This week I had the opportunity to view Age Exchange’s ‘Children of the Great War’ film, followed by a question-and-answer session with the film-makers.  This hour-long film was one of the results of interviews conducted with more than a hundred people about stories they had regarding their family in the First World War, a reminiscence project that also incorporated digitising thousands of war-related artefacts owned by members of the public for the Europeana archive. I enjoyed the film, and at the same time it raised questions for me about the similarities and differences between the concerns of historians and artists such as film-makers.

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Ah, Foucault.  That really talented and prolific French guy who gets referenced by practically everyone in the humanities.  Seeing as he had things to say about human nature and the self in terms of ‘the subject’, I thought I’d better read some things by/about him.  I’ve found some things so far that could relate to my thesis, but I don’t know if they’re too forced/tenuous.

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As I mentioned in the last post, this week I took part in a session where a few of us who have been through the process once or more gave some undergraduates advice on how to do their IRPs (i.e. dissertations).  Although we ended up answering questions as a panel, I prepared a guide to the seven stages of a dissertation and I thought I’d share my advice here.  Obviously, deadlines, expectations and supervisory arrangements vary from place to place, as I found - the students I spoke to had to have far more of an idea what they were doing by the end of second year and an earlier deadline than I had!

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One very important thing you need to do a PhD is space to work in - somewhere you can plonk your laptop and/or books and concentrate.  This blog features some of the places I’ve worked in the past month or so.  

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Last week I met up for coffee (well, hot chocolate - if I liked coffee my life would be A LOT easier and my stomach probably less rotted from sugar-free Red Bull) with one of my PhD colleagues.  The conversation turned to how we hate the question ‘how’s the PhD going?’ and how the answer is always along the lines if ‘urgh, alright, I suppose’.  We all know PhDs are really hard, and they wouldn’t be worth very much if anyone could do one.  But there is this culture that, even if it’s going amazingly, you have to tone it down.  You can’t look like you’re having too much fun (unless you’re trying to sell the PhD at an open evening).  It’s like you’re somehow ‘letting the team down’ if things are going reasonably well.  There are really hard times and, being of a realistic (some say pessimistic) nature, I often find it hard to be positive about the PhD myself.  So, this post, I’m deliberately going to write about the parts of my PhD that are going quite well at the moment, actually.  I’m not saying everyone is having an objectively nice time, of course - just finding things in my experience that I sometimes lose sight of!

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A few months ago, I had one of those dreaded conversations with a taxi driver about what I research, which segued into the research interests of my fellow PhD students.  To paraphrase: 

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A bit of a break from my normal blog routine this week as I went to the abovementioned conference on Saturday but also want to post a book review on Friday.  I didn’t speak at the conference as I couldn’t think of a non-tortured way to get my research to fit the theme, but I found a lot to interest me, but it was lovely to be able to enjoy the conference and not have to worry about giving a paper.  As usual, all the papers were interesting, but I’ll talk about the ones that really stood out to me personally to avoid a massive post (also, there were parallel sessions so I naturally only saw half the papers anyway!).  It was a very interdisciplinary conference, so I felt like my brain was given a good workout!

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And so, back to writing - this time, a draft chapter on only children’s personalities.  It makes uses of different sources, it busts stereotypes, it’s interesting (in my opinion anyway) - but I think it may be a bit bloated.

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This week, I’m very much back on the writing - specifically, about how only children described the their personalities as children (spoiler: they didn’t fit the stereotypes and there was a lot more to determining someone’s personality than just being an only child!).  Before I got to write about the only children themselves, though, I had to unpack the ideas of ‘self’ and ‘personality’ to set the scene.  This sent me into the realms of psychology and philosophy.  Again.

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