First supervision

Had my first supervision with Pak Lee and Jonathan Joseph in the Gulbenkian today. It seemed to be have been hastily decided on around Jonathan's availability and he turned up late because of a union meeting about the work-to-rule. Neither Pak nor Jonathan seemed very interested in following the guidelines in the Postgrad handbook and it wasn't clear what structure there was going to be to the supervision meetings over the term. This is just what Ruth told us about in last week's GRTS but I can't really make an issue of it because I need whatever guidance they can provide.

Pak seemed to take a back seat, I went through the summaries of the reading I'd done on national identity and Jonathan seemed pretty happy with it. Then we moved on to my reading on Realist Constructivism. I showed him the Samuel Barkin book and hastily offered a few caveats about not wanting to fall into the trap of adopting this approach as 'a bit of this and a bit of that'. He said that Barkin seemed to have fallen into that trap himself, although he admitted he hadn't read the book and we talked about Realism and Constructivism, thick and thin constructivism, PoMo and discourse - theories and approaches. Jonathan offered a good suggestion about changing my theoretical framework to Materialist Constructivism - or to attempt to contrast materialism and constructivism.

In terms of discourse, he asked what I'd read and made some good suggestions about a website for Critical Discourse Analysis,  Teun Van Dijk's Discourse in Society. I talked a  bit about Levinson and Widdowson and looking at illocutionary intent and perlocutionary force and garmmar related to discourse, but he said it was just Saussure. Said I needed to be clear about what I mean by discourse and he's probably right.

We looked at my thesis and research question again and they said it still needed tightening up. Jonathan suggested changing 'how is identity constructed through discourse?' to 'why is identity constructed through discourse?' in order to get to something more critical that is going to push the boundaries of research further. What stuff is there out there on the discourse of Chinese policy elites? What is there on the discourse of policy elites on Taiwanese identity? It would seem good to use Gee's book to do a critical discourse analysis on policy elites. I'll start with Ma Ying-jeou's 'I am Taiwanese'.
Jonathan suggested looking at North Korea and Japan. What is Japan's interest in Taiwanese identity? Is there a Japanese influence?

Overall, the thesis still needs tightening up and focusing and I need a hypothesis on why policy elites continue to construct Taiwanese identity.