Monday, December 03, 2007

Upcoming Events

Postgrad Cafe Christmas Social

This year's Christmas Social will be held in the Glamorgan Senior Common Room at 5pm. There will be drinks and nibbles and Christmas cheer! All welcome!

Postgrad Conference

The Postgraduate Café’s annual conference is now booked for the 20th of February 2008.
All postgraduates are invited to submit a paper for presentation. Papers may relate to any social science theme or discipline and may include empirical data, or discussion of methodological or theoretical issues. The conference offers an opportunity to practice disseminating work in a friendly and non-threatening environment, and to make links with other postgraduates within the department. The minimum requirement will be the submission of a 2-300 word abstract, from which a number of papers will be accepted for oral presentation. Presentations will last 20 minutes, with 10 minutes for questions.
In addition, this year we are inviting postgraduate students to submit a 2-3,000 word article, which will form the basis of their presentations and if selected, will form a part of a symposium of conference papers to be published through the Cardiff School of Social Sciences Working Papers. Please note that this is not a prerequisite for speaking at the conference, but offers students the potential opportunity to get work into the public domain in the form of a recognised publication.
Please submit all abstracts or articles via email to:postgradcafe@cf.ac.uk.

Elite Interviews

Neil Stephens and Jasmin Tregidga presented on elite interviewing at the last cafe on 21-11-07. Neil's talk was entitled 'Interviewing Elites and Ultra-elites as an early career researcher'. His paper was an opportunity for him to reflect upon his experiences of interviewing elites and ultra-elites during his PhD at SOCSCI and in his subsequent job. Based on Neil's paper recently published in Qualitative Research, he discussed why, for a young and relatively inexperienced researcher, it can be intimidating conducting interviews with important, famous, and sometimes notorious individuals. However, by stressing the importance of recognising similarities as well as differences he suggested ways of facilitating greater confidence and more productive interviewing.

Jasmin's presentation 'Interviewing the Policing Elite: A Researcher's Progress' briefly discussed some of her experiences of interviewing top ranking police officers and leading members of police authorities in 2005-2006 - a period within 'public' policing characterised by sustained political pressure for profound organisational restructuring.
The presentation touched on issues such as negotiating access to the police at such a turbulent time, and highlights the impact that such political and structural uncertainty had on the process of conducting interviews, and the nature of the data that was generated from these interviews. Finally, Jasmin's talk provided a reflexive account of a young(ish) female researcher entering and operating within a traditionally conservative, male-dominated organisation such as the Police Service.

The talks were well received, with a stimulating question and answer session.