The most wonderful time of the year.

No, not Christmas, you fool- the start of another academic year. The campus, which has been so lovely and quite is suddenly not so quiet, as sport societies throw rugby balls across the road, night clubs offer trendy looking people (i.e not me) their flyers and a new group of freshers make their way into the university.

Even though term hasn’t officially started yet, I can slowly feel the increase in momentum, and know that if I’m not careful the PhD is going to get lost in the hubbub of teaching, work, conferences, etc. etc. So, I’ve started to write, even though I don’t know if I’m ready to really start writing up my chapters, I’ve started anyway. As a classic over-committer, I know that if I don’t start now when I have time,  I won’t be likely to start when lots of other more immediate but less important  things need doing. As Het pointed out in her blog, procrastination takes many devious forms, including doing work that seems easier and more pleasant than the things that you really need to be doing. And I really need to finish this PhD.

I’ve never seen this film, but it’s got Henry Winkler in it.

Okay, I have a year at the very least (more likely 18 months since I intend to take all my writing up period) but I already know how fast time goes, hell it doesn’t feel that long ago that I was a fresher myself, even it’s been seven years. I already get a bit tetchy when people ask how long I have left, and writing, however painful it might be, at least makes me feel like I’m doing something. Without wanting to sound too much like I’m applying for a job as a motivational speaker, I do feel like I’ve realised that the only way this is going to get done is if I prioritise it. Selfishness, quite rightly is not a desirable trait, but the flip side is that sometimes you spend so long worrying about what other people need you to do, or what they want that you forget that your own aims and objectives matter too. I’m not saying I’m going to start completely ignoring everyone and never helping anyone even when I can, but I do think it’s important that I realise that it is not at all possible for me to say yes to everything. (Just so this is related to my research- there was an interesting article in Ms. in the eighties about this- the perils of over commitment, and I do wonder if more societal pressure is exerted on women to do this).

So I will write- 500 words a day, which is easily doable when I have nothing else to do, but not so unmanageable on days when I’ve got over stuff to sort out, and I’ll even write when I don’t feel like it, and the words might be crap, but they’ll be words on a page that weren’t there before. My internal critic is lambasting me and telling me I could do 1000 words a day but my internal critic is usually a complete cow, so I’m telling her to back off.

Tempting fate

Ta da! For a glorious change, things are actually going okay research wise. I’m sure this won’t last, but for now I’m really enjoying research for a number of reasons.

1. I went to the FWSA conference at the weekend. The FWSA (Feminist and Women’s Studies Association) put on damn good conferences and this was no exception. Lynne Segal (who I love, but who I was too scared to talk to, even though I was stood RIGHT NEXT TO HER twice) did the first keynote and it was marvellous. The theme of the conference was Rethinking Sisterhood, and I did a paper on the familial metaphor in discussions of the “new Spare Rib” AKA The Feminist Times. I wrote the paper at the last minute, but think it went okay? I also saw lots of other fascinating papers, and then stayed for the second key note given by Margaretta Jolly about the Sisterhood and After Oral History Project. I then spent an evening in Bristol with one of my best friends, though since I’d been up since 4.45 I was not the most enthusiastic partier.

2. I’m reading oral histories. I love reading oral histories/ feminist biographies etc because they satisfy my nosiness and also they’re quite useful.

3. I’ve gone and done a plan for the next year. Though this was at first terrifying, it’s actually nice to be able to look into the future. People keep asking me how long I’ve got left, and now I’ve planned it all out I feel slightly more confident that things will happen on time Yay!

Apologies if all this optimism is insufferable, I imagine it will be a rare occurrence and that normal gloomy service will be resumed shortly!

Conferences- remember to write the paper.

So… conference papers. I actually really enjoy going to conferences. Although I am fortunate enough that I speak to people about my research online and offline on the regular (or more to the point, fortunate enough that I have people I can commiserate with about how my research is not going), conferences are nice, because it is rare that you get a group of people with shared interests in a room who basically want to geek out and talk about research. A few weeks ago there was a big anime/ cosplay at my university, and I think for me academic conferences are a bit like that. For outsiders you probably seem a bit strange (albeit a bit more anonymous since you’re probably not dressed up as Harry Potter/ Sherlock/ people that I didn’t recognise because that sort of thing isn’t my thing) but it makes perfect sense to you.

