I met with my advisor yesterday to review an outline of my dissertation, which I've been working on the last few weeks. I can think of at least three organizational schemes for this research, and I think that some moderate anxiety about "which one" has been bogging me down lately.
I also wanted to get some sense of buy-in on the general overview, due to cautionary tales I've heard about PhD candidates cut loose to produce a dissertation, which is then totally panned by their advisor and committee. I think there should be a bit more hand-holding on your first major research effort. For me the dissertation is about the ability to conceive of and answer an important research question in the context of what others have done in that field, not a test of whether you can disappear for a year or two and produce something that is earthshattering.
Anyways, he advised me to sit down and write through three of the major "data" chapters. This could be one BIG chapter, we agreed, but let's start off in smaller chunks and see how it goes.
Then his feeling is that some of the context and lit review stuff I've been obsessing over in the outline might simply disppear of its own accord. The streamlined dissertation: I'm all for it. One hundred pages or less, that's my motto." (Of course I am mindful of Proust: "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one." Yeah, he was probably writing to his friend Henry James.)
I am making public some deadlines. They are artificial, but I hope enough to motivate me.
January 26: Chapter 6 - the role of labor
February 14: Chapter 7 - the role of faith
March 2: Chapter 8 - "othering" Nowa Huta
I am bringing a couple of texts to work through over break. I don't have high expectations for getting a lot done, and I can live with myself if I get nothing done, but if there's opportunity, I want to be ready to use it.
How to mock commercial (here we could also read 'the political') persuasion and its techniques? Sonia Katyal, a law prof at Fordham U, has coined the term in an article in the Washington U Law Review.*
Def: reinventing or subverting logos or other symbols of a commercial enterprise to redefine meaning in an oppositional way. Vandals do it to billboards: brandalism, subvertising, culture jamming, adbusting.
it's a combination of civil disobedience [think Thoreau and Gandhi] and semiotic democracy, a neologism of media scholar John Fiske. See his book Television Culture.
Discussed with hook of the video game Disaffected! - a parody of being a Kinko's employee.
source of this info: Rob Walker, "Gaming the System." New York Times Magazine September 3 2006, p 18.
*Update, 12/8/06: Sonia K. Katyal, PERFORMANCE, PROPERTY, AND THE SLASHING OF GENDER IN FAN FICTION. 14 (Am U.J. Gender Soc. Pol'y & L. 461. (American University Journal of Gender Social Policy and the Law) 2006.
Where are the limits of intellectual property vis-a-vis slash fan fiction? She uses the phrase semiotic disobedience only once, in shock quotes.