a reassuring supervision

I had a good supervision yesterday. Both my supervisors were able to reassure me that spending 16-20 hours on a 20 minute conference presentation is not an indication that I'm thick and don't know what I am doing; rather it's an indication that I'm working at ensuring that the points I want to make gets across in the most effective way. We also agreed that as you become aware of the social practice of conference presentations the personal stakes become higher - both ML and I were finding that the more we do such presentations, the more anxious we have become about doing them. It was good to know I'm not the only one feeling the pressure of the 'performance' and that all the work I do on my presentations isn't an oddity, it just my unique way of managing this particular social practice.

We also chatted about the work load for the next few months leading up to December. Its going to be busy. I designed a special calendar marking off specific days to do particular tasks...otherwise these activities seem to slide into oblivion. I'm hoping my fancy calendar will help to make concrete all the 'little' tasks I need to do. I also got my grant form signed for my fieldwork in Cape Town - need to book that flight soon!


Writing has come back on the agenda - my plan is to focus on Research Methodology in general and write reviews associated with doing ethnography and approaches to textual analysis. I was somewhat enthused by ML's comment that thematic analysis can be applied to textual artefacts and that because I was collecting texts, this doesn't necessarily mean that I needed to do a particular form of textual analysis. We will have to see how this idea develops over the next couple of months.

Then some good news: 

Thank you for submitting your paper for consideration in the special issue of Higher Education Research and Development (HERD).

I am writing to inform you that J.... C... and I would like you to submit your paper to HERD as part of the special issue.

Isn't this great - I'm still in shock of course as I thought I would be rejected in this first round of selection and review. Now to work on my paper and make the submission. Thanks to SP and his die hard attitude of simply submitting papers that provided the bits of inspiration to just do it! My next submission will go through another blind review process...so we will see, but hell, I'm happy with getting this far.