Academic life and family | antropologi.info

Wrapping it up, or new beginnings

Published on May 31, 2013 by cicilie Posted in Academic life and family, Blogging, Cicilie among the Parisians, Post defence

I was reminded of my blog again recently when an editor from Popular Anthropology Magazine asked me to write a short article on my experience of blogging from fieldwork. Her questions made me miss the time I was blogging regularly:

For example, what are some of the challenges and rewards of blogging during fieldwork? Are there any special precautions you need to take in order to maintain the anonymity of research participants? Have any of your research participants read your blog? How does blogging impact the accessibility of anthropological research? What does blogging reveal about fieldwork that may become lost in other publications? How do you transition from blogging to writing up?

I’ll link to the article when it appears in the magazine in June. While writing the article, I became so inspired that I set up a new blog Cicilie’s city blog (Cicilies byblogg) where I consider blogging from my recent project. Now the only challenge is to find time… between feeding the 6 months old and playing with the 4 years old and all the rest.

Another thing that has happened in this project since the last time I updated this blog, is that the radio clip I wrote about previously was aired again. It lead to a request from a support group from people with psychological problems and another from a library to hold a speech. I’m working on the latter now and have titled the lecture Therapy and democracy at the bar: Slam poetry in Paris. It was fun to write in Norwegian about slam poetry again, and I’ll see if it’s possible to transform the lecture into an article of some kind. I desperately need to publish…

Apropos this desperate need: The first I got on with after the birth of my second son was an application for a postdoc. I thought my head was pretty fit for starting working again, particularly since I had so much time on my hands to just sit thinking about things for a long time (seeing Little Fatty Pear just get fatter and fatter). When I received the evaluation I realised that I must have been a bit out of my mind at the time, as I had proposed to write nine articles and two books during a two years long postdoc period. Now, I’ve sent a new application, for a 3 years long position this time, and with the aim to write only 4-5 articles and a book, all from the slam scene inspired by my other research: The stage is all the world, and the players are mere men and women: Parisian performance poetry and other stories from Relational Europe… We’ll see. In a few months time, it seems I’ll have not much more to do than to look after Little Fatty Pear and write.

But for the moment, it’s not Parisian slam poetry that counts, but suburban libraries and urban morphology, but that’s – hopefully – food for another blog coming up very soon.

Ops, there I almost forgot the nice little interview (in Norwegian) at Foreningen !Les (“Read”): In the field with poetry slam

Manifesto for faster writing and shorter workdays

Published on January 10, 2011 by cicilie Posted in Academic life and family, Cicilie among the Parisians, Writing

To my surprise I discovered that it was easy to change my way of writing and even my way of working more generally. The writing came easiest. When I wrote my master thesis, on very good days I could produce half a page. I could file and mould every sentence for hours, a technique I think contributed to the far too dense structure. Not only is the fluency easily lost, but I also started to find it a boring way to work.
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I then read a tip that helped me out of it right away. Now, regularly write at least a 1000 words on a regular workday. It’s just to write on, without any censorship – don’t erase anything, just switch paragraph – and preferably no checking of sources during the first draft. [Write everything you want like to check in square brackets]. One should start first thing in the day (or rather, in the work day, for us with children) and keep it going for two hours. Often it goes so well that it is just to continue. They way I wrote earlier made me so fed up with my own text that I never rewrote and hardly even read through it. – But even then I had to restructure the text, both within and between chapters. Now, this editing work is much easier on all levels. It’s far easier to delete since my sentences and paragraphs haven’t had the time to become particularly dear darlings, and it is far easier to rewrite and restructure.

This writing exercise also helped me with the more challenging task to change work habits. When it suddenly was necessary for me to get as much work done as possible, it almost seemed like I needed to change personality. Until then, for as long as I can remember my way of working can be likened to a heavy, heavy steam engine setting off from last chance saloon. I could (can) spend hours getting started. I’ve waited until the absolute deadline, than procrastinated a little longer before slowly pulling my forces together, in order to finally work for a loooong, looooong time with an increasing speed and enthusiasm. Then of course, after a period of intense effort and concentration, some kind of break is desperately needed, and it will once again take a long time – and usually a last call – to get the steam engine going again.

