community, and attending 101 in the evening.

Somewhere, a few weeks ago, I read a great criticism of functionalism that completely clarified for me why it's a problematic approach. I thought at the time that it would be wonderful to use in a paper I'm writing. Now I'm writing and can't remember where I read the argument, or even what it was.

Bah.