Advice for PhD students approaching the examination process in Aotearoa New Zealand (or other contexts featuring external examination of theses), by Dr April K. Henderson

I am delighted to share this invaluable resource from my friend and colleague, Dr. April K Henderson. April has written the most thoughtful and practical advice I’ve seen on navigating the PhD examination process, which involves a viva/oral defence here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her advice is grounded in years of supervisory experience in Pacific Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and exemplifies her generous mentorship. If you or someone you know is approaching a thesis examination in Aotearoa New Zealand, this is essential reading.

Approaching examiners’ reports

Your first and lasting response to examiners’ reports—even the one with the toughest-to-take criticism—should be gratitude for the detailed engagement with your work they provide. Let’s face it: reading a thesis, even a beautifully written one, is a bit of a slog, but these three people read yours, re-read it, thought deeply about, formulated opinions and crafted several (or five, or sometimes even eight) pages of detailed discussion and advice. No one else, apart from your supervisors, will read your work this closely.

Examiners are people, and just like other people we know (friends, relatives) some examiners are better at wording their critiques in a generous and supportive way, while others may be more blunt. Some critiques you may easily see the truth of, others you may reject. But no matter how they sound, examiners’ comments are always (at least in my experience) intended well and meant to improve your thesis. Therefore, the first note you should sound in the oral exam is gratitude that these esteemed, busy people have given so much time and attention to your work.

In your oral exam, you will need to be prepared to address critiques in your reports. Here’s some strategies for preparing to do that.

So you have your examiners’ reports—what to do now?

I advise students to work your way methodically through all the reports, developing a list of every critique/request made and who made it. More specifically, I suggest developing a spreadsheet with three columns.

In the left column of the spreadsheet, enter each critique/request in a new row.

In the middle column, write a statement about whether the critique was echoed or contradicted in the other two reports. Why this middle column is important:

It will help identify the key areas of agreement across all three reports, and these will most likely feed into predictable questions in the oral exam and possibly revisions you will be asked to make;
It will help you to have perspective on the reports when taken as a whole. Otherwise, our natural human negativity bias means that we will obsess about the most critical bits in the reports, losing sight of the big picture—including that some examiners may have loved the exact same aspect of the thesis that another hated. So Professor X thought you did a really poor job elaborating [key concept] in your thesis. But Professor Y and Dr Z thought you did a great job and said so! This middle column can help your fragile scholarly ego maintain perspective. It also can suggest positive strategies for approaching the stinging bits of critique in the oral exam: if examiners’ responses were contradictory on a particular point, it can be useful to gently (and non-defensively!) work a reference to the positive commendations of other examiners into your considered response to the critique (a suggestion for doing this below). Which brings me to the final column…

In the right column, put your carefully considered response to the critique and what (if anything) you are willing to do to address it, including practical changes you might make to the final thesis. Also note for yourself if/how you might (implicitly or more directly) work a reference to the critique in your opening fifteen minute presentation. (More about how you will use and draw on this column is at the end of “The Oral Exam” section).

Here is an example of a table of examiners’ comments and student responses. (Note: this is an anonymised, generalised composite, not a particular student’s exact spreadsheet).

CRITIQUE	CONVERGENCE/DIVERGENCE in REPORTS?	MY RESPONSE
1. One examiner said thesis invokes divergent conceptions of [key concept] from multiple theorists and “the way in which [key concept] is being used as expounded in Chapter 2 and especially in later descriptions and analysis could have been clearer” (Professor X p2)	Critique not reflected in Professor Y’s or Dr Z’s reports, who write approvingly of thesis’s use of [key concept]: “[insert their flattering, approving statements here]”.	Two examiners were very satisfied with my treatment of [key concept]. I can offer an implicit response to Professor X’s critique in my opening 15-minute presentation in the oral exam; As part of narrating the thesis’s key original contributions, I can say something like: “I agree with examiners that the concept of [key concept] is critical to the thesis. It underpinned my analysis of x and y and allowed me to see z. Given its importance, I was gratified by Professor Y’s and Dr Z’s commendations of how the thesis introduces and uses the concept.” If Professor X raises a specific question later in the exam, I am prepared to restate/elaborate clearly on the thesis’s use of [key concept], making reference to particular passages in the thesis that I feel address Professor X’s questions. Ways to do this non-defensively: open the response by agreeing with X that clarity is important. After pointing to specific passages that I hope address X’s critique, close by welcoming suggestions X may have for bringing further clarity.
2. “Textual descriptions of x and y are rather hard going” (Professor X p2)	Critique not reflected in Professor Y’s or Dr Z’s reports. Both of these other examiners are trained in [specifically relevant field] and write of the thesis’s textual descriptions in very positive terms: “[insert their flattering, approving statements here]”.	Professor X’s critique seems a bit pointed here—it’s very specific and not shared by the other examiners who have more expertise in [relevant field]. I don’t think I need to pick up on it in my opening presentation. If it comes up later in the exam, I could discuss why I chose to describe x and y in the level of detail I did, the relationship of these descriptions to my analysis, and end by acknowledging with gratitude Professor Y’s and Dr Z’s commendations of my descriptions in their reports.
3. “The Conclusion [was short]. I craved more. What I expected here was a greater connection between the research questions posed at the start, the subtle exposition of complex theories, the graphic depictions of [thesis content], the lived realities of [thesis participants] than is presented in these short, final paragraphs. This was a profound disappointment and I can only presume that the author ran out of time or energy. This deficiency might be redressed in the final version.” (Professor X p7)	While phrased more generously, the other examiners agreed: “The thesis concludes with a short chapter that briefly summarises [xxx], reiterates the central argument, and sketches some preliminary ideas for future research.” (Dr Z p4) “[The student] might well want, in any future revision, to expand and amplify the thoughts indexed in their concluding chapter.” (Professor Y)	This critique was shared across all reports and is likely to come up in oral exam. I agree with examiners that my Conclusion was too short. It was not a matter of running out of time or energy, though—just running out of word limit. I think there’s a way to acknowledge this shortcoming of the thesis towards the end of my opening 15-minute presentation, and to do it in a way that explains this shortcoming as an unfortunate by-product of what examiners appreciated as the strengths of the thesis: all of the rich detail in the substantive chapters meant that the thesis was at the maximum word limit. In terms of practical steps to address what we all agree was a shortcoming in the thesis: prior to the oral, I will gain clarity from FGR on whether the revised, final (post-exam) thesis can exceed the 100,00 word limit – if so, I will readily offer to expand the Conclusion. If not, I will explain the word constraints to examiners and seek their advice on parts of the thesis they think could be sacrificed to make space for an expanded Conclusion.

