budding scholar

We went to Barcelona. Found a house. Came back to Toledo. And next week we move. While in Barcelona looking for houses I heard one person talk about schools as being good, with the first reason being there were no immigrants. I had heard of this as a criteria for “good” schools in Spain these days. Though a special report in the Vanguardia newspaper of Barcelona talks about  the fact that most Spaniards actually have very little contact with immigrants, many hold strong negative feelings towards them. I wonder how this compares to what we find in other new destinations of immigration, for example the South in the United States, or Italy. Or what differences we might see by class background of the parents. Or how language plays into the issue of judging the quality of schools.

Little interactions like this one make me want to do a larger study of relations between immigrants and natives, and look beyond the school. But to do a good dissertation involves drawing on theory and basing my work in planning that is flexible, but at the same time draws on previous research. So my third goal for the rest of this month is to work on planning, to try and finish reworking my dissertation research plan, while also working on planning each work day to be as focused as possible. Because once I’m in the field I’m going to see a thousand paths and questions like the one above, and doing good work involves having a larger plan I’m following, while also having routines that include planned time for writing up fieldnotes, and synthesis memos.

We arrived in Spain last night, to wide open plains, blue sky stained with spots of clouds, and the quiet of suburban life. We’ll be staying with my in-laws for two weeks while we look for a place to live and though we’ll be working (I plan to work half days most days and a few full days) it feels like a vacation. After months of preparing this trip, we’re finally here. Sitting and listening to birds sing, sprinklers make their rounds, and the breeze moving through the poplar trees next door.

I’d been craving quiet, outdoor space all summer. Wanting a break from city life and most of all city noise. So here we are. And my goal to accompany these two weeks is to sit outside, with this view of brown grass, red buildings, wide open skies, and write each day. In the morning, before the heat of the day. Or at night, when the sweltering heat has passed. This year will be about collecting dissertation data, and writing time will be taken up by memos and fieldnotes most days. But for the next two weeks I’m still in scholarship, still drawing more from the books than the field, still reading more than talking with people, and I want to use the expansive quiet space I have in this house for writing about it. So, a 30 minute walk each day, and an hour of writing.

Black lines on swirls of green concrete floor. Traffic, voices echoing up through the windows from the parked cars below, one floor down. Three years of looking at these buildings, of hearing these street sounds. Three years as a student at Berkeley working my way through milestones, books, articles. A transition point now. I defended my dissertation proposal on Thursday last week, and Friday we moved out of our apartment in preparation for the year in Spain. How appropriate that this milestone would happen the day before our last day in this loft, which fit our lives so perfectly until now (mostly because of the proximity to BART and ease of getting to Berkeley).

A month of transition now, before we’re settled in a new place in Barcelona. Inspired by a friend thinking big, I’m going to take this month as an opportunity to try for a little more, take risks myself, think bigger, share more of the process here. For a while I’ve kept another document on my computer, also called “budding scholar”, where I keep track of ups and downs of the Ph.D. process. Whenever I’m stuck in my work, or inspired, or anything in between, I write there. This month I’m going to bring more of that into the blog, risk sharing it with whomever happens upon this space.

I’m starting with that. But I like bigger goals too, being a goal-oriented kind of person. So I’m thinking about what else to try for this August, in this transitional moment.

Any ideas?

Another gray day, and I hunger for color. Magenta and papaya oranges like these flowers I saw on my walk yesterday. Color flowing like these balls of bouncing blue and red and yellow through the streets of San Francisco. The writing is flowing better, but I still wish for more ideas, for the work to come even a little easier. Even as I know that the real color won’t come until I’m on the ground, in Spain, talking to people and keeping fieldnotes every day. But there’s still this proposal to write, a milestone that our professors have set out for us to make sure we’re ready to make sense of the field once we get there. So I sit here, gray skies over browns and creams of San Francisco buildings, listening to this piano music, writing with the colors I have.

What inspires you in your work? Do you find that the weather affects your feelings about doing the work at hand?

A gentle evening summer breeze comes through the open window as I sit working late in Graduate Student Services, in Berkeley’s Doe Library. It’s re-discovering an old favorite. Finding true quiet that hums with productivity is harder than I’d have expected at Berkeley. The only sounds here are a train in the distance, sometimes the click of another student’s keys. I see people working on literature theses, their tables piled high with books.

Like views and breezes and humming productive silences, I have rediscovered language, nationalism and citizenship this week. The kind of belonging that is about not only passports, but civic duty and common social identity as well. Like a daffodil sprouting from an old bulb in spring, I hit upon a policy to use as an entry point for my study of immigrant integration in Spain, and the other pieces started growing into the beginnings of a real dissertation.

Now I hear a plane. The breeze gets cooler through the window but the late evening sun still comes warmly through the blinds in laticed stripes. I’m thinking about re-reading old writing, pulling and reshaping to fit it to the shape of my dissertation proposal.  I’m thinking about writing new sections. The pieces from orals and years of reading taking a new shape. And for the first time this dissertation proposal feels possible.