Then circumstances just came and changed the pattern. Circumstances demand that I get a minimum of 6-7 hours of sleep every night (if not things can get very nasty between Mrs Surpæt [untranslatable old dialect related to ‘grumpy’] and her offspring. Circumstances also demand that (at least the first part of) the office day must end around 15H. That leaves me with no more than 5-6 successive work hours, something which was unthinkable under my previous regime. I sometimes force myself to take a lunch break, and I still rarely write less than my 1000 pages. – If it is not one of these awful, annoying, aggravating days that keep me from getting on with the writing right from the beginning. Because, the thing is, if I get hung up in some petty task of searching for something or clearing some space on my desk or some administration of some kind, I’m almost certainly unable to recover that day’s work spirit.

But if I’ve prepared rightly and know where to start (either by thinking it through the day before or on the way to work), and I sit down without too much fuss, it’s almost as if the fewer work hours I have in front of me, the more I get done. Down to a certain limit of course, but working concentrated for around 5-6 hours (with or without a break, is really perfect). This scheme worked amazingly well for more than four months in the autumn, a very lengthy leg which it would have been impossible to beat under earlier circumstances.

Now the question is: My thesis needs about 33 000 more words. Can I get them written in 33 days (divided on 4 days a week, – also due to certain circumstances), thus a little less than two months?

The multilingual playground

Published on September 8, 2010 by cicilie Posted in Academic life and family, Cicilie among the Parisians, Fieldwork, Paris, Spaces

(Early Sunday morning. Where are my playmates?)

It’s not the first time I write about how I enjoy hanging out in Parisian playgrounds (see posts from 2005 and 2007). They’re small to middle sized and every neighbourhood seem to have one. So, if you’re looking for a green and shady place to relax for a while and observe the local way of life, a playground can be recommended. Earlier, I haven’t paid much attention to the standard of the equipment, but this time I quickly noticed that all the parks in this part of the town have got new, exciting and very varied games for the different age sets. Perhaps this is part of an renovation of the public spaces in the Northeastern and poorer districts of Paris?
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Parc de Belleville in full blossom

Parc de Belleville for instance, has always had very well kept and diverse flower beds compared to comparable spots in Oslo’s poorer neighbourhoods, but now they’ve planted flowers and plans all over it – presumably in relation to the biodiversity plan of the city of Paris. (I see on the municipal net site that Père Lachaise is participating from the 20th Arrondissement, but they haven’t written anything about Parc de Belleville yet.) But I presume also as part of an over-all refurbishment of this part of the city. Anyway, back to the playgrounds.

Leo adds to the diversity and learns to drink running water from watching the older children at the playground

It happens that our local playground is the same one I wrote about in 2007, and I can only repeat what I wrote about diversity at that time. The first friend my son made in France, was a little French Japanese girl with a nice Japanese bug on wheels which she swapped for a while for Leo’s excavator. Another day, Leo talked to himself as he played with cars side by side some older children. One of the north African looking ones asked what language he spoke, and he was so amazed to hear that it was something called Norwegian that he had to boast of his knowledge in Chinese. Whereupon he said something and the Chinese looking boy present (who were even a little older, and not too nice towards the smaller ones) laughed acknowledgingly. Today, he played around two girls where one of them was bilingual in German. And so on. The playground bears witness both to the increasing gentrification and the high Chinese presence in the area, in addition to the North African Muslim as well as Jewish immigration. An many others.

(Early Sunday morning. Where are my playmates?)

It’s not the first time I write about how I enjoy hanging out in Parisian playgrounds (see posts from 2005 and 2007). They’re small to middle sized and every neighbourhood seem to have…

Can a conference be a family occasion?

Published on August 26, 2010 by cicilie Posted in Academic life and family, Cicilie among the Parisians

Early morning, Maynooth Campus

Taking one’s family along to a conference is obviously not that uncommon. “Where can I sign up for that anthropologists’ wife association?” my partner wondered, as he saw yet another man pushing a stroller along on the campus here in Maynooth. This month I’ve tried both, conference – or festival, as I often missay it – with and conference without husband and child. With is definitely not much of a festival, but it’s got other charms.
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As long as my son isn’t busy with his trucks and tractors in kindergarten, I tend to choose his company. And I’ve to admit that a workshop or plenary must look more than moderately interesting to beat an opportunity to go rabbit spotting in the Gothic garden where we live or clap for street musicians (who play the theme from the Godfather on saxophone and accordion in Balkan fashion) at Grafton street with him.