Once you’ve got a draft of this spreadsheet, circulate it to your supervisors in advance of your preparing-for-the-oral-exam meeting. When you meet, supervisors can help you go through the list and provide additional guidance on ways to approach responses to critiques in the oral.

Note that this table is a tool for you to help make sense of the examiners’ reports and prepare in the lead up to the oral exam. More about how to use this table is at the end of the next section.

The oral exam

Your opening 15-minute presentation

At the start of the oral exam, after the chair has welcomed everyone and discussed the general process, you will be invited to make your opening remarks (at our university, these are usually limited to fifteen minutes). In your opening remarks, what you want to do is: 1) thank the examiners for their careful consideration, 2) tell them the story of your thesis (how it came to be what it is, what it accomplishes, and why it matters), and then 3) end by explicitly welcoming the ensuing discussion and questions as a valuable opportunity to improve your work.

Discussing each of these, in turn:

First, re-read the opening lines of “Approaching examiners’ reports…”, above. Gratitude should be the opening note you sound in the oral exam. You will never again in your life have this many people focused solely on you and your work (even if you write a book, you’ll just get peer review reports—not the additional benefit of getting to talk to those people for 2–3 hours about your work in person and explain why you wrote what you wrote). Even if you disagree with some of their comments/critiques; even if you think one or two of them don’t “get” your work, express gratitude for their careful consideration of your work—they really do intend well (in my experience).

Second, I usually advise students to think of this opening presentation as a chance to tell the story of your thesis. Of course you will want to ensure clear statements about the thesis’s key arguments and original contributions to knowledge, and especially why it matters, but this is also a chance to contextualise the thesis. This is a chance to narrate why and how the work they’ve all read came to be what it is. It’s quite common for examiners to simply be curious about some things that may not be explained in the thesis: they’ll have questions about certain decisions you made to zig instead of zag, why you went here and not there, or how you ended up in this research area in the first place.

Of course, there are endlessly different ways to tell a story, including the story of your thesis. Take your cue for what parts to emphasise by what’s in the reports. For example:

If a common question or critique emerged across the examiners’ reports about an aspect of the thesis (for instance something in the research design: where you went, who you talked to, how you talked to them, what theoretical concept was centred, what archives you consulted; or some key consideration that they thought was missing; or even why the thesis was structured like it was), and you can work an explanation of this into “the story of your thesis,” do it! I’ve seen examiners’ concerns about something melt away when they hear the backstory of why the student chose to do it like they did. Just hearing that the decisions were carefully considered and that the student had good reasoning behind them can sometimes appease examiners, such that things they raised as big concerns in their reports are no longer concerns (or even mentioned) in the recommendations for final revisions.
Sometimes, if it’s not clear in the thesis, examiners will want to know more about you and how you came to do this research (at least in my field of Pacific Studies, people’s personal stakes in the work usually matter). I recall two of my past PhD students who both produced theoretically nuanced, ethnographically rich, and immaculately written theses, but both chose, for various reasons, to give minimal details about themselves in their theses. In both cases, multiple examiners came back asking them for more discussion of their relationship to the research topic. Partially this was about ethically disclosing their positionality, but partially it was also curiosity: how did someone who appears, on the surface, to be so different from this research context come to be studying this specific thing? So when one of these students crafted his opening presentation, he devoted some time to telling his coming-to-the-thesis backstory (aspects of which I’d never even heard, as his supervisor) and examiners seemed delighted to hear it: it was like, Ahhh, I get it now! And in the end, they didn’t even ask him to add any of that extra biographical detail into the final thesis—they were just curious and wanted to know.
In contrast to #2 just above, many of my other supervisees include quite a lot about their personal biography and relationship to the research in their theses (I’ve had at least two that incorporate auto-ethnography as a specific method). In these cases, examiners probably aren’t going to ask for more about you and your relationship to the project, but they will be curious about other aspects of how the thesis came to be what it is. Look for questions in the reports that you might be able to address (in a positive, implicit, way) in your opening narration of why and how the thesis came to be what it is.

The important thing in this opening 15-minute presentation is to keep the focus on what you did do in the thesis. The most effective opening presentations tell that story of what the thesis did accomplish, and why and how it came to be in the form it is, in a way that implicitly answers some of the examiners’ questions. Narrating the decisions you made, and why, will implicitly explain why you chose not to research or write the thesis in another way. Where relevant, feel free to lightly work in explicit acknowledgement of things the examiners said they liked into this story (c.f. Row 1 Column 3 of the spreadsheet above, where it says “Given its importance, I was gratified by Professor Y’s and Dr Z’s commendations of how the thesis introduces and uses the concept.”)

You can weave more explicit mentions of examiners’ critiques into your opening presentation as well, but keep the main thrust of your presentation to the positive work you did, and see if there’s ways to frame (what examiners’ identified as) shortcomings or gaps in the thesis as by-products of some of its strengths, or the result of decisions that were well-considered and necessary. For instance, see Row 3 Column 3 in the example spreadsheet table above: in that example, all of the examiners (and the student) agreed that the thesis conclusion was too short. The student’s opening presentation foregrounded the rich, original contributions made in the thesis’s substantive chapters and thanked examiners for their commendations of those chapters (e.g. leading with the positive story of what the thesis did do well), and then acknowledged that the rich substantive chapters strained the word limit and regrettably left little space for a Conclusion.

I strongly advise rehearsing your opening presentation with supervisors to get both substance and tone right. What you don’t want to do in this 15 minutes is foreground examiners’ critiques first and then respond to them point-by-point with an explanation. It’s common for students to think that’s what they should do in their oral exam or oral defence presentation, but don’t do that: it sounds defensive and sets a combative tone for the oral exam. (So don’t go down your spreadsheet point-by-point! That spreadsheet was to help you process the reports and plan effective responses).

