Proposal Anew
The last blog post was dated four months ago. Today I also met with my supervisor to discuss my dissertation. Discuss the problems of the very rough first draft of my dissertation proposal. After our last meeting, she gave me notes, but also insisted that I take care of Ethics Approval first. I was approved finally in July. So, yes, it’s been a bit too long, especially since I was aiming to have this defended by end of September. In the meantime, summer extremism taught me a lesson, or something. Summer is nearly over, and the time for scholarship overload needs to take its foremost place. First, I’m leaving to Europe for three weeks in a few days, unprepared, but I do have the schedule of shooting the final bits for my documentary, microfemininewarfare! I will also work on the proposal anew. Kim insisted that my initial draft is not to be mended but I start with a new fun and creative form. Instead of the tired formula of Intro, Methods, Lit Review, Analysis, Conclusion, I need a fun and creative form to match the content I’m working with. I agree so I will begin anew.
We decided that I should pick an image to guide each chapter. Each chapter should deal with a theme, concept that then feeds into a more comprehensive understanding of the meta-theme (women making images as enunciations of trauma). The initial images will mobilize the chapter, they will be close read and used politically, historically and philosophically. It is because the dissertation is not thinking about the images, but thinking with the images. From there, more images will link and appear to emphasize my theorizations about the photographic as image object, communication device, and as practice.
- I will find five images that can serve as leads to the theme of the chapter
- Concurrently, come up with five themes/concepts that each chapter will deal with
- Write out a 250 word abstract for each chapter (each ch. will have its own lit review)
The introduction will comprised of: questions, explanation of themes, methodology, and other get this out of the way to get to the good stuff stuff. I should also not write this first but last, or else I will lose my energy for the analysis. Kim says I have an issue with starting not at the beginning. For example, she said my research questions only came in on page 19 as did my proposal. She noticed this at a presentation I gave in Lancaster. Only about 1/2 way I really started my work, and the other half was a justifcation for that work. I wonder where this stems from? This overdetermined desire to justify the work, rather than let the work justify itself. My undergrad feminism that choked me every time I missed any angle of an -ism? Being a woman who does philosophy? If I believe in the work or my ideas (which I do) then why am I so afraid others won’t see the merit unless I overcompensate? I wonder how this affects my creative practice? I’m always waiting for the other to initiate me in rather than going out and making it happen on my own. Why do I think no one actually takes me seriously? or my writing seriously? or any of my art? I never thought I had impostor syndrome, its characteristics never stuck, but maybe this is it? Fuck. More to deal with.
Other things to note
- BE MORE IMAGINATIVE – write from and with the content
- Diss Proposal should be like a book proposal
- Find more literature on photography (and trauma, shame) and digital photography, the digitial and online
- memory studies, memory work as method – who they are now will influece what they think they were and how they remember it – photo as a means of revisiting
- scrap research-creation
- each chapter functions in metonymic fashion
- I am making a decision on what to reconstitute (in the partial fragments of history I amass)
- MOMENT of TRANSITION – i’m looking to provide an alternate geneology of the 1990s web to include these practices, and what do these practices do to enrich our understanding of women’s use of the internet, but also the ways in which social media operates now
