Plan for the Week

TO DO THIS WEEK:

• Write Study Plan for this unit
• Transcribe audio for a-spec focus group
• Watch Watchmen

Happy Tutorial Tuesday Thursday

Had the first tutorial of the unit a week early, since Colin can't make next week. We mostly talked about feedback for the thesis and how the focus groups had gone. Some main points:

• Overall very positive! Emma and Colin keep telling me how interesting my project is, which frankly by Thursday I fucking needed that.
• Looooong discussion about my use of the concept of ideology and if it's appropriate - Colin thinks it feels quite outdated and out of place, might be worth trying to find a more appropriate concept to foreground, Colin suggested looking at flow of discourses (Foucault slay) and Emma suggested breaking up the ideology paragraphs and splitting them across other sections
• Other academics worth looking at - bell hooks and her discussion of oppositional readings, Miriam Hansen's writing on early cinema, Stuart Hall's encoding-decoding model
• Discussed the focus groups - did some reflection on the methodology. I was talking about some of the limitations I think the focus groups might have - due to how I recruited participants the demographics are quite homogenous: mostly students, all but one of the participants were white, so there's a lot of other perspectives that could be missed. Also, as Colin put it, the non a-spec group was very much a "self-selecting group". As I put it, everyone in the group was either queer themselves or very aware of queer issues - probably because outside of a-spec people, these are the people most likely to respond to an advert about a focus group about a-spec issues. I'm not exactly getting the perspective of the Average Joe Heterosexual here.
• On the other hand, tutors pointed out the value of the a-spec group and the value the a-spec experience and perspective can bring - thinking about a-spec identity in terms of more than lack - ALSO one of them made a very interesting point comparing it to feminist approaches and how a lot of early theories position women as inherently "lacking" something compared to men. Honestly hadn't thought of this at all and it blew my mind
• Advice for thematic analysis - make note of how I can relate points that come up to stuff I've read
• Tutorials are gonna be very self-guided this unit, so think about hwat feedback I want at each stage and structure my time around that. will I actually do this? Maybe

The What The Fuck Am I Doing With My Life Tangent

Well, it's the first week of the unit, and you know what that means! That's right - my regularly scheduled Start of the New Unit Mental Breakdown!!! I'm having the usual experiences of looking at the amount of work I need to get done and exploding about it and convincing myself I'm too stupid for grad school and going off to hide in the woods and touch grass, but now there's also the additional mental breakdown fodder of this is the last unit and I have no idea what I'm doing with my god damn life!

According to Willem we're apparently meant to come up with some kind of plan for our career plans or academic progression post-Masters, which is difficult because I have absolutely no direction in life. This feeling is not helped by the fact that I had my last day of teaching Saturday Art School this week and I already miss it and kind of now wish I was staying in Bournemouth next year to continue doing it, but also a Saturday job that I do four hours a week is not a particularly viable reason to choose to stay in a specific town.

Anyway, in the interests of appeasing Willem, here's some of my possible post-MRes options for myself, ranked by how much they actually count as plans:

1. Move back to London with my parents, get a job as a teaching assistant, and then apply for teacher training if decide I enjoy working in schools full time
2. get a job as a teaching assistant literally anywhere else (preferable option)
3. Do this specific CELTA course with my friend Zuza in Oxford for a month in September and get a job teaching English as a foreign language
4. Move to Hull with my friend from school who's getting a placement there
5. Quarter life crisis. Move to random city where I don't know anyone and just start over
6. Worse quarter life crisis. Move to random other country where I don't know anyone (except Zuza if she successfully convinces me to follow her to Poland) and just start over
7. My counsellor suggested I just go travelling for a bit so I guess there's that?

Other Events of the Week

• Most of my week has been spent transcribing the audio from the focus groups. I've been using Adobe Premiere Pro's auto transcribe feature to create the transcripts - it's mostly pretty accurate at picking up the words that are said, though it's not great at distinguishing who says what. My job has been going through the transcripts and adding in who says what, as well as correcting any mistakes the computer has made. I've deviated from my original plan of finishing transcribing the a-spec group this week because I realised that I would actually go insane if I was listening to nothing but the same two hours of audio for several days in a row, so I've also started on the non a-spec group recordings. Hopefully I'll still have all the audio transcribed by the end of next week.
• I've also been plagued by various technical issues in the process of transcription - or rather, one very large technical issue, which is that while 3 out of 4 recordings have been transcribed by Premiere pretty painlessly, it's seemingly refusing to fully transcribe the recording of the 2nd half of the non a-spec group, and instead keeps cutting off about two thirds of the way through. I'm planning to try using Premiere on the uni computers on Monday and see if it works any better. Hopefully that will solve it bc I really don't fancy manually transcribing the entire last third of that recording.
• Had the first macro lecture of the unit - it was a lecture from Scott Freer on 70s disaster films - while I'm not really a disaster movies guy, as an enjoyer of both horror movies and tragedy I found a lot of the points he made about people's enjoyment of disaster movies and how it connects to these things pretty interesting. A lot of the points he made about the gender politics of these movies were also pretty interesting to me - the contrast between the domestic woman and the working woman in these movies, the way the villain of Airport is associated with "sexless lifeless married life" (phrases that INSTANTLY made my ears prick up). That said, I do feel like a lot of the points he made went over my head a bit - it was very dense and boy was I struggling to keep up. I did then have a little bit of a crisis about thinking I'm too stupid for grad school and then ran off to hide in the BU library and do my transcription, but again, regularly scheduled start of the new unit mental breakdown. I'm used to this at this point.
• Listened to this podcast episode talking about Heartbreak High season 2 - thought it was interesting that they mentioned Never Have I Ever becoming a trope in depictions of asexuality in teen shows. I hadn't even noticed that, so it got me thinking about what other tropes I might have missed.
• I've been getting into screwball comedies this week - I watched Bringing Up Baby, What's Up Doc, and Holiday. This isn't actually relevant to anything aside from the fact that they're old romance movies - honestly the gender politics of these ones are less weird than most but they did still occasionally throw the world's most absolutely heinous sexism at me without warning. And somehow the one from the 70s was the worst. I'm sure Scott could make a point about that.

Previous week

Next week

Back to weekly journal

Back to home