Friday, March 18, 2005

Next Meeting - Juggling Identities: Who am I supposed to be?!

Hi everyone

The next meeting of the Post Grad Café will be on Wednesday 30th March. The theme for this meeting will be ‘Juggling Identities: Who am I supposed to be?!’ In a change to our usual arrangements, there will be no specific papers presented; rather, there will be an open discussion about the experiences of being a postgraduate who has to juggle a variety of identities – student, researcher, teacher, practitioner etc – and how different people find ways to cope with moments of difficulty. We also want to focus on how best to take advantage of the many positive aspects of occupying what can sometimes be contrasting roles.

We hope that by running a session of the café on this theme that people will be able to share in the diversity and commonality of their experiences in a relaxed and friendly environment. To help establish the right kind of atmosphere, this meeting will be the first to travel outside the school and will be held at the ‘Funky Buddha’ on Woodville Road in Cathays at 7 pm. We have booked space and will order wine for the group (and hopefully some nibbles too).

Looking forward to seeing many of you there

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Graduate Skills Development Programme

By now, everyone should have received the Graduate Centre's Skills Development Programme for Research Students April-July 2005. The school would like to encourage doctoral students to attend courses on the programme and has asked the Cafe to advertise these.

Students are increasingly expected to keep a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) log across their candidature. To get a picture of who has done what, the Graduate Centre will provide SOCSI (and other schools) with an end of year printout which will be used in the Annual Review. The school will use these data to identify those candidates who are not using the courses sufficiently. Consequently, students are expected to up-skill themselves and participate and supervisors have been asked to include this in their next supervision agenda.

Extra copies of booklet can be obtained from Liz Renton, Research and Graduate Office, Room 0.16.

Thanks to Rolland Munro – Post Grad Café Extra success

The Café Team would like to express their gratitude to Rolland Munro for coming and speaking with the Post Grad Café at the Extra meeting last Wednesday. Thanks also to everyone for coming along, it was great to see so many attending!

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

First Visiting Speaker - Prof. Rolland Munro

Professor Rolland Munro from the University of Keele has very kindly agreed to be the first visiting speaker to talk with the Post Grad Café. This special meeting will be next Wednesday 9th March at 5pm in the Glamorgan Building common room. This is an important occasion and an encouraging development for the Café, and we hope as many people as possible will be able to attend what will certainly be a fascinating informal discussion.

In order to stimulate discussion Professor Munro has suggested that people should read either Punctualising Identity: Time and the Demanding Relations paper which is in Sociology (online - see below)
or
'A Consumption View of Self: Extension, Exchange and Identity'. In S. Edgell, A Warde and K. Hetherington (eds), Consumption Matters, The Sociological Review Monograph series, 1996, pp 247-272.

http://ejournals.cardiff.ac.uk/?V=1.0&N=100&L=KK8RV2GW7T&S=T_B&C=Sociology

Title: Punctualizing Identity: Time and the Demanding Relation
Author(s): Rolland Munro
Source: Sociology Volume: 38 Number: 2 Page: 293 -- 311
DOI: 10.1177/0038038504040865
Publisher: SAGE Publications

Abstract: Questions of identity, the nuance of self to context or culture, continue to dominate despite a fashion to imagine 'structures' of class, status and ethnicity as becoming less demanding and, hence, more fluid and open to choice. In contrast to a picture of individuals suspended in fluids of their own making, this article introduces the idea of identity being punctualized: a 'revealing' of each specified identity within the here and now; and in response to the 'demand' of others. Accepting there is a positioning effect, requiring those making demands to be in a position to make their specific reading on identity, the article draws on Henry James's novel The Ambassadors, to illustrate a timing effect, in which each 'call' demands a display of identity that annuls other 'calls' - precisely by overtaking these in the here and now. These demands arguably overlap with Heidegger's formulation, in which the demanding relation is general and is presented as the effect of technology: technology transforms everything in nature, including ourselves, into things 'standing in advance'. Relations are not attenuated, so much as it matters more what identity is being produced (and when).
© 2005 Sage Publications
Keywords: enframing; punctualize; relations; revealing; technology; time

Mixed Methods Success

Thanks to Katie and Michael for their presentations at the café last week. Once again the meeting was a great success - many thanks to everyone who came along. Our next regular meeting will be on Wednesday 30th March and will be our first off campus meeting. Details of venue, time and theme to follow shortly.