I’ve managed sort of a mix, but the selective and quick dip into the flood of academic activities a joint family & work solution offers, has deprived me of what I like most about conferences. This happens also to be the reason behind my frequent Freudian slip of calling it festivals. I experienced some of the same phenomenon during the last championship in football: The more you see the more fun it gets. The more anthropology (or other academic genres) I engage in during a 3-4 days period, the more engaging it gets. Listening to debates and commenting on papers during the day, and discussing , chatting and mingling during the night, with too little sleep in-between high-wire the brain in a very creative and inspiring fashion. The first time I experienced it, weeklong camping on rock festivals was still fresh in my memory, and that experience was what an anthropology conference reminded me of. Music, hanging around, meeting new people and much too little sleep until one feels extrovert and elated by nature. Or, in the case of academic festivals; until one dreams of fieldwork and can’t go anywhere without a notebook to jot down the ceaseless spinning of the mind.

So, yes, it’s been nice – Leo abroad for the first time and some new ideas for my thesis (e.g. here) – but not the best of two worlds like I wrote about some posts ago, and not like the balance I seem to have found at work between a short, but hyper-efficient workday and the relaxed and focused time before and after. Probably conference with family is never going to be a festival, but just a plain conference and a nice family event. Next is family at fieldwork.

Early morning, Maynooth Campus

Balance

Published on July 27, 2010 by cicilie Posted in Academic life and family, Anthropological notes, Cicilie among the Parisians, On places on earth and food I like

A little red robin just whistled outside the bedroom window. My son takes his midday nap in my lap this summer. For a long time now, he has let us know that midday laps are a waste of time, and the only way to get him to sleep is to make the environment as boring, but cosy as possible. I bunk up with a cup of tea and a novel or a pencil and paper, and for an hour or so I can slouch peacefully in the bedroom in the middle of the day.
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In the summer cabin, the bedroom window faces a steep rocky hill full of different trees, flowers, roses, green leaves, moss, forest berries, squirrels and the odd bird, like this red robin. In the distance, I can hear the waves, the sound of the engine from a boat, or sometimes the rain tapping on the roof.

Before this little pause, I had two hours off from family life where I sat by myself and watched the sea and sky as I composed an outline for my paper on narration and migration in Linköping. I translated a poem by Ucoc Lai about the particular moment when he left Vietnam for France where he after four years of waiting had been granted status as a political refugee from Cambodia. I will also translate a beautiful, lyrical text by Souleymane Diamanka about the nomadic Fulani’s voyage up north to France, and their life “under the baobabs of beton” in the Bordeauxan suburbs, called Fulani Winter. I will argue something like that through writing their histories into the history of France, without severing the ties with other parts of the world, they weave the histories together. Like that, their stories and experiences contribute to a more inclusive, open and wider understanding of what France is… something like that.

With little Leo in my nap, I continued working, finishing the outline of the narratives of nation-paper, and an abstract to a conference in Sicily on borders. I want to talk about the internal borders created by a nation’s imagery. In have in mind particularly how action/interaction and environment shape each other in relation to these internal borders between what is French and what is not. The lines of inclusion and exclusion function differently in different parts of the city, in different urban spaces, I think the idea is. And these lines are constructed completely differently in the open and inclusive, however very “French”, space that is created during slam sessions in east Paris. I don’t know if my paper will be accepted as the conference seems to focus on eastern Europe, but I very much want to go to Sicily in the end of January, to tell the truth, and the venue for the conference, an old monastery in the second largest city in Sicily, seems fantastic… And, well, my material would surely benefit from being studied from such a perspective on internal borders.

And what I think about once in a while when I stop scribbling on my sheets of paper, is that sometimes life feels in complete balance. I don’t feel torn between academia and family life, far from it. The two, equally all-absorbing and rewording in their own but very different rights, usually complement each other perfectly. I didn’t expect that, but that’s really how I feel.

A little red robin just whistled outside the bedroom window. My son takes his midday nap in my lap this summer. For a long time now, he has let us know that midday laps are a waste of time, and…