Finally, be sure to end your presentation by explicitly welcoming the ensuing discussion and questions as a valuable opportunity to improve your work. This last bit is key: by inviting their critiques, you actually retain more power in this situation. Examiners will visibly relax and feel more comfortable about raising questions, and the tone is more likely to feel like an engaged scholarly conversation rather than an inquisition. That’s what you want. 🙂

Some final reflection on examiners

You may be wondering, how the heck did these people come to sit in the seat of judgement on my work?

Examiners are ultimately nominated by supervisors. Your supervisors usually consult each other and will have varying degrees of responsibility for the final examiners. I can’t speak for all supervisors, but everyone I’ve ever co-supervised with has sought the same qualities in examiners: people with some expertise relevant to the thesis who will be rigourous and kind. We want them to hold students to a high standard and help ensure that the student’s final published thesis can withstand scholarly scrutiny anywhere, but we also hope that their criticisms will be voiced in a generous and supportive way. In Pacific Studies we’ve been fortunate to have many rigourous and kind examiners over the years, but occasionally we’ll see an examination report that surprises us.

Pacific Studies is a pretty small field (big ocean, tiny field), so we often know the “Pacific Studies” examiners personally and have expectations of what kind of examiner they will be. However, sometimes a colleague we think we know well surprises us when they put their “examiner hat” on. At other times, the student’s topic or the unavailability of people we initially ask necessitates that we get an examiner who supervisors don’t know personally and/or don’t have a sense of as an examiner—in these cases we always hold our breath a bit and hope that they turn out to be great, rigourous, kind examiners.

So, if the ideal type of examiner (and, I assure you, the vast majority of past examiners of PASI theses are this way) is rigourous, engaged deeply with the thesis, and able to relay comments and critique in a kind and generous (but firm) manner…what are the other types? Here’s some characters I’ve encountered:

The off-in-some-other-field examiner: this is the “one of these things is not like the others” examiner—their report bears little relationship to the other two, and in your (and your supervisors’) opinion bears little relationship to your work. Parts of their report might seem downright wacky, like huh? What the…?

If this person is the overseas examiner, YAY! This is the best case scenario for an oddball examiner because the overseas examiner does not attend the exam and the examiners who are there (internal and NZ examiner) have discretion over how they incorporate the overseas examiners’ questions and whether to include any of the overseas examiner’s requests into the final required revisions. If the overseas examiner’s report was really wacky, trust that everyone present at your exam (the internal and NZ examiners, the chair, your supervisors) are aware of it. They will have to be diplomatic and professional in their comments about it, but they know. The examiners who are present will still have to pose some of the overseas examiner’s questions (they are required to), so do your best to remain poised and professional also as you generously and diplomatically address the irrelevance of the overseas examiner’s questions to the work you did.
If this person is the internal examiner, take a deep breath and know that you will get through this. The internal examiner wields a greater amount of power over the very last stage of the thesis process because they are usually the person responsible for overseeing and approving the final (post-exam) revisions (your revised thesis will not go back out to the overseas and NZ examiner). Again, remain poised, professional, and diplomatic in the exam, and be prepared to do whatever is the minimum required to appease this person if their requests get included in your final required revisions. For instance, they might want you to include a new section that the other examiners (and you, and your supervisors) think is totally unnecessary, but they’ve managed to get this included in the list of required revisions. Unfortunately, you’ve just got to suck it up and do enough to satisfy them. Remember, the thesis is a means to an end goal (your PhD). If oddball examiner is gonna throw up this one last hurdle for you at the end of your marathon, take a deep breath and do what you need to do to get yourself over it.
If this person is the NZ examiner, be professional, poised, and diplomatic when responding to their comments in the exam. See what, if any, of their odd requests get included in the final required revisions. If some of them do get included, you will need to do something to show the internal examiner that you diligently attended to their requests, but you may not need to do as much as you would if the oddball requests were coming from the internal examiner themself.

The I-actually-think-this-thesis-is-really-good-but-I’m-having-a-bad-day (or) I-actually-think-this-thesis-is-really-good-but-I’m-just-too-tired-to-write-kindly examiner. This is the examiner that buries some stinging little comments in a report that otherwise mostly contains praise for the thesis (see Professor X in the example spreadsheet, above). Developing a spreadsheet (as advised above) will help put this examiner’s comments in perspective. Try your best to look past their little barbs: those ouchy bits may not be representative of examiners’ comments as a whole, and (funnily enough) they may not even accurately represent this particular examiner’s overall estimation of your thesis. I’ve encountered variations of this type of examiner several times: students dwell on the stinging critiques in the report and assume the examiner hates their thesis, and then are shocked when the same examiner sums up the thesis as excellent and is totally pleasant and encouraging in the actual exam. Sometimes people are tired, or annoyed about something when they write their reports, and things come out more harshly than they intend or realize. Or, due to time pressure, they had to send the first draft of their report rather than the draft they would’ve sent if they had time to sleep on it, go back in, and soften their language. Focus on crafting well-considered responses to the useful and productive elements of examiners’ critiques, and try not to focus on the stinging or ungenerous ways the critiques may have been delivered.

The Your-thesis-makes-me-think-about-all-these-things-I’m-interested-in-in-my own-work-that-I’m-about-to-tell-you-about examiner. This type seems to be less interested in engaging your work on its own terms and discussing what your thesis actually did, and rather more interested in using your work as a jumping off point to talk about their own scholarly interests. There’s a couple variations of this type:

The easier-to-handle variation will talk a lot about their own research interests in their report, and want to talk more about them in the oral exam, but will not insist that you do a lot of revisions to make your final thesis more like their work. This type might be annoying (if you are actually wanting them to focus on your thesis for two hours), but they are ultimately benign because they aren’t going to put up additional hurdles at the end of your marathon. In some ways, this type of examiner’s response is a form of flattery: they are reading your work like they might read an exciting new book in their field, and it’s sparking off all these ideas for their own work that they are keen to talk about. They are treating this examination as a chance to have a stimulating scholarly conversation. Be diplomatic and pleasant, engage with them, gently guide the conversation back to your thesis in your responses if you need to, and trust the chair to do this as well.
The more difficult version of this is an examiner who then insists on revisions that will align your thesis more with the project they would’ve done, or are doing, rather than respecting your thesis on its own terms. The extent of the challenge this examiner poses may depend on whether this person is the overseas, NZ, or internal examiner. See points 1, 2, and 3 from the off-in-some-other-field examiner above.