I went to my first proper academic conference when I was doing an MRes. Cynically I thought I’d stand a better chance of getting doctoral funding if I had a conference on my CV (spoiler alert: I didn’t) and submitted an abstract for a paper at De Montfort University- which incidentally is the university I now go to. I do love a bit of synchronicity. The conference was great, but I took the whole thing far too seriously. I am an introvert at heart, though in true fake it til you make it fashion, I have learnt to enjoy meeting new people and standing in front of them whilst I attempt to make sense of my research. At the time, however, it felt awful. I remember being stood at a train station, waiting for my connecting train (it was probably Derby, I have spent far too many hours now waiting at Derby station) and crying on the phone to my friend that it had been awful and I had felt like such an idiot, etc. etc. I cannot guarantee I will never feel like that again, though the fact that I have presented at a number of conference now without people laughing directly to my face suggests that things probably didn’t go as badly as I thought. Also, there was the time when Liesbet Van Zoonen mentioned me in her keynote and told me to my face that she enjoyed my paper. I can’t put that on my CV (OR CAN I??) but it was something that makes me feel a bit less of an imposter.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/

So conferences are great, which is why I wish I could be less of an idiot about writing papers for them in a timely manner. I’m going to a conference tomorrow, I’m sure it will be great. It’s in Bristol which is one of my favourite cities and I get to see a great friend whilst I’m there. Trouble is, I forgot about writing the paper. I’ve written it now, though it’s still too close to work out if it’s any good.

I <3 the library.

I have a serious problem with buying books. I never thought I would be an e-book kind of woman, but a couple of years ago I bought a Kindle and I was hooked. Granted the Kindle has proved its worth as a research tool- I can email copies of journal articles, which has saved me a fortune on printing and also reduced the chance of my desk being crushed under the weight of articles. However, an e-reader is a dangerous thing for a bibliophile. Amazon one click ordering is evil, and I have hundreds of books- some of which I’ve read, some of which sit, waiting to be read and unlike IRL books I cannot donate any of these books to a charity shops to be read by someone else, so they sit, unloved. There is also the fact that Amazon is a shady organization, and I know that I should not be giving them any of my money. In an effort to save money and also feel less shitty about my buying choices, I’ve rediscovered the library, and it’s great. 

I can’t help feeling that if we didn’t already have libraries, they are not the kind of thing that would be invented today- the world is too commercially focused to countenance the idea that you can read books for FREE. Libraries are amazing, but for a long time I forgot all about them. When I say I forgot about them, I mean council libraries, as a PhD student I am all too familiar with the university library (though currently I can’t get any books out since I owe them £25 in fines…oops). I am incredibly lucky that Leicester library (for that is where I live) is surprisingly well equipped in the kind of amazing books that were already on my Amazon wishlist. 

On a more important level than my own desire to save money, libraries play such a vital role in making sure that knowledge is available for those who want to access it. I have spent at least a week in the Brotherton Library at The University of Leeds this summer, accessing old copies of Spare Rib and Ms. that I simply would not have been able to access were it not for the lovely volunteers at The Feminist Archive, North who recognised the importance of holding on to and sourcing material from the feminist movement, so that young feminists could look back at the history of the movement. This, I feel is crucial, since it is easy for histories to be taken for granted, and easy to forget that those who write the histories are often those in positions of privilege. Accessing archive material has been exhilarating- even just being able to touch the magazines that I have spent the last couple of years theorizing. It also makes me wonder about the future- how will historians of our present encounter the blogs that we are written now- will the wayback machine become the archive of the future? Or will some things get lost? 

The Terrible Twos

I am in my second year of my PhD, almost in my third year, which is terrifying. Like many PhD students, my second year has been rocky. I have also had an upturn in the amount of people asking me how long I’ve got left- a question that is often more loaded than the asker realises, especially if they’re not really aware of how a PhD works. One of the things that I have learnt over the last year is the need to look after myself- I am a carrot person, my inner critic is damning enough without my conscious brain adding to it. Since last week I kind of talked about research, this week I thought I’d talk a little bit about my experience doing a PhD, and the things that have helped me get through a tough time.

Reading

I think that last week I mentioned that I feel like sometimes I can write off some reading for research purposes, but truth is that I’ve made a conscious decision to make sure that I carry on reading widely. I do this for a couple of reasons- firstly because just reading about feminism all day, every day can eventually get a bit wearing, but also because it’s nice to detach from the research, and sometimes reading about other stuff can help you think differently, which in turns helps your research. Fundamentally though, I just love reading. 

