Thursday morning and I'm sitting in the back bedroom at Pretoria Ave, looking out over deep green sheltered well of the garden which is on the cusp of Autumn - or the dying days of Summer, I can't decide which. The leylandii hedges are roughly trimmed and thickly grown in and the London plane trees have grown to an enormous size, with heavy branches spreading over the gardens round about, since I last lived in this house over four years ago. A grey squirrel bounds along the fence at the bottom of the garden, settles on a fence post and starts grooming itself. Apart from the whirr of the computer and the distant rumble of the Tube deep under the house, it is silent.
Since then, I've been down at the University of Kent and have been living in Whitstable and Canterbury. I took a redundancy offer from the uni earlier this year when the internal politics became too much to cope with and have been unable to find work since. It's not a good time to be unemployed, but the redundancy payment and the fact that Pauline has a secure job and we have rented out our house in Canterbury means that I'm not going to starve for the time being.
A year ago, I started working on two PhD proposals in entirely different disciplines. Both of these were prompted by a research visit to Peking University. The first was in the area of Educational Research and Applied Linguistics and was something that I had been interested in for several years; it was planned as a study of international students' acculturation processes in UK universities and has remained pretty much the same in terms of thesis since the start. The other was a study of China-Taiwan relations and has gone through several revisions, starting off as an examination of the legal and political status of Taiwan and ending up as a realist-constructivist take on Taiwanese and Chinese identities through discourse analysis of the statements of policy elites in Taiwan and China.
I have spent the year juggling both proposals, sending them to various institutions and revising them in line with comments and feedback, and have been dismayed and disappointed in particular by the chaotic response from Lancaster University. They lost my application and then rejected my application when I chased them up because they said they did not have the staff available to supervise me. The Dean of Education and Social Sciences promised that he would chase it up for me when I complained, but I have not heard back from them. Warwick rejected my application on the same spurious grounds, even though I had been recommended by a professor there. Both of these institutions are in the top ten in the UK league tables. I had been keeping my offer from Kent on the back burner, reading up and revising my proposal and getting feedback from the SOAS Taiwan Studies summer school in July. The proposal and thesis are a long way from perfect and I am not happy with them, but I have decided to go with Kent and finally went there yesterday to register and talk to the head of graduate studies, who was very helpful, personable and supportive.
Looking out over the soothing green well of the back garden, I've got a pile of books on the desk (more of a work bench, really) in front of me: J Samuel Barkin's Realist Constructivism, which I started reading on Tuesday, and which will form the conceptual framework of my study, Patrick Dunleavy's Authoring a PhD, which I'm going to have to refer back to again and again and three books on Discourse Analysis: J.P Gee's An Introduction to Discourse Analysis and Discourse Analysis: A Tool Kit and Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis' Discourse Theory and Political Analysis. I'm planning to read all of these before my meeting with Pak Lee, my supervisor. To be honeset, I'm a bit vague on the theory of discourse and textual analysis. I can talk in general terms about Foucauldian theories of discourse and Widdowson's applied linguistics and ELT approaches, but I really need some solid techniques and tools. Books on the shelf next to me that I've read through are Rubenstein's Taiwan, A New History, Steve Tsang's If China Attacks Taiwan, Melissa Brown's Is Taiwan Chinese?, Cooper, Taiwan in Troubled Times, Tzeng, Honto Jin to Bensheng Ren, Callahan, China, The Pessoptimist Nation, Edgar Snow's Red Star over China and Allport's The Nature of Prejudice (this, in fact for student acculturation, but applicable in some ways to this project).
The SOAS summer school was helpful, in that it allowed me to refine and reconsider my proposal and thesis. The title at this point is:
Identifying Taiwan: What Cross-Straits Dialogue Shows about the Attitudes of PRC and Taiwan Policy Elites to Taiwan's Legal and Political Status. A Realist-Constructivist Approach.
I've been told by several people that keeping a research journal is a good idea because it encourages one to reflect on one's research experience and ties in with notions of progress-based learning that hold that a better end product is achieved through an iterative, process-focused approach. I'm slightly concerned, though, that this will slide into some kind of self-regarding, airy-fairy project that uses words like hermeunetics and transgredience and loses sight of the goal. I don't want to spend all my time navel gazing when I should be cracking on with actual reading and writing. Some interesting theory and support on research journals is available in an article by Simon Borg and there are some useful guidelines from SOAS and Anglia Ruskin
So, at this point I am embarking on PhD studies at the grand old age of 49 after a university career in English language teaching and helping prepare other students to get their own PhDs without actually having the time or resources to get my own. I've read widely and voraciously on the subject that I'm going to research and am confident that I have the skills to see it through but at the same time I do tend to get sidetracked by events and distracted by displacement activity (such as writing this blog).