The This-is-my-first-examiner’s role-and-I-think-I’m-supposed-to-treat-the-thesis-like-the-articles-we-savaged-in-my-graduate-seminars examiner. This person may think their job is to be a finely-honed machine for dispensing incisive, exhaustive critique that tears apart what someone else has built, rather than approaching examination as an opportunity to support and strengthen another person’s scholarship. Many competitive graduate programmes in the US, for instance, foster an ethos where tearing apart someone else’s work is equated with competence. If an examiner has only recently emerged from that type of environment, and not yet had a lot of experience publishing their work and supervising postgrads (both of which tend to make you a bit more generous towards imperfect texts, I think), they may think that “doing a good job” means being as relentlessly critical as possible. This is enough of a “thing” that some supervisors deliberately avoid asking very junior academics to serve as examiners. But sometimes the niche subject matter of the thesis, combined with the unavailability of the one or two more senior scholars with relevant expertise, means that your supervisors do approach a first-time examiner and hope for the best. If you do receive a report that offers unrelenting critique of all the thesis’s faults without attentiveness also to its strengths, it may just be that the examiner mistakenly thinks this is what is expected of them. Your supervisors (and the middle column of the table strategy I suggest above) can help you to keep some perspective on this report.

I’m sure there are other less-than-ideal types out there, but these are the ones I’ve encountered. But as I said before, by far the vast majority of examiners I’ve experienced are the kind we hope for: rigourous but kind, deeply engaged in the work of the thesis, and intent on helping you make the final published thesis as strong as it can be.

Best wishes for your preparation!

Dr. April K Henderson
Pacific Studies
Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Ethnographic writing intensive: Five activities for the fieldwork-to-writing transition

Recently I have been thinking about how I learnt to transition from fieldwork to writing. Like many graduate students, mid-way through my thesis research I found myself with a stack of notebooks and detailed fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and hundreds of photos (among other things), but I wasn’t sure how to transform this material into ethnographic writing. The shift from gathering data to crafting compelling stories requires a different set of skills that aren’t always explicitly taught in methods courses.

Over the years, as I have supervised graduate students and taught courses on ethnographic methods, I have noticed others struggling with this fieldwork-to-writing transition. In this post I share five activities I have developed to help with that transition. The activities are modelled after the best writing course I have ever done (“Unstuck: The Art of Productivity” with Kel Weinhold from The Professor Is In) and draw on prompts in Kirin Narayan’s excellent book Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012) as well as my lecture notes from courses I have taught (including ANTH 312 Creative Ethnographic Practices).

These activities form an ethnographic writing intensive designed to strengthen your ethnographic writing practice. They address common challenges I see students facing: how to separate your thoughts from your writing; how to structure a piece of work; how to start with participant perspectives, how to write yourself into the narrative, how to write an ethnographic story.

Activity One: Investigate your thoughts with The Professor Is In

I recommend starting here, with a blog post by writing coach Kel Weinhold from The Professor Is In, because I have found it helpful in dealing with negative thoughts (hello imposter syndrome, my old friend!) in my own writing. This approach has helped me separate my thoughts from my writing process.

Tasks:

Read this blog post: https://theprofessorisin.com/2022/06/07/just-one-thing-investigate-your-thoughts/
The blog post suggests that writers sometimes have thoughts that feel completely true but actually interfere with making progress. As Kel writes, “The issue is not whether or not we have unhelpful thoughts; the issue is what we do with thoughts” (Weinhold, 2022)
See if any of the examples in the post resonate with your own writing experiences
If so, work through the investigative process in Kel’s blog post

Reflective question:

What, if anything, did you find useful in this approach that you might carry forward in your own writing practice?

Activity Two: Reverse outline a model piece of writing

I first learnt about reverse outlines through “Unstuck” and since then have recommended doing them to just about all of my graduate students.

For this activity, you are going to create a reverse outline of a model of the kind of writing you are currently working on (e.g. a MA thesis chapter, a journal article). This is a technique I regularly use myself. Usually people create reverse outlines of their own work, but I like to do it with examples of other peoples’ work so I can get a feel for how the piece of writing is structured and what each paragraph does for their argument and overall flow of the writing.

Tasks:

Read this blog post on reverse outlines: https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/reverseoutlines/
Read another blog post on reverse outlines: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/reverse_outlining.html
Choose a model piece of writing to work with (e.g. a chapter from a thesis your supervisor recommends, or an article from the journal you want to write for)
Sit down and read the piece from start to finish. Just read it; don’t take notes or do any highlighting
Read the piece again with a pen. Number each paragraph as you re-read
On a fresh piece of paper, write down the number of each paragraph and a sentence or phrase that describes what the author is accomplishing in that paragraph (e.g. this paragraph introduces and defines key concepts; explains the purpose of the chapter; lists the central research questions; situates the chapter in relation to other literature; etc)
Optional: add a star next to the paragraph numbers that you think are doing especially important work, or that you particularly like
Then, look at a draft you are currently working on to see where you might use elements of the model piece in your own work (e.g. ‘I need to have a paragraph that explains how this chapter contributes to my overall thesis argument’)

Reflective question:

What was useful about this activity? Might you use the reverse outline process on your own writing?

Activity Three: Starting on the ground

“The term “ethnography” has its roots in the Greek words ethnos (folk, the people) and grapho (to write). Ethnography is to write about people, society, and/or culture, but it is much more than writing. It is also a method and a theory. As a method, ethnography is an embodied, empirical, and experiential field-based way of knowing centered around participant observation. Ethnographic research requires participation, not just observation. It is to participate in rather than just observe the daily life, logics, rhythms, and contradictions of a cultural group or society. As such, it requires discipline and commitment beyond what is visible to someone not trained in ethnographic methods. As a theory, ethnography is to start on the ground, with the concepts that ground people’s lives, worldviews, actions, and words in particular ways to that community.”