Exercise 

If I haven’t banged on about exercise in my blog (and I very well could have done and forgotten) I have certainly bored my Facebook and IRL friends to tears with my evangelism for fitness. Thing is though, if you have an anxiety disorder (which I do, yay me!) then doing something to waste up all that nervous energy can be super helpful. Also, it’s a good distraction when things go wrong. I also, rather inexplicably rather like it. If you saw what I was like in P.E at school you would find this hilarious. However, away from the Mean Girls and even meaner P.E teachers, I rather like busting some shapes or lifting some weights. 

Sleep

I love sleep. Enough said. 

Nice People

Although people rather rightly point to the isolation research can bring, I have been incredibly lucky to be able to make some good friends during my PhD. Those of them who are fellow PhD students know the score and can emphasize with my fury at bureaucracy of the university, or the mental blocks that sometimes come when things don’t seem to be going right. I also keep in touch with friends I already had when I started my PhD and all of them are brilliant and I am lucky to have them! 

Perspective (sometimes…)

This is hard, but getting some perspective helps. 

plus ça change

Recently, I’ve been thinking about backlashes. As a feminist researcher, I spend a lot of time reading feminism literature, having conversations with my feminist friends and generally thinking feminist. However, I am not naive enough to think I live in a feminist utopia. Although my research is based primarily on the second wave, and certain narratives exist that say that either, a. feminism is no longer needed, we are post- feminist (for a much more eloquent discussion of post- feminism, see McRobbie, 2009), or that we still need feminism, but that we have moved beyond the second wave (texts like Baumgardner and Richards’ (2000) Manifesta is just one text of many on the third wave, a phrase that became part of the lexicon with Rebecca Walker’s 1991 Ms. article ‘Becoming the Third Wave’.) Much has also been said about the problems with the third wave in ignoring the history of the second wave, something that I am particularly interested in with my research (see, for example, Hemmings, 2011).

Over the last couple of months I have been carrying out my data collection, analysing a number of feminist magazines from the seventies through to the early nineties, specifically Spare Rib, a British magazine and Ms. which is an American magazine, spearheaded by Gloria Steinem. Something that has struck me in my research is the fact that many of the issues that the magazines are talking about are still important feminist issues today. Whether it’s rape culture, body image, welfare cuts or workplace discrimination, it’s clear that though important gains have been made, many more need to be made. This is something I also felt re-reading The Backlash, Susan Faludi’s bestseller from 1991. In it, Faludi outlines the various ways in which feminist gains have been clawed back by neoliberalism. Reading it, I had to remind myself that the book is 23 years old. In fact, The Backlash is now as old to us, as the start of the second wave (if we say that is 1968) was to Faludi when the book was published.

We often hear about Backlash culture, but not it seems that The Backlash has lasted 23 years, something that puts paid to the idea of living in a post-feminist society. Whilst an optimist would say that feminism is now just assumed amongst people these days, the number of posts on the Women Against Feminism blog, and the lack of understanding of what feminism is, suggests that in some ways we are no further forward then we were in the seventies. Similarly, the plethora of celebrities who reject feminism for a number of stupid reasons (e.g “I like men” “I want to be protected” “I don’t like isms, etc,etc) suggest that there is still a long way to go. (Notable exceptions include Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who really did not need to give me any more reasons to love him).

This is not to say that feminism is a perfect, or even a unified movement. There is bullshit perpetuated in the name of feminism (TERFS, I am looking at you) and feminism has been historically a movement that has been slow to pick up on the differences between women, leading to rightful criticism from Women of Colour. However, there is a difference between criticising feminism for its shortcomings, and choosing to rail against it because of perceived problems based largely on stereotypes that didn’t hold true when they were first formulated in the seventies and still don’t hold true today.

Back to blogging.

Wow it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged here.

This was meant to be a blog about my research, but like a lot of other research students, I’ve actually been too busy with teaching and other stuff to keep up. The summer has been a bit turbulent- I’ve had a gallbladder took out, which was inconvenient, but uneventful. Concurrently I also went through a couple of scary weeks of anxiety and depression, which I think in retrospect was probably my brain telling me that actually sometimes I do need to switch off and rest, something which I have been trying to do more of.

I am collecting data at the minute, which is a much more scientific term for the reality, which is sitting in the archive and reading magazines. I have loved it, since the act of having to go to an archive makes me feel more productive than I usually would. I’ve also been reading a lot, and it has all been going rather smoothly. Because I am a glass half empty kind of person, I am waiting for it to go belly up.

