a box of maltesers

It's been a while since I sat down to write my blog. Its been a tough two weeks. I've moved out my home of just over two years in Milton Keynes on Saturday. The run up to that final event was really exhausting. I was up and down the stairs more than 50 times in any given day and filled with frustration as I tried to organise my life into three neat 'stuff'categories - one for storage, one for Sweden and one for my trip back to SA. So instead of moving all my stuff from one location to the next, as one would commonly do when you move house, I had to organise them into three separate bundles. It was equally frustrating to realise just how much 'stuff' I had accumulated and how I hate to let things go, even the most insignificant things. And having the space to store these insignificant stuff , means you do: The line between storage and hoarding is a fine one indeed.

So I was not a happy camper by the time Saturday rolled along and in the end I just put everything into large bags and took them with me, to a friend's large spare room, for sorting through at a later stage! I just needed a break from figuring out what needed to go into what pile of stuff. Of course I did all of this in my head as soon as put my head on the pillow at 11:30pm on Saturday night - so much for leaving it until later.

My fieldwork schedule all bright and purposeful!

Needless to say I didn't do much academic work for most of last week. I just about managed to organise my fieldwork schedule into a more aesthetically pleasing and digitally constructed artefact and then talk about it with my supervisors at our last supervision meeting on Thursday.

I also managed to find some interesting and hopefully useful articles about the disciplinary environments I will be researching. I'm taking Jan Blommaert and Dong Jie's advice about preparations for fieldwork seriously; by trying to find out as much about the contextual realities of my research site as possible.






I've also started reading about the university of technology sector in SA - a received a special report written by a well respected SA academic analysing  teaching and learning approaches at these institutions. What is particularly interesting for me is the academic's use of Bhaskar's critical realism ontology and Archer's social realist methodology to structure her analysis. While I don't understand this particular philosophical tradition in sociology, I'm interested in how it differs from my particular view point and what it can possibly add and why I haven't considered using it to frame my own research.


Other than that, I'm back in Uppsala, currently watching the snow fall outside, but suitably snug inside. I've realised that in my rush to get my life organised I left all my discipline related readings on my external hard drive in Milton Keynes. So I wont be doing that in the run up to Christmas as planned. I do however have a paper to write for a French journal based on my conference presentation at Lille in September - at least I have all the material on my laptop to do that. I've also polished off a entire box of Maltesers in the past couple of days, in between watching the snow fall and drinking tea that is!

Xmas star in Uppsala

More Xmas lights in the window