McGranahan, Carole. 2018. “Ethnography.” In The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by H. Callan, Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2262

This activity takes its cue from the first lecture I give in my Creative Ethnographic Practices class. In it, I discuss Carole McGranahan’s point that theory, in ethnography, means to start “on the ground”, with what your participants have to say. Rather than starting with theories developed by others, ethnographic writing tends to ask: what’s going on here? What are my participants telling me about how their world works?

Tasks:

Choose a paragraph from a draft you are working on
What does the paragraph start with? If it starts with someone else’s theory, can you see a way to rewrite it so your participant’s words and explanations guide your analysis?
Note that not every single paragraph needs to do this; the activity prompts you to show how you are building understanding inductively, starting “on the ground” with what your participants said

Reflective question:

What did you notice about the difference between starting with other people’s theories versus starting with participant explanations? How might this approach change the way you build arguments in your writing?

Activity Four: Writing yourself into the text

This activity is drawn from two sources. The first is a lecture I give on autoethnography (a methodology many of our students are drawn to), where I discuss Leon Anderson’s argument that analytic autoethnography requires “narrative visibility of the researcher’s self” (2006, 378).[1] Autoethnographic writing requires you to be visible as a researcher while being in conversation with your participants. Ethnographic writing, too, often includes the presence of the researcher to show how their knowledge was produced. Since dialogue can be a generative way of illustrating key insights from your research while showing the relational nature of knowledge-production, the second source I have drawn on is Kirin Narayan’s chapter “Voice” from Alive in the Writing. This chapter has an excellent discussion of how to “build texts from conversations” (page 69 Kindle edition), and in my course on Creative Ethnographic Methods I ended each lecture with in-class writing prompts (like the ones below) based on Narayan’s work.

[1] Anderson, Leon. 2006. “Analytic Autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35 (4): 373–95.

Tasks:

Read “Chapter Four: Voice” from Narayan’s Alive in the Writing
Writing activity 1: Locate a quote from one of your participants on the issue you’re writing about and experiment with working just a line or two into an introduction (adapted from the prompt on page 73)
Writing activity 2: Write an extended conversation in which one of your participants explains a concept to you. Include your questions in the dialogue (adapted from the prompt on page 75)
Writing activity 3: Revisit one of your interview transcriptions, using different colour pens to highlight (a) the main questions you asked, (b) your subsidiary questions, and (c) your participant’s answers (adapted from the prompt on page 77)
Writing activity 4: Draw on the interview transcript you looked at for the previous activity to create a 2-page dialogue between you and a participant that reveals information or insights central to your project. Pay attention to the textures, cadences, and intonations of voices, including your own (adapted from the prompt on page 92)

Reflective question:

After experimenting with these different ways of writing yourself in to your work via dialogue, what did you notice about how the presence of your questions and responses changes the way insights emerge in your writing? How might dialogue work differently than summary or analysis for revealing what you learned in interviews?

Activity Five: Ethnographic storytelling

“Focusing on stories that have been co-created enables me to work on the ethnographic narrative and its process of coming into life through storytelling. In starting with the creation of ethnographic stories and story lines I am following an argument by Soyini D. Madison; she has criticised the tendency to avoid transparency in oneʼs own ethnographic storytelling techniques by hiding behind the writing of others and showing off (with the theory of others) in order to give more weight to oneʼs own ethnography while hiding possible flaws. She observes that rather than taking guidance from and trusting the stories, instead “the researcher becomes so enamored with […] impressing colleagues that honoring the narrative becomes less important than acrobatics of abstraction and theoretical word play” (Madison 2014, 394)”.

Bönisch-Brednich, Brigitte. 2018. “Writing the Ethnographic Story: Constructing Narrative Out of Narratives.” Fabula 59 (1-2): 8–26. Page 12.

This activity is based on a lecture I give on ethnographic storytelling. I begin that lecture by talking about a blog post Carole McGranahan wrote in 2015, where she writes: “What is defective is how we miss the power of stories and storytellers even as well tell them. We tell stories to get to the point, to make our points. We miss that the stories are the point” (my emphasis added). McGranahan puts forward an argument similar to the one that Madison makes in the quote from Bönisch-Brednich’s article cited above (which I also discuss in that lecture): that we use our participant’s voices to make our own theoretical arguments (often drawing on the theory of others) rather than letting their stories carry the weight of ethnographic insight.

Tasks:

Choose a story that one of your participants shared with you that you found especially memorable (perhaps one you are working with in a current piece of writing). You will work with this story in three ways
Writing activity 1: write the story as if you are reporting it for a newspaper, using the journalistic who-what-when-where-why-how questions and describing the basic sequence of events
Writing activity 2: write the story as your participant might (see the ethnographic vignette that Bönisch-Brednich shares on pages 12-13 of her article for an example)
Writing activity 3: Following Bönisch-Brednich’s article or McGranahan’s blog post, write the story for your draft, discussing what it shows about broader patterns in your research and connecting it with relevant theory. This is how it becomes ethnographic storytelling

Reflective question:

After writing the same story three different ways, what did you notice about how each approach revealed different aspects of the experience? How did writing activity 3 differ from simply adding analysis to writing activity 1?

I designed these activities with individual work in mind, but they might also be useful starting points for a ‘shut up and write‘ session with peers. If you try one or more of them, please let me know your thoughts in the comments – I would love to hear from you!

New Zealand-born and internationally raised

I am delighted to welcome writer Cileme Venkateswar to anthropod. This is the third post in my series on doing fieldwork with kids, and in it Cileme (who I introduced in Part II of this series) reflects on what it was like to be the kid of an anthropologist who travelled a lot to do fieldwork.

You grow up differently as a kid of an academic, that’s just kind of a given. There’s a certain drive you have, a desire to know more about the world, a determination to succeed in the things you find joy in that I’ve only ever seen so fiercely in children whose parents have similar professions.

But being the kid of an anthropologist in particular? Now that’s a whole other ball game.