I’ve also been reading for fun to, something that always makes me feel a bit guilty (why, I have no idea, I think my subconscious has absorbed the idea that if I’m reading for fun, I’m not working hard enough). Some of this reading, I can kind of write off as research (something that in my head is a bit like writing stuff off for tax purposes). So I read Crazy Salad by Nora Ephron, because she writes about the Women’s Movement in the seventies. I’ve also just read Daily Rituals by Mason Currey, a collection of accounts of how famous artists worked. I’ve actually found that although texts targeted at PhD students have been helpful, the most helpful texts are about writing more generally (Stephen King’s On Writing has been super helpful in making me think about both the act of writing, and also how to improve my writing) whilst I am currently reading Stylish Academic Writing, which is turning out to be really helpful, and as one would expect, very well written.

Can reading books about running help me write my PhD?

I realise that in the few posts I have paid scant attention to my PhD, which as the name of this blog suggests is quite central to my life. Although I have lots of (sometimes) interesting thoughts about my research it’s sometimes easier to think in the abstract and often motivation can come from the most unlikely of places. 

I remember when Eddie Izzard did those back to back marathons a few years ago and vaguely thought about taking up running. I searched for running shoes on the internet, then not long after broke my ankle spectacularly on a friend’s birthday night out. Over the next eighteen months or so I had a couple of operations, started to walk on the ankle slowly and put any nascent aspirations of getting into running to one side. I started swimming, enjoyed that but wasn’t very good, got a full time job, struggled to fit swimming into my schedule and then gradually stopped exercising all together. Since my injury was pretty serious and the operations I’d had were more about making the ankle more stable than anything else, I’d got quite used to rolling out the excuse that I couldn’t exercise “because of my foot”. 

Last year, I did start exercising, partly because I’d made a decision to lose weight and the more exercise I did the more I could eat (I wish there was a less problematic reason, but there isn’t). I began walking more, that walking turned into signing up to they gym and realising that I actually quite liked it, I went swimming more, did fitness videos in the front room and generally got into the habit of doing something most days. One day dressed in my gym clothes and on my way back from a long walk I did something weird, just to see if I could, I started to run. Okay, I managed about twenty seconds, but the fact that I could do it at all was enough of a shock that it made me think. I started (then stopped) a couch 2 5K programme, carried on doing other exercise and then started another couch 2 5K programme a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday, just to see what I could do, I ran for as long as I could and by the time I was done, I’d ran two miles. 

You will probably be asking (quite rightly) what this has to do with my PhD. Well, whilst doing all this, I’ve become a bit obsessed about reading things/ books about running. I read Adharanand Finn’s Running with the Kenyans over the summer and have just recently finished Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and Eat and Run by Scott Jurek (ultra marathoner) and Steve Friedman. Although I know I will never run a marathon, there’s something quite nice about reading about the people who do. I don’t think the concept of the PhD being like a marathon is that novel, given its size and the length of time it takes, the PhD is like an academic endurance race- in some ways the ability to keep on going matters as much, if not more than innate ability (Jurek makes the point in his book that his marathon pace, which can be used as a barometer for talent, is nothing to write home about). Thinking about my PhD like this helps put things in perspective- as long as I can get to the finish line in one piece, put in the preparation, then hopefully everything else will take care of itself. 

If I can stretch this metaphor even further, I see the PhD as the last in the long lines of things that need to be overcome, that you never think you will manage to do. Some runners start of with a 5k and within a few years they’ve completed a marathon. Limits change, what you think you can do changes, even if you can’t quite believe it whilst on your way to doing it. I teach second years who are preparing for their dissertations next year; when I tell them that 10,000 words isn’t that much really they look at me like I’m crazy. I probably would have looked at me like I was crazy too, but 10,000 seems less daunting to me now- 1000 words a day, repeat for ten days.

Whilst I am a long way off finishing my thesis and often the journey seems like an uphill struggle, I’m going to try and think like a runner and put the miles in until the day until the race has been run. 

(p.s I’ve signed up to a 5k, this is a big deal for me: you can sponsor me here: https://www.anthonynolanevents.org.uk/ClaireSedgwick) 

Resolutions

Happy New Year!

I always say that I’m not doing resolutions, especially since the pressure to keep on the right track can often means that I often give up quickly. However, this year there are a couple of things I would like to do, but rather than being added pressures, I’m trying to see them as things I’m trying to do for myself- as hard as that might be.