A New York Times article this Sunday talks about Somali-Americans in Minneapolis choosing to go back to Somalia to fight for an Al Qaeda-affiliated group that is trying to overthrow the government in Somalia. One of their teachers talks about their reasons for joining as being a “crisis of belonging”.  These young boys, who had come to the U.S. as teenagers or been born here to immigrant parents, felt disconnected from both their homeland and to their new country. Many of them had done well in school, gone on to college, but still felt they did not belong. Fighting for this group in their homeland gives them a feeling of purpose and belonging.

Belonging is important. Feeling that we have a place in the world, a meaningful place with others. I wonder about belonging for the many immigrant youth in Spain. I wonder about studying it here in the U.S.  I wonder whether anyone is studying the links between belonging and policy, how school policies might make a difference for youth experiences of belonging. Could the schools where these boys went in Minneapolis have handled things differently? What about the communities? What can schools do to teach people to be tied to their new country? What, if anything, should they do?  And what about policy implementation–does the policy matter if it’s not implemented?

A lot of discussion of language and multicultural policy talks about this very issue, with people having differing opinions about what schools should be doing to foster belonging to the country. I am curious what they actually do, under current policies. And what experiences immigrant youth are having. Perhaps this will be one focus of my dissertation.

What do you feel you belong to? What, if anything, have your schooling experiences had to do with your feelings of belonging?

My mind drifts this morning, out into yet another gray day outside my window. Yesterday filled with sun and productivity all day. Today worry and uncertainty press in again with the gloom of the fog. I lose myself in the dahlias bringing sunshine to my desk, seeking summer in their golden centers. Remembering gardens of dahlias from years past. Aching for a garden of my own.

Ownership. What do you own? Beyond the hard, soft, old, new material possessions, what do you own in your work? Your career? Ownership is huge in academic work. We are all building on past work, making a unique contribution to a larger world of scholarship. All professional careers have ownership buried within them, choices that add up to a career. Talking with writer friends I find that some of the struggles of ownership and working through my own contribution are similar. All summer I have felt like having the garden and sanctuary of a home with sun and no plans to go anywhere would help with thte more abstract ownership. Dahlias of my own to tenderly weed around and smile upon each day. Yet the world of work would still be out there, and graduate school would still be there waiting to be completed, and the questions of ownership of “my work” would press in just as persistently.

Instead we rent, and cut dahlias grace my desk this morning. My mind skitters from worry to worry, landing upon a hard rock of anxiety about my dissertation project. All my own. What choices should I make? A post soon with the options I’m weighing.

How do you feel about ownership of your work? Your career? Your professional life?

We’ve begun packing up the house for the year in Spain, selling things on Craigslist, giving things away, making lists of new owners for our belongings.

If only preparing my study were as straightforward. Instead I spend day after day mucking around, reading, writing, talking with people, but not feeling like I make real progress.

The main thing keeping me from being excited about the year away at this point is not knowing what my project is going to look like. I work every day, but don’t finish anything. And yet, yesterday as I talked with a former student of my adviser about my dissertation dilemmas, I felt closer.

The challenge is there are so many decisions to make. Which discipline I’m most closely aligned with, since education is multidisciplinary (sociology, some political science, I think)? Which one or two theories to use (assimilation/integration, social networks, boundaries, policy implementation…)? How to sample? Whether to focus more on immigrant students or teachers of immigrants (have decided the students I think)? Two cities or one in Spain (depends on the research questions)? And the list goes on…

Any thoughts?

One of my professors talked about identifying the “center of gravity” of my dissertation project. By this she meant the main question driving it, the main way of tackling the question. We’re all interested in a lot of things, and want to include them all in one study, but for a dissertation project we need to hone in on one slice of the interest. Especially for the field research. Once we have collected our data we can start circling out again. But doing good research requires focus.

The center of gravity of my intellectual interest is on cultural difference and commonalty, how people learn about them, teach about them, come to understand what they mean. Government policy, personal interactions, community life. All ways people might encounter or learn about cultural difference. Studying immigration is my way of getting at this, since it almost always raises questions of difference, sameness, identity.

This is very mushy sounding. But I feel like in working on designing the dissertation, I’m revisiting my passions, why I’m in graduate school in the first place, as a way of ensuring the project I do will be meaningful.

Working on the last of my class final papers, hopefully ever! Classes will be done next semester. It actually already feels like my work is on its own path regardless of classes.

At the last minute I decided to abandon the empirical paper I was writing for my Immigration Studies class and polish up a proposal I wrote last month that drew heavily on the class. Found my statistics skills weren’t all there yet, and that the dataset had a few major flaws for answering my questions.

So I’m revising this proposal, and am excited to get my professor’s feedback on it. Although I want to keep exploring some more before comitting myself to a dissertation project, I think I have a good idea, and that the proposal has some very good writing in it. I’m excited about improving it.

Failing in the statistical effort (or at least, suffering a setback), despite quite a bit of work, makes me wonder about the process for writing these kind of papers. Do people usually do most of the analysis, then go write up the theory? I feel like I needed to have done more of the analysis before I could really sit down and write the paper, yet the design for the study draws heavily on the literature. Perhaps if the dataset had not had such a paucity of variables for answering my questions it would have worked too.

For the moment, I’m working on the proposal. Have a regular writing schedule set up for this week to keep going on the other project (and a deadline for the statistics project which should help with the statistical analysis piece). I know where I’m trying to get to, just not sure of how yet. The only way to figure it out is to keep working.