I can safely say that I wouldn’t be who I am now in any way whatsoever without my mother’s influence as an anthropologist. I’ve learned some of the most important life lessons I carry with me as a now almost 21 year old from the anthropological teachings I witnessed and the research I was privy to as a child. Growing up, it was just me and my mum and so when it came to her doing fieldwork, there weren’t a whole lot of options for what I would do. It was simple. I’d just go with her.

Travelling from a young age is its own lesson. Before the age of 15, I had been to New Zealand (obviously), Australia, India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the UK, the USA, Nepal, Portugal, Germany, France and quite possibly more that I don’t even remember. It ingrained in me from a very young age the vastness of the world and how much more there was out there. I was surrounded by so many different languages and cultures, heritage and traditions that even if I didn’t understand them, I was immediately curious about how their lives differed from my own and how much diversity existed around the globe.

Kids aren’t inherently patient, not in the slightest, but annual 12 hour plane rides, long taxi commutes to various places in numerous cities, waiting in long queues, having to amuse myself for several hours during book launches, research interviews etc., certainly helped improve what little patience I had as a child! It also produced a remarkably active imagination. I learned to sit in my own corner and make up stories in my head. I carted my imaginary friends around the world with me, having my own adventures in each new location we visited. I began a growing collection of books picked up cheaply in roadside book stalls and airport shops that helped foster a love for storytelling, complex characters and literature, a love that remains today as I study English and Creative Writing at university.

But one of the things I’ve only recently started to appreciate having learned solely from the situation of my mother’s work in academia, is my ability to converse with anyone, especially adults. Adults speak to kids a very particular way, stick to a select few conversational topics and often use that annoying, high pitched, slightly condescending tone of voice, laughing at the interesting and often naive answers they receive to their questions. Children rarely notice, but as a child of an academic, you’re constantly surrounded by adults in scenarios of meetings, pot luck dinners, fieldwork, or random encounters during a normal day. The asking about school, the ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’ and the interest in what books you’re reading grows old pretty quick when you have several pot lucks a semester and you’re encountering the same adults each time. For a while, it’s easy to be amused by the luxury of getting to watch Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network on Sky TV, or running around playing tag outside with the other kids. But eventually, it reaches around 10 o’clock in the evening and the only shows on the television are reruns of episodes you’ve already seen, half the other kids are either asleep or have gone home, the high schoolers are bored of babysitting you and have taken to answering questions about their own subjects and university applications, and you meanwhile want another slice of the pavlova on the dessert table but unfortunately, there’s a group of lecturers from a department you’ve never heard of standing there and you have no segue into asking them to help you reach the cake tin. It’s around that point that you realise you’ve got to bridge the gap between child and adult and just find a way to talk to them without them looking down at you like a silly little kid.

Somewhere between the ages of 8 and 11, I suddenly gained the ability to proficiently and fluently interact with adults outside of the regular ‘child questions’, whether I knew them or not and whether we had common ground or not. I talked about travel, about what they might be researching and what my mum was researching, about where in the world they’d been and where in the world I’d been, about the things I didn’t understand in the books I read, about the stories I was writing, about whether I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist — anything and everything I could hold an almost adult conversation about. It never occurred to me that this was a ‘skill’ of any sort until I was much older. Only in the last few years of my life have I realised that people my age don’t just hold conversation with adults much older than them (even now with so much more to talk about), that it isn’t normal to be able to go up to a perfect stranger and find common ground, sparking a friendship. I’ve had so many friends pull me aside after a seamless conversation with a tutor or a lecturer and whisper ‘How did you do that? How did you know what to say?’ It’s so much easier now, as I can converse about politics, history, literature, climate change, generational differences, activism … but it all stemmed from the ability I decided to cultivate as a child.

Some of the things that have shaped me the most profoundly are the experiences I’ve had because I accompanied my mother in so many aspects of her job. I’ve played soccer with boys living in slums in India even though they didn’t speak a word of English nor I a word of Bengali. I’ve spent half my childhood wandering around university campuses playing make believe and dragging those same invisible friends to every country I had the privilege of visiting. I’ve been changed and impacted by each and every culture and experience I was enveloped in and would be so much lesser of a person without it all. This was all a part of my life out of necessity — me going with my mother was the only option either of us had for when she had to travel or go to research. But to any and all academics out there with kids: honestly. Even if you have other arrangements you could make, don’t rule out taking your kids with you, especially before they reach high school. Getting to see the world as a kid is unlike anything else, and they learn lessons that are invaluable and unteachable in any other circumstance. Believe me. We become better people for it.

Doing fieldwork with kids: Part II

Thanks to some amazing role models in the School of People, Environment and Planning at Massey University, where I studied, I have always known that it is possible (although not easy) to be a parent/grandparent and an academic. What I wasn’t quite so sure about was how, exactly, you went about doing ethnographic fieldwork with kids in tow. As an undergraduate student I read ethnographies written by anthropologists who had their families with them while conducting fieldwork – including Philippe Bourgois’ In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, Annette Weiner’s The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea, and Margaret Trawick’s Notes on Love in a Tamil Family – but I don’t recall many classroom discussions about the relationship between carework and fieldwork. This changed once I started my PhD. A number of my fellow PhD researchers juggled mothering and grandparenting with fieldwork, and have since written about how their experiences influenced their research (e.g., Lesley Reed’s thesis ‘What is this thing called Grandparenting? The social, economic and political influences on the role in New Zealand‘, or see the list Kelly Dombroski has here on her blog). My first glimpse into what it was like to actually do fieldwork with your child present was during a research trip to Kolkata, India, in late 2005.

Continue reading “Doing fieldwork with kids: Part II” →

When Worlds Collide: A tale of parenting and an optimistic undergraduate

I am pleased to welcome guest blogger Jess Thompson to anthropod. In this post Jess shares her experiences of being a parent and university student, adding to our conversation about carework at university.