1. Stop checking my emails in bed, either late at night or as soon as I get up. 

Since I am just a PhD student and  part time lecturer and not a brain surgeon, nothing is ever as urgent as I make it seem. I realised this this morning as I got up and promptly spent ten minutes checking emails and panicking. Since we’ve just finished the Christmas Holidays half my brain is still in a holidays, whilst the other is annoyed that I can’t deal with the emails I get without that panicked feeling in the pit of my stomach. Before Christmas, I started meditating and as I’ve said before, it is really helpful, but as has unfortunately happened before, I  stopped (for no good reason). So now might be the time to start again: ten minutes of meditation before I get up and absolutely no checking my emails before I’m dressed and have eaten breakfast.

The flip side of this is that I also check emails well after five pm. This also has to stop, as my tendency to check emails causes two problems. Firstly, it stops me from de-stressing of an evening, and secondly it creates unrealistic expectations, which is especially problematic when students email you the night before an essay hand in and expect a prompt reply.

2. Read More 

As a PhD student, I do a lot of reading for my thesis, but I want to read more for fun too. When I lived in my old house I had to get the bus into work,  and used to read on the bus everyday. Now that I walk in I’ve lost those twenty minutes a day of reading time. I want to give myself that time back, either before I go to bed, or at lunch or in the afternoon. I’ve been reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and despite being nearly 800 pages long, I’ve loved it and I’ve loved having the time to sit and get lost in a book in a way that I haven’t for a very long time.

3. Have a Lunch Break

I eat lunch, but rarely eat it anywhere but at my desk, or on my way to somewhere or at a cafe where I’ve gone to  work. I’m taking back my lunch hour, partly because this is a fairly achievable way to regroup in the middle of the day, and partly because it will give me the chance to do things like read my book, killing two birds with one stone.

4 Carry on Exercising 

After a Christmas break where I exercised a grand total of three times, I need to get back on my bike (literally and metaphorically) and start exercising regularly. I went for a run this morning, and felt genuinely calmer for doing so. I’m starting another couch 2 5 k (this time The Guardian, how terribly middle class) and I was surprised at how good I felt at the end of the run, and how easy I found the running (even if it was only a minute at a time). I need to find my way to a park nearby since I spent most of today’s run going up and down my street!

“You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

Since moving to a new house in Leicester, I’ve started walking everywhere. Partly this is a commitment towards being healthier and exercising more and partly it is because I can save the £3 a day and spend it on other essentials such as coffee. Walking, among other benefits also gives me chance to think, and one of the reasons for starting this blog was because I had started writing in my head and figured I should get the words down in writing at some point. Anyway, every so often as I’m walking, I shock myself by reminding myself that I’m doing a PhD. 

Since I’m in my second year, this might sound strange-  I’ve had long enough to get used to the idea. However, when you’re immersed in research and all of the other things that make up working life as a PhD student it can be easy to forget that this is something that not everyone has the opportunity (or inclination) to do. Whilst I dallied with the idea of being an actual medical doctor, I soon realised that I wasn’t drawn to it enough. Eventually, I decided what I really wanted was to get a PhD, and now I’m doing it and sometimes that feels a little surreal. 

Partly, I’m startled  because doing what I’m doing was never a given. I was the first person in my immediate family to go to university, let alone the first person to get a PhD.  I say this not as a brag, but more because it’s important to acknowledge that whilst going to university has become increasingly more common, when you’re the first from your family to go it doesn’t feel like an inevitability. Whilst people do complain about the increased numbers of people going to university, and that university is no longer (and probably never was) a guarantee of a graduate level job, I still think it’s important that we give young people who may not have found out what university might be like from friends and family the opportunity to see what universities do, not just what they look like from the outside.

I was incredibly lucky that when I was growing up my local university (Teesside University) did some amazing outreach work that showed hundreds of school students what the university had to offer. At secondary school I took part in projects at Durham University, and in sixth form did a project that took me to Belgium with another student and a researcher from the university (interestingly all of this was for science related subjects, a subject that I have completely abandoned). I went to a summer school between my first and second year of sixth form where I was taught by English lecturers in small groups, doing close readings of texts and engaging with secondary material in a way that I’d never done before and cementing my desire to study the subject at university. 

Luckily, stuff like this still exists. A project I worked with last year do a ton of stuff for a number of community projects, and work with local schools to increase aspiration and participation. (The Square Mile Project-dmu.ac.uk/mile2) Local kids who might have no idea that university is an option get the chance to see the kind of stuff that they could do, if they wanted to. The discourse around universities has become increasingly pessimistic, and university has gained a somewhat unfair reputation as a rite of passage for middle class teenagers. However, for some students, university was never an inevitability and is instead a gateway to knowledges that would otherwise be hidden.