Introductions

[forthwritten]

If you'd like to introduce yourself you can do so here. What's your subject area? What are your research and/or teaching interests? What do you do to relax?

Comments

[trouble]

Hi, I'm Anna. I'm a grad student working on disability history. Right now I'm writing my thesis about the Halifax School for the Deaf. I'm a part-time student, so I feel constantly like I'm running behind, even though I don't have to be caught up with anyone anyway!

[teej]

I'm a part-time student, so I feel constantly like I'm running behind

Yep, recognise that feeling!

[teej]

Hello and thanks forthwritten for creating this community!

I'm a second year part-time PhD student, based in London, UK. I'm researching the kind of narratives which contemporary white feminists in Britain are producing about the recent feminist past (from the 70s onwards), with a particular focus on issues of race and racism. Currently I'm analysing a whole bunch of texts (activist, mainstream and academic) but at some point i will be starting to do interviews as well. My interest in this topic came from knowing that there's a whole load of histories of black feminist and anti-racist organising and theorising in Britain which keeps being written out of the constantly regurgitated standard narrative of British feminism. The telling of history is always political - so narratives of the feminist past which privilege whiteness continue the process of marginalisation and racism within contemporary feminist communities and theorising... Anger and frustration at the racism and white privilege within white-dominated feminist communities & a belief in the absolute importance of history is what led me down this road to begin with.

Hope that makes some sense - I seem to get more and more confused about how to describe my project the further i come along. Does anyone else get that?

[liseuse]

I get that as well. It started off as an idea that was reasonably easy to soundbite and now it has spread and altered and I end up rambling when I try to describe it. I fail at the elevator test.

[trouble]

I just shrug and tell them I write about dead deaf people.

[forthwritten]

I seem to get more and more confused about how to describe my project the further i come along. Does anyone else get that?

Oh yes, that happens to me too. At first it seemed so straightforward but now I kind of flail around. The suffrage movement is something that people think they Know All About so I get to enjoy a fair amount of mansplaining (unfortunately not just from men) - do you get that too?

[teej]

for my topic, it really depends on what people think and know about feminism and racism as to how they respond - sometimes it leads to interesting conversations, but i also get a lot of 'oh, so germaine greer and that?' to 'why are you studying racism? - you're white' to 'well feminism is just a theory - men will always dominate the world, you should get over it' (yep that is what someone - a fellow phd student at my uni no less - said to me a few weeks ago)

[forthwritten]

I'm a PhD student working on the media representation of the British suffragist movement in The Times newspaper. I'm actually a linguist by training and am using corpus linguistics as an approach. Basically, I look at large amounts of (machine-readable) texts and look for frequent patterns in them - at the moment I'm working on suffrag* + direct action term constructions. I got into it because of my interest in how disempowered groups are portrayed by the press, especially when they're campaigning for rights.

More generally, my interests are in gender and sexuality - especially LGBT issues, minority groups, and digital humanities.

So, hi!

[liseuse]

Hello! I'm Hannah and I'm a PhD student based in the north of England. I work on the presence of medicine and medical practitioners in the works of Thomas Middleton and his contemporaries. Essentially I am engaged in decoding the reasoning behind the large numbers of medical practitioners, how they work within and outside the bounds of legislated medical practice in the 1600s and how the texts are engaged in creating and responding to contemporary medical discourse.

To relax I knit and read cheesy vampire/werewolf/everyone haz magicks books. I also enjoy upping my blood pressure and becoming irate by reading people being wrong on the internet and in the print media - especially when they are being wrong about feminism and LGBT issues.

[rooibos]

Hello! I'm Aliyah, and I'm about to embark upon my PhD in French Studies. My major interests are colonial and postcolonial women's writing, especially where gender and sexual identity are explored. Part of this is because I'm a lesbian from the (English-speaking) Caribbean, and it intrigues me how "deviant" sexualities are treated in the literature, but it's mostly because it's simply absolutely fascinating!

To relax, I knit, read, cook, dance around my apartment and love on my wife a lot.

[luciente]

Hi, I'm Clare. I'm coming to the end of my 2nd year, studying media convergence and transmedia storytelling. On the one hand, my PhD involves months where I can do nothing but watch Doctor Who and call it work; on the other, it involves a degree of theoretical work and poking at concepts that makes my brain ache (I'm basically developing pretty much from scratch a critical theory and method for studying character in transmedia fiction). My research interests generally are in the relationship between fictional texts and their media, processes of translation or extension of fictional works across media, sf&f studies (the subject of my MA), videogame studies, and fan studies.

Researching texts and media I love and enjoy sounded like a great idea at the time, but it does make relaxation awfully difficult; everything I used to do for fun now feels like work :( I've developed a love of cooking, though, which never fails to calm me down when I'm in a thesis-stress, and I swim a lot.

[rhivolution]

I know the feeling regarding 'yes, studying fun things that I like!' turning into a mindsucking inability to relax with them; see my inability to watch most of this series of Doctor Who or Leverage. Also, your academic interests sound relevant to my interests and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

By the by, does your username refer to Woman on the Edge of Time?

[luciente]

It is! Luciente made quite an impression on me when I first read the book, and I've used the name as a screenname on and off for a good 6 or 7 years (there's some appalling early attempts at Harry Potter fandom under it somewhere ¬_¬).