I wouldn’t say I’m a typical young woman at the mere age of 22; I threw myself into the world of academia at 18 years old like most my age, but I’d already moved to and worked in London for five months after leaving high school. After 2 ½ years at Victoria University I got on a plane and didn’t look back, ventured to Samoa, and volunteered on a development assignment before returning to finish my final papers for my degree this year. En-route, things took a sharp turn with the arrival of my son (Moo) 8 ½ months ago. Three papers short on my Bachelors in Development and International Relations, suddenly I was faced with a situation I had not anticipated; do I work my life around my son, work my son around my life, or just throw it all away and become a full time mum?

Today, the result of finding a middle ground between the former two options exists. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than I could have hoped for. Moo and I are not a nuclear family; I am a co-parent with his dad, a system in place since he was born, and as circumstances arise and Moo gets older, our situation changes as needed. I study part-time, three generations of my family occupy the house I live in, and I’ve not only returned to my volunteer role at GirlGuiding New Zealand as a Ranger Leader (girls aged between 12 ½ and 17), but also taken on an additional role of being a Training Assistant, on the pathway to becoming a Trainer for other Leaders. I live my life as I choose, and integrate Moo into it as required if he is in my care.

From an academic point of view, things have been generally speaking, relatively straight forward. I make the most of the time Moo is with his dad as study time and work care arrangements around lectures and tutorials. But if there was ever a piece of advice read here: you have to be a little crazy and whole lot of adaptable to take an intense 5 week summer paper with a two month old. I would sit at my desk and be working on assignments or catching up on readings with Moo lying next to me playing, or almost begging him to go down for a sleep so I could get an hour’s peace to get part of an essay knocked off.

Photo 1.jpeg — This was one method of essay writing; Moo fell asleep in his bouncinette once while I was sprawling through books trying to work on an assignment on the floor.

A lot of the time I find myself switching between my ‘mum’ headspace and my ‘student’ headspace so things can get done. To my classmates I am a regular student just like them, and it’s only when I talk to people that they realise and sit in slight astonishment that I am juggling study with raising an infant. As an undergrad and Moo being his age it is impractical to bring him to lectures meaning I am in constant reliance of my support networks to look after him. Over time, things have certainly become more manageable; I sit and write this on the couch while he eats crackers, stares at the cat, and pulls half the contents of the bottom of the DVD rack out and throws them on the floor. Needless to say he has now started working out how to move, and I spent much of my exam prep this trimester hoping he wasn’t going to learn how to crawl BEFORE my exam.

Photo 2.jpeg — This was Moo as I was writing this piece; he shuffled off the towel, is secretly a gymnast with legs like that, and was trying to pick up a small piece of cracker on the floor. Had also thrown his homemade drum away made out of an old formula tin.

GirlGuiding has been a part of my life for over 15 years now, and the concept of leader’s daughters in units with me has been quite normal. A lot of leaders are typically mums, however being so young means many of the young leaders I work with are usually students or full time employed, maybe with a serious partner but no kids. Suddenly I’m an anomaly; 22 years old, well experienced, young leader, facilitating/attending/presenting trainings WITH an under 5! I emphasise with here, as in the course of his life, Moo has already come to weekend trainings, is down for two school holiday sessions coming up, and I’m sure a few more in the next few years.

Photo 3.jpeg — I posted this photo on Facebook on the Sunday morning of my first weekend training, captioned: “There should be a blanket patch labelled ‘I survived a GirlGuide weekend as a trainer with a small child.”

Being a new trainer, plus learning the ropes with a very dependent young child makes anyone’s stress levels skyrocket. Attending a weekend training, let alone facilitating one, is another kettle of fish when it comes to having Moo coming along; sometimes I wonder who has more stuff packed in the car, him or everyone else. By the time all his clothes, port-a-cot, food, some toys, and pushchair are packed, then somehow it’s my personal bits, plus resources needed to bring along and so on to pack; there’s an entire house in a small car minus the kitchen sink and a fridge almost. (Although I’m getting really good at car tetris.) A conference I attended led me to be ‘that crazy woman pushing a pushchair up and down outside to get the baby to sleep’. Part of one weekend training involved sitting at the back of the room listening to presentations quietly, so to avoid the awkwardness of the occasional squeal or baby noise we sat at the back of the room listening while I bribed Moo with gingernuts on a blanket on the floor. That same weekend I was presenting two morning sessions; Moo was happily sitting watching me present when all of a sudden he fell down from sitting up and absolutely lost the plot while I was mid-sentence. Bringing such young children has become a rarity over time but now there are a couple of us who for one reason or another need to bring children along always/on occasion and that these other little people are a major part of our lives beyond GirlGuiding and they do need to come along and be involved in the training sphere sometimes. Bringing Moo along certainly has its challenges, but he has never hindered the ability to get things done.

Looking to the future is a hard and difficult one. My passions for a very long time have laid with the Pacific and Development, and really making a difference in the world. Once upon a time I saw myself ten years from now potentially returning to the academic sphere having ventured overseas once again and gained some real-world experience. Now as I save what I can from my benefit each week so that in the long run I can afford to buy my first home (big dreams I know, but you can’t give up on your dreams entirely) I’m faced with a future either working within the NGO sector locally for a salary less than ideal doing something I love, or adapt my skills into something else and start a career path down a different track, while committing my spare time into my passions. One day I’d love to return to the academic sphere to add to my study in a postgraduate form, but only when things are a little more stable.

Regardless of where the future is headed, there is one thing I know for sure. We cannot let children hold us back from chasing what we want to do, sometimes the better option is to let our children come along in the chase. From my perspective there’s a lot of occasions where we forget that other people have lives beyond the portion of their lives we know them from, and sometimes these intersect, and other times they are reason things do not happen immediately. Adaptability and flexibility is key, not only from a mother’s point of view but from an everybody point of view. I praise people like Lorena who have the ability to combine their interests with their children and also their professional life. As the concept of professional work changes and how it is represented, from flexi-hours to working from home, surely it is time to bring the sphere of children and where they fit in the bigger picture into it as well. What if we looked at others like real complex humans, with histories and stories untold, friendships and relationships we may not know about, and a vast array of experiences and needs; would our methods of recognising care, how we treat people, and how we go about and participate in our careers and lives differently? I certainly hope so.

Doing the squiggly writing – a guest blog post

I am delighted to welcome guest blogger Charlotte Fielding, who agreed to write this piece following my earlier post on Doing fieldwork with kids: Part I. These posts are part of an important conversation I think we need to have to make the carework many of us do more visible at university.

