Day 2 – and the excuses are over

Well, it’s day two of writing the PhD… the first plan has been sent to my propective supervisor and I’ve just finished tidying up all the expenses from fieldwork… I’m running out of excuses… I’m going to have to start writing soon.

 The supervisor thing probably needs explaining. I had two: one hearing, one Deaf… one in Geography (hearing), one in Deaf studies (Deaf). Now, the hearing one has just left to take up a post at a different university which has rather left me in the lurch since the geography department in Bristol seems to be rapidly moving away from the social and cultural geography side towards an emphasis on economic and political geography and there is no-one there who is really working in the areas that I am. So I am busily trying to persuade someone else to take over.

It’s this kind of thing that demonstrates the interconnectedness of the social sciences to me. Oddly enough, I didn’t know anything about human geography at all before I actually ended up there (I could probably argue that I don’t know much about it now either!). I was originally trying to go through the sociology department but the concerned people there happened to be away at the time of my application. But it’s been an interesting theoretical visit and one that promises to be immensley valuable for my working future even if I struggle with the flavour of some geographical texts that seem more concerned with the construction of space itself than they do with the inhabitants of the spaces. I’m afraid I had a similar attitude to theoretical linguistics in my undergrad years at Essex; it didn’t seem interesting unless it was actually being applied to something real. Perhaps that’s why I like Utopian theory… it presupposes an application of the imagination, even if it’s necessarily cracked and incomplete.

 Now I have to go and buy a diary for 2007… it’s another chance to put off typing, and I really do need one before I get swamped with dates I can’t manage.