I’m trying to post more frequently!

This whole belly dancing malarkey isn’t playing out! I went for a few lessons, and now I’ve missed two, so I suspect I might be a bit behind! Last week I was feeling a bit rough, and this week I was so totally engrossed in uni work I missed the time I needed to leave uni to get there. Oh well, I think I might sack it off and take it up again next term. I can’t let my amazing jingly jangly scarf go to waste can I?!

So today has been really good. I had a nice supervisorial meeting. Rob and Elaine liked the photos I’d taken and the notes I’d made, so that’s great. I’m looking forward to summer when exploring these places will be pleasant. The days I went out and took photos were awfully cold and dreary!

I’ve really gotten into the swing of being at uni. I’ve started coming in more frequently, I’ve got a stash of coffee and tea in the office, actually I even have a stash of breakfast cereal and pot noodles. I’m such a student!

I’m quite excited, next week I start my teaching assistant work again. This semester I’m TA-ing on Regulating Sexuality. It was one of my favourite modules as an undergrad so I was pretty pleased to get the gig!

The rest of this week is a little quiet, busy socially but quiet uni wise. Then it reverses next week, and it’s all business! I’m very excited, this week it’s skeptics in the pub on Wednesday, a thing on the science of light on Thursday, tea with a friend on Friday, I’m not sure about Saturday, and tonight I’m off to the cinema to see The Gray. I hear its rubbish, but it’s cheap night so who cares, right? Next week will be all work and no play, teaching, a HASS lecture and I was supposed to have a PGR lecture but it’s been cancelled, so good bye to my free lunch!

Well, it’s been a while hasn’t it?

Well, it’s been a while hasn’t it?

You would not believe the amount of times that I have sat down to begin writing something for this blog and then stopped. More often than not it’s what you might call “non productive uni work guilt”. You know, when you’re doing something for uni that isn’t uni work, but you have uni work you should be doing? Well…. I know what it is. When its not NPUWG, it’s “ooo my cows need feeding on that facebook game, hang on people are talking at me on facebook chat, ooo I missed Eastenders last night lets watch that on Iplayer.” or as I like to call it semi-professional procrastination. The internet is too full of wonderful tempting irrelevancies!

So, what did I promise to talk about? Oh yeah the Christmas party and the HASS module.

The Chirstmas party was awesome. We had secret santa and a bring something meal. Now don’t get me wrong, the PhD community at Newcastle is a VERY friendly group, but I suspect there’s a lot of competitiveness between us when it comes to baking (yes, baking). So many of us are amazing at cooking, there was mulled wine, mince pies, pizza, Mexican lasagne, so much yummyness. I made pumpkin and apple muffins and chocolate truffles in 3 different flavours. I must admit that I wouldn’t have put so much effort in if I wasn’t trying to make an impression on the other PhD students I don’t know well. I was tempted just to pop into the shops on my way there and bring in a bunch of pre-bought snacks, but I’m glad I didn’t! The secret Santa was fun too. Iain got me a “do your own graffiti” mug. Inspired by my last dissertation on toilet graffiti I’m sure. I LOVE it! It was supposed to be anonymous but I knew exactly who would get me that. I would like to tell you all what I got for someone else, but I think its still a secret!

The HASS module I mentioned was “The nature of explanation and enquiry”. Hand’s down it was by far my most favourite module offering from HASS so far. Basically every lecture is an introduction to different perspectives, for example Feminism or Marxism. I was introduced to ideas like Hermeneutics for the first time and recapped old favourites like Bourdieu. I was so disappointed that I wasn’t offered this as part of my MA, it would have been SO useful to me back then, but now I’m fairly committed to my love affair with Situationist – Psychogeography- reinterpreted sociologically. Also, I would have liked more lectures. I’m sure other students will hate me for saying this but there were weeks where we only had one lecture and others where we had two, honestly, I could have stood for three. I love lectures, it’s like watching TV but more stimulating. So the assessment was 500 words on three different topics. I chose:
Karl Popper- would he think your subject is scientific? (If your wondering, good old Mr Popper slates the unscientific nature of many social sciences, so sociology is a psudo-science, and to be honest I don’t think he would be particularly thrilled by my philosophical perspective. After all, I doubt you can falsify affect.)

Something about Marx’s ideas on how society evolves. (I’m not a massive Marx fan, but it seemed doable in 500 words)

and

How has feminism changed the way your field understands knowledge. Which I found quite fun. A couple of the other PhD students are ardent feminists and I quite enjoy playfully winding them up. So now I feel like I have a little more knowledge with which to back up my playful prodding.

Obviously I’ve paraphrased the questions a little bit, not that I expect next years PhD students to read through this blog, but just in case they do I’ve vague-d it up a bit. I did feel that 500 words was a bit limited as an assessment, but who am I to criticize?

Can you guess what THE most important thing I learned from this entire process was? I learned that I was not on the HASS mailing list, so I’ve been missing HASS emails. Oops!

A serious plus point about the module was having group discussions run by a music student come psycho geography fan, a lovely French lady called Elodie. She was really fun to work with and mediated the group so well! Talking to her really helped me identify more literature I should be reading.

In other news, I took one half of my “how to teach” class. It was supposed to be a two day thing, but alas the guy who was giving the class was poorly on day two. I did pick up some handy hints, I found that having done some teaching and found my strengths and weaknesses it was more useful than it would have been had I had no experience.

On the non uni-personal life stuff, I had a lovely Christmas and New Year, Christmas was quiet, we don’t really celebrate it in our house. New Year was nice. In my family we traditionally go to the beach for a bit of a wander around and to grab some chips during the day on NYE, which is by far my favourite family tradition. On NYE proper I went to a house party and met lots of new people, which is by far my favourite thing about parties! Also, I’ve ALMOST finished decorating my bedroom. I’m can’t wait to move in! I will post pictures soon. I nearly forgot to mention that I went to a friends wedding. It was amazing. The bride and groom looked lovely, and they had a cake made out of cheese as a gluten free alternative to wedding cake! On the same day as the wedding the boy I had been dating decided we should make our relationship “official”. Nothing has changed other than our facebook status’, the internet exacerbates the awkwardness of human relationships sometimes, don’t you think?

Well, this is getting to be another self-indulgently long post isn’t it?

Next time I’ll tell you about how I’m progressing with uni, and tribal belly dancing. Fellow Sociology PhD Emily and I have taken it up. We’re hilariously bad!