I joined the world of academia at 28 years old; a full decade older than most first year university students. I had a bunch of stuff to do first, like getting married at 21, becoming a solo mother at 24, and trying my hand at lucrative careers like being a musician, a photographer, and a small business owner. When I finally made the decision to go to university it was because I wanted a career rather than a job. I no longer wanted to try and make money from my creative pursuits, and I was ready to commit to something long term. I was exhausted from years of financial insecurity and frugality as the sole-earner, child-carer, and responsibility-bearer for my little household. I wanted to knuckle down and find a more stable and defined career path.

But I had someone else to consider, and what did my son want? Me.

In an effort to balance our needs, I decided to get the education I’d always wanted rather than go back to full time work at that point. I’m working towards improving our lives long-term but in the short-term my university schedule allows me the flexibility to pick him up from school most days and do fun things together…

Even though he’s sometimes dejected when I get to school and interrupt his play time.

…or bring him with me, or stay home when he’s sick without having my pay docked or letting my colleagues down. It also allows me to include him in my world on a regular basis, something which most workplaces don’t encourage or allow. I have no idea if my university has a policy regarding children on campus; I don’t want to know so I’m not going to ask!

There are such high expectations of constant productivity in the workplace and other institutions that children usually aren’t welcome in those environments: they make noise and have needs and can be unpredictable. And unless an event is specified as child or family friendly, it’s usually not. These attitudes unfortunately have the result of not only excluding children from ordinary or extraordinary experiences, but it excludes their parents as well. Particularly if, as in my case, you’re a solo parent and you just miss out if you can’t take your child with you. I don’t have the money for babysitters, nor do I have a partner to share the daily care. And everyone else misses out too: on opportunities to practice tolerance and kindness when children are disruptive, or the opportunity to meet a cool little human, or experience the genuine infectious joy when a child laughs, or the feeling of being part of a community where people of all ages are valued.

I want to see our society evolve (or return) to one where children are welcome everywhere it is safe for them to be. The only way I know how to do this is to simply ignore the unwritten rules, and take him where I want to go, including university. He’s attended a few lectures per week with me for the last year.

Here he is plugged into the tablet during a lecture. Thank goodness I bought that
when I was still working; I had no idea it would be such an effective mute button.

So far all of my lecturers have been happy for him to accompany me, with some making a particular effort to welcome both of us. I think my favourite moment was when he laughed out loud at what he was watching on the tablet for about 30 seconds, oblivious to the fact that the entire class could hear him, and my lecturer got the giggles. I was highly embarrassed at the time, but now when I look back on it I think it was a wonderful. In my cognitive psychology course I “encouraged” him to sit on the floor under the desk instead of on the seat as we weren’t allowed devices in the first six rows of the lecture theatre due to research into the effects of the distraction on grades. He thought it was super fun to hide under the desk.

Sometimes he gets bored at uni and does things like this. I’m OK with this. Apparently it’s good for kids to be bored. I’m not going to cite that claim because this is a blog and I don’t have to.

Mostly it’s been good, and he’s been good. I’m lucky that he’s old enough to behave (mostly), he sleeps well so I’m not sleep deprived (except when I procrastinate an assignment and stay up late finishing it), and he can entertain himself. As a parent and an adult student I’m motivated, and (reasonably) disciplined. I’m not doing it because it’s the natural progression from high school – that was a long time ago! Nor am I doing it because my parents think I should. I’m doing it for me. I don’t have as many hours in the week as my fellow students who don’t have children, so I have to focus harder in the hours I do have. I’ve spent most of my life as a night owl but these days I usually get up at 5am to study in the peaceful morning hours by myself before I have to get him up and ready for school.

The major downfall of studying with a young child is that I think I could get much better grades if I didn’t have the drain on my energy and time associated with parenting, and I struggle to come to terms with that. I want to do postgraduate study so I need to get good grades. Sometimes I’ve missed lectures because he’s too tired to be trusted to behave, or I just don’t have as many hours to work on assignments as much as I should. However it makes the As I do get that much more satisfying.

There’s also the social downside: I never really lived the young student lifestyle and find it hard to relate to most of the students in my class, who are mostly teenagers. I’ve made one good friend so far – another mature student. I overhear conversations about party games, and happenings in the hall of residence, and I don’t even know what they’re talking about. I feel like I can relate more to the faculty members, but I’m an undergraduate student, so there’s a divide there too.

I’m still financially vulnerable, and that makes me feel guilty and worried. I wasn’t an anxious person before I became a solo parent; now I have constant low level anxiety, and it’s almost entirely money related.

Then there was the time that my son woke up all through the night with a sore tummy, and I couldn’t send him to school but I had a test that day so I took him to university with me. This turned out to be a bad decision.

So unwell he couldn’t even sit up straight.

This photo was taken moments before he vomited everywhere. Through the tutorial room, the hallway, and into the toilets I ushered him towards, mid-vomit, that were miraculously across the hallway (but still not close enough). I bumped into the course coordinator for my test as we left university, and asked if I could resit the test another time. She glanced at my vomit-covered child in sympathy and said “of course, go home”. I felt guilty for taking him to university with me; he needed to be home, and if it was a bug other people could have caught it.

Then there are the times when the student lifestyle has meant I’ve been strapped for cash, or too tired to cook a decent dinner, but he still requires feeding on a daily basis.

Here he is eating cheerios leftover from his birthday party while watching Netflix.
There is not a vegetable nor educational resource in sight, and certainly no nature.
The tomato sauce is in a plastic container as there were no clean dishes left.
I posted this picture on Facebook to make everyone else feel good about their parenting.

I’m too early on in my academic career to have experienced any particular requirements or expectations on my work, so my thoughts are entirely personal at this stage. I do wonder about my future career. I can’t take overseas jobs, and I imagine fieldwork or research as a mother would have added levels of difficulty, although it’s not impossible.

I’m very fortunate that I have a large support network of friends who give me practical and emotional support. I don’t think I could get through the demands of university without them. My friends are a big part of why I want to study friendships and community, and the