Thanks to everyone who attended the Beginnings/Endings meeting yesterday and made it such a success. Special thanks to Andy and Wen-Chuan for their engaging presentations which led to great discussion.
There were several matters arising from the meeting:
1. Joanna Latimer, who attended the first part of the meeting as an invited guest, has offered to try and arrange for selected speakers from the SOCSI spring seminar series to speak with the Post Grad Café on Thursdays before they present to the school. Please see details of the series at http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/news/seminars.html and email the team with suggestions/requests for speakers who you would like to invite to speak to the café. These meetings will be in addition to our regular meetings and will be important in raising the profile of the café, so please get in touch.
2. MSc students in SOCSI who express an interest in research and would like to get a taste of what the doctoral experience is like in the school will be invited to attend meetings that interest them.
3. Doctoral students from JOMEC (and possibly elsewhere) will be invited to be involved in the café in addition to those from SOCSI and CPLAN.
4. A provisional calendar of meetings will be drawn up and placed here for further reference.
5. We will have regular meetings, every three months or so, entitled ‘Mixed Methods’, where presentations will be given about the methods/methodology employed in people’s projects. The February meeting will be the first with the Mixed Methods theme. One presentation has already been offered and we would like to have another two, so please contact us as soon as possible if you are interested.
6. Several people discussed how we could use this site for continuing debates from café meetings and how we could have ‘virtual’ café meetings. The site can be used to do this in two ways. Firstly, people can email us any posts they would like placed on the blog. We welcome the use of this facility for introducing new topics, asking questions, making enquiries etc. Secondly, by clicking on ‘comments’ at the bottom of each post, comments can be left on any topic and a chain of dialogue can be formed. The use of these facilities will generate a sense of community by making the site polyvocal and allowing people who have difficulties in attending meetings to be part of the e-café. So get in touch remember to check the site regularly!
If anyone would like to continue discussing issues raised at the Beginnings/Endings meeting then please comment on this post…
Many thanks for your continuing support!
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2 comments:
I found Wen-Chuan’s story of access particularly interesting, as he had to adopt strategies to the different cultures that he found himself negotiating entry into. I would also be interested to hear how Andy found the task of obtaining access to political figures in Bosnia. As I am just beginning my PhD I read, or listen to, stories of access with a view to planning my own fieldwork. Or, at least, anticipating the problems that might arise.
So far I have had only to ask and I have had the interviews that I have wanted, more or less, but then I have been interviewing academic scientists who; [1] want to talk about their work, and [2] come from an culture that appreciates the concept of research in its own right. As my research progresses I face the task of securing access once again, and this time it might be more difficult as I set my sights higher up the scientific hierarchy.
Access is a very important issue. Would people be interested in having a meeting dedicated to stories about access to research sites?
Personally, I have heard many interesting (and frustrating) tales about this sometimes difficult element of the research process. I think it would be very productive if we could catalogue a few such stories here so that we have some kind of informal record that people can refer to and share.
David
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