Mock Thesis Defense: Justifying Blogging When I Could Be Revising Essays

I have a serious need to repent.  I intended to write this post over a week ago, but here we are.  Let's be honest-I just collapsed after finals and fell off the radar.  But now it is time to get back in the game, and without further delay because my honors thesis is due January 16th.

I want to take a minute and comment on what I have learned from my mock thesis defense and from my latest post that goes over a draft of my final essay in my collection, "Snot and Untold Stories."  The mock thesis defense was done as a final presentation in my Thesis Writing class.  Another student who acted as my representative contacted Professor Burton and received some good questions to ask me, one of which was this: how do I justify spending valuable time blogging and focusing on the digital component of my thesis when I could spend that time doing much-needed revising?

It is a good question, and after my latest post highlighting concerns with my essay I am more equipped to answer it.

Since posting my latest draft, I have received a few great comments with invaluable feedback.  While I admit I have not had as many people comment as I would have liked, the comments I did receive were incredible.  Shara, who I connected with while in India, took a good chunk of time to give me some much-needed suggestions.  Had I not blogged about this draft, I would not have received that feedback.  In this case, blogging has actually aided me in the traditional revision process.

A second, less obvious benefit to blogging that I have discovered within the last few weeks, has been that I am held accountable to a "real" audience.  Within a day after posting my essay, the German friend I met on the bus mentioned in my essay, who I renamed Charley, contacted me and mentioned he read it.  My initial reaction was concern.  Had I really represented him accurately?  For all of my talk of authenticity, was I holding to it?  The truth is I fused a little bit of a later conversation I had with a history major friend to include a few of the Vietnam details.  By having this post I am acknowledging the fragile nature of storytelling while also being held accountable to an immediate audience.  This is not available in mainstream publishing.

In conclusion, while blogging and adding this digital component of my thesis can be time consuming and daunting, I am glad to have done it.  At the end of the day I would rather have my ideas shared and available to read than have them be perfect.

(Photo credit goes to cs.cmu.edu)

Method Meets Art by Patricia Leavy

My friend and coworker Jay recommended that I read the first chapter of this book, Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice, and I am really grateful he did.  I wanted to underline almost everything as I went through this chapter, and I am sure that as I look more in-depth at the chapters on narrative inquiry, poetry, and visual representation I will have much more to add.

I feel like I have been looking for this book ever since I started field studies.  I am one of those "others for whom these research conventions make what was once a passion start to feel more like a job" (1).  This is why I have always turned towards more artistic approaches, and my whole avatar framework I developed in Ghana would certainly fall under this.  I loved this article because it articulated what I have been internally screaming for years.  Here are some of the insights I gathered.

By doing arts-based "research," we can "bridge and not divide both the artistic-self and the researcher-self."  There is a "profound relationship between the arts and sciences," and there are several viable reasons that more and more people are turning towards alternative methods (2).  Art-based research is more holistic, it is a new genre that "comprises new theoretical and epistemological groundings that are expanding the qualitative paradigm" (3).  In many ways it can capture and represent what traditional research cannot, some of the most fundamental aspects of human experience.  Additionally, there are "tremendous meaning-making and pedagogical capabilities" within this emerging genre.  It is not merely used at the representation stage of research, but during all phases instead (4).

This chapter also talked about the qualitative paradigm and how it has changed based on the emergence of ethnography with people like Geertz and Goffman coming into the picture.  Starting int he 90's though, art-based practices became a legit new method.  The cool thing I find about this is that it looks at "knowledge as a process, a temporary state" (9)and that it is not linear.  Rather, it is iterative, and meaning emerges through "labeling, identifying, and classifying emerging concepts and testing hypotheses; finding patterns; and generating theory" It helps us to look more at the process of meaning-making as well (10).