May-hem, in a good way

Ooops - too long since I did this. Too long. There are excuses (or reasons, depending on your benevolence): I had post-holiday blues for a week or so, for, having spent Easter in beautiful places, I learnt afresh how little Manchester, though it has much to offer in many departments, casts in the way of aesthetic balm. I've also been mired in marking, which I hate, and am crap at - feedback, fine, but numerically categorising and boundarising is not my forte. But it's over now. Just finished. I'm sure there'll be something I've omitted to attach/tick/upload somwhere, but I've a few days before deadline to remember it...

In PhD news, I've started recruiting participants, and found my advert on the University's Research Volunteering page to be quite effective - after two Masters dissertations and various MSc assignments trying desperately to get ANYONE to take part, I've been comparatively inundated with responses. Many asked about reimbursement and didn't get back to me after I told them they'd be paid only in tea and cake and self-exploration, but those who expressed interest nonetheless have been very enthusiastic. And I too have been cranking up the enthusiasm (not that there's not tanks of it already, mind) on account of an insight from the first potential participant I met, who, after yet another ethically-conscious reminder that they were free to withdraw at any time, said to me: 'You keep telling me I can withdraw, but you never tell me I can stay'. I felt slightly ashamed of myself for sacrificing human warmth and welcome to become an ethics-form monkey. Or parrot. Or ass, perhaps. Anyway - twas a good insight.

In other news, I've had a book chapter proposal accepted, which is most exciting. The working title is Social identities and multiple selves in foreign language education, edited by Damian J. Rivers and Stephanie Houghton. The chapter is based on my MA dissertation, and the blurb is as follows:


Lou Harvey (UK)

The social and pragmatic parameters of L2 motivation: Investigating the motivation of three UK ESL learners

An investigation of 3 UK ESL learners motivation in relation to globalizing world, identity, future selves and selective participation in social development. Very much rooted in Gardner and Lambert, and Dornyei.


This is also the subject of the paper I'll be presenting at the 14th Warwick International Postgraduate Conference in Applied Linguistics (28th - 29th June), for which my abstract has just been accepted. So I've got this paper to write, plus my paper for the New Dynamics conference in Jyvaskyla at the beginning of June. I'll also be presenting at two conferences here at the School of Education in Manchester: From Here to There and Back Again: Conference papers by the Language Teacher Education community on 3rd June, at which I'll be presenting my Jyvaskyla paper; and I'm about to start work on an abstract for a paper for the Student Research Conference on 5th July, which will be based on my methodological work on Bakhtin, voice and agency (I'll post a link to the abstract when it's written). So there's plenty to keep me busy in June: four conferences, initial interviews, transcription, two hen weekends (both of them mine, so no escape), and moving house.

Think I'll miss out on July but come up smiling in August.

It's brown...

...but it has a map. And an astounding array of exotic fonts. Welcome to my PhD blog.

I begin this today as my brain is jagged from thinking and my face all a-spasm from prolonged screen-staring. What better to do now, I thinks to myself, than open yet another writing outlet? On a beautiful day? A Friday, no less? Well, this is the life of a PhD student, so I may as well embrace it, eh? Come join me. Group hug.

And besides, I've made an exciting discovery. Mikhail Bakhtin is his name. 'Re-discovery' would be more apt, actually, as he featured in my undergraduate work too, but I wasn't quite ready to absorb him then - I didn't have the 'in' I have now. Namely, the question I was asked by my progression panel in January, something along the lines of:


'You make a lot of grand theoretical claims, using concepts like identity, voice, and agency. What do you mean by these terms?'


I stumbled; I fumbled, I bumbled. And went home and thought: What is it that I mean? Why do I believe in agency? It's an emotionally appealing concept, right? What more basis than that? But 'because it is' is no justification for anything, and I had to find some way to articulate my use of the term. Enter Bakhtin, who had reared his imposing forehead several times during my reading, and whose proffered thread I decided to take up in earnest. His work on dialogism offers a useful foundation for narrative methodology, and for the concepts of agency and voice I'm trying to formulate; not least in my reflexive work, and my attempts to find my own voice as an academic writer among the voices of so many others. Aha. Is this why I've started blogging..?

There's something else at work here too: Bakhtin provides a connection to my literature-student days, which I’ve only recently linked to my interest in narrative research. As an undergraduate I was fascinated by what stories do, how they negotiate the space between the words used to tell them and the worlds which create them, and are reflected and transformed by them. Since I’ve been an education postgraduate I’ve felt distant at times from my first academic interest, but now I’m reconnecting. So I can identify the emotional appeal of Bakhtin – now to explore the intellectual appeal, and to consider how they intersect. And I'll post more on Himself on my website when I've done some more thinking.

I'm going outside now.