Thesis 3/∞: Inadequacies
— and yes, there has to be a process —
The Big Gap in My Sociological Curiosity
The goal of graduate school is not to learn everything there is to learn about a field; indeed, the breadth of anything warranting the term “field” should be far too deep, and when you add in the hyperspecialization researchers and educators are expected to develop there’s simply too much for any one mind to handle. […]
Thesis Update 2/∞
Two quick notes for future contemplation (then the inevitable tangents): The sheer joy I feel in organizing a segment of thesis, only to slash it away into a separate document for future development, tells me everything I need about whether research is a good direction for my life. It wasn’t until I was working on […]
Thesis Update 1/∞
The last few sessions, every time I sit down to my thesis, I have felt invigorated, enlivened by the topic and the contribution I hope to make. Today started out much the same, but after a few hours of just moving around tidbits and half-citations, it’s starting to set in just how much of an […]
On Interviewing
I’ve only conducted one other interview in graduate school. Although I think I did a great job with the interview itself, I was trying to shoehorn a lot into a theory class whose scope should have been much more precise. This is part of why I don’t think I’m good at theory. I can’t focus […]
Grad School and Travel
I write this from sunny Oakland, California. I’ve traveled more in the last year than I ever did as a caregiver, and the logistics and costs have been… punishing. I missed a deadline to get some conference reimbursements this month, but that was far from the first cost I’ve eaten. Travel was one of the […]
Response to Ortlipp 2008
I am, to be honest, quite fried this week, so I’m going to share my notes unstructureded in response to Michelle Ortlipp’s “Keeping and Using Reflective Journals in the Qualitative Research Process”. I like the idea of balancing “transparency” against poststructuralism (697) and “making my history, values, and assumptions open to scrutiny” (698) I note […]
Get in Where You Fit in
We have this “fun” activity we’re supposed to do this week, wherein we use software to write poetry about our research paradigm. There is no part of that sentence that appeals to me, especially in combination. But I have it lucky, I’m still bursting with ideas and versatility after all these years. While I’m struggling […]
Family and the Well-Hyphenated Bastard
As far back as I can remember, I called my family of origin “well-hyphenated”. There was my mom, my half-brother, my step-dad, my “adopted” grandparents (academically, we call this fictive kin), and any number of distant relatives from each. I couldn’t even refer to my father without specifying “biological”, since we hadn’t had a relationship […]
Caregiving and the Ontology of Human Development
One of the reasons I think caregivers are a rich opportunity for research is that it has not gained much traction as a stage of the life course, but I suspect that is about to change. The demographics are overwhelming: Baby Boomers are living much longer than previous generations and the economy is not structured […]
Theories of Care 