Yay, another media/cultural studies person :) Although I'm a fairly recent convert - I used to be one of Those People who are snobbish about media & cultural studies, but I've very much seen the error of my ways :D Trying to get people to realise what valuable subjects they are has actually become a bit of a soapbox of mine, heh. I do wish I'd started studying it earlier, though; my BA is a super-traditional English Lit degree, and while that's useful in many respects, it means I'm missing a basic familiarity with media studies that sometimes kicks my PhD in the shins a bit.

Your dissertation sounds AWESOME, btw. I love the idea of presenting dissertations in non-traditional forms; I really wish I was able to do mine as a hypertext project, but there's not much support for that kind of experimentation in my uni.

I don't really use Dreamwidth other than to read and comment on friends who don't want to use lj, but if you ever want to chat more, I'm fanbeatsman at livejournal :)

[rhivolution]

I think the important thing with media studies is to have a sort of click moment where you realise that everything, no matter how vapid, is a product of time and place and culture, and therefore something you can learn from. And that sentence ended with a preposition. Augh. Too lazy to try and rework it, it's hot today.

Anyway, my diss is video based as a requirement of the course; it's a combination of academic and vocational (e.g. production work) media studies, so learning to construct a documentary is considered important. Of course, then I've got the defence paper to write, god help me. Not that I'm a bad writer, but it's so hard to find theory that backs up my work.

Friended you on LJ if that's okay, no obligation to friend back. (I'm rhipowered if you wonder who the heck that person is.)

[such_heights]

Hello! I'm Amy and I'm starting a Masters in political theory in the autumn. My main interests at undergrad level have been feminist philosophy, the social construction of identity, and the relationship between the theoretical and the practical, which I hope to develop in more specific directions over the next year.

[rhivolution]

Rhi here. I'm an MA media studies student working on what I call the Overambitious Dissertation, which is a video documentary and a supporting defence paper on women* as science fiction fans and the community building therein, both in literary and media fandom. It's due at the end of September. Between then and now, I am also getting heteromarried and emigrating. Suffice it to say, the deadline is looming heavy.

Like many other people here, the subject of my diss is often seen as confusing, and many people find it not-overly-academic, but I did pop culture studies as an undergraduate, so I'm used to it by now.

* Anyone who identifies or ever has identified as a woman of any gender shade, and actually also including some people who are not women but wanting to talk about women...yeah.

[jibrailis]

Hi! I'm starting my Master's in library science in the fall. At the undergrad level I studied literature and comparative religion, and going into library science I'm thinking about combining my two previous interests and working in rare book preservation or theological libraries. I'm also interested in digitalization and gender/race/sexuality, so I may venture into those fields as well.

[trouble]

As someone who practically lives inside my local archives, I highly support your (potential) work!

[aruna7]

Hi! I'm Natacha.

I am a French media PhD student. I am starting my second year. I work on the evolution of the Sci Fi franchises since 2000, and my work will be mostly about Battlestar Galactica.

Though I already have a good idea of the "main" structure of the thesis, I am currently still in the process of reading/reviewing my book list. At least, I'll go back to do that after a couple of month breaks, once I've moved.

[trouble]

Oh, that sounds really cool! Have you had much luck with the book list?

[aruna7]

Thanks! I'm so glad I found that community.

I was lucky so far with the book list. I managed to put some books I used for my previous MA degrees, and find a lot of interesting books (Cinema and TV series generalities, Transmedia, Fan communities, Science Fiction and more economical/marketing books which are the ones I'll read last because meh!). I bless amazon because 90% of my books are in English as the topic isn't big in France.

[berangere]

Hello,
I generally don't introduce myself in communities, but since dreamwidth seems to be a small world, I think it may be easier and also friendlier (does this form of this adjective even exist ?) to do it.
So, I'm studying archaeology. I'm specialized in the Neolithic era and writing a thesis about the transition between two period of Neolithic in Japan. When I'm not working I'm... huh... well, I'm here. Writing a blog about Japanese archaeology. Oh and I watch Japanese TV pretending it's for studying the language ! (￣ー￣；
Well, is it enough for an introduction ?

[trouble]

Ooh, that sounds really interesting!

[berangere]

Yeah, shiny isn't it ? Archaeology totally rocks ! ヽ(*・ω・)人(・ω・*)ノ

I'm not sure it will work, I never remember which code I have to use in which site... but I found this last week :

[forthwritten]

That's awesome!

Have you seen this before?

[berangere]

hahaha, that's just great !
(Do not misinterpret : I am a big fan of Indiana Jones. And of the films with Imhotep too !
To Indiana Jones defense, we have to state that archaeology in the 30's may have been more an adventure than a science...
OK, HIS archaeology is a really big adventure, even for the 30's)

[kaz]

I just realised I never introduced myself here. God knows if anyone's following the post, but:

Hi, I'm Kaz, and I'll be your token person in STEM today! I'm doing a PhD in maths, specifically pure maths, specifically specifically noncommutative algebra. I study certain properties of certain abstract structures, and am perenially frustrated by the fact that it is actually completely impossible to explain what the hell I mean by that and what my question is exactly to anyone who doesn't have something along the lines of an undergrad-level background in pure maths. :( I can explain the rough basic philosphy underlying it if you give me an hour so?

I am sometimes jealous of people who actually get to work on stuff that I do/talk about in my free time for their PhDs and have been known to steal my friends' textbooks on gender studies and read them for fun, and also people where the papers they have to read could not easily fit into a game of ArXiv vx snarxiv, but honestly I do think maths is gorgeous and the question I'm working on is really, really interesting. Even if I can't explain it to anyone. Ever.

I'm also in my final year and will probably start writing up in a few months' time which is absolutely terrifying. *wibbles*