At 2am in the morning I find myself thinking about things I need to say in my blog, yet during the day I cant seem to find the time to write about all these seemingly important and valuable insights.
So here is a whistle stop tour of some (those I remember) of these important insights
- the Mobility, Language and Literacy conference last week was a resounding success for me. Of course for all the 'wrong' reasons as it was rather tangential in its focus on academic literacies. However, I was once again reminded to appreciate the work of literacy and language theorists and scholars as they try to explore and unpack the ways in which language and literacy creates and shapes inequality in our society. While I don't always understand their theorisation, their analytic frames or their terminology, nor do I necessary want to use these frames, I continue to develop an appreciation and respect for what they do and see the connections with my own work. We are all looking at similar problems (even if only at the macro levels of our fields) using different lens.
- I have been able to put faces to some of the many famous researchers and theorists whose work I have encountered - thanks being a little conference bunny over the past 2 years at the OU. Last week was no exception and 'they' were all there - Ben Rampton, Ilana Snyder, Hilary Janks, Brian Street, Mike Baynham, Theresa Lillis (so I'm cheating here), Lucia Thesen (another cheat), Jan Blommaert, Suresh Canagarajah, Jennifer Rowsell, Raj Mesthrie, Alastair Pennycook, Mary Scott (cheat, cheat), Cheryl Brown, Caroline McKinney, Cathy Kell, Lynn Mario de Souza
- apparently my accent is changing and I'm sounding more and more Capetonian...mmm, wonder if my supervisors will understand me when we have our supervision meeting on Thursday?
- I still haven't figured out how I will manage the ethics of blogging while doing fieldwork. Until I have worked it out I'm going to be rather reticent about what is happening 'in the field'
- I saw that little spark of interest and enthusiasm for my research topic appear during the conference last week...think I need to fan this fire and feed it some oxygen
- I'm having an internal debate about whether to use only hand written fieldnotes or use my laptop in the field to create my notes - I can see the obvious advantage of being able to import my digital notes directly to Atlas_Ti but wonder what I might be loosing in the process - AND Jan Blommaert waxes lyrically about the value of handwritten, tangibly, material fieldnotes captured in endless journals
- I'm a manic editing machine - there are so many track-change correction in my article I've had to accept and reject many of the amendments just so I can make sense of what I want included and/or excluded. I'm once again reminded of the difference between devoting time to thinking through the argument and points I want to make and time needed to actually capture these in the paper.
Hopefully now that I've captured these thoughts I can get a full nights sleep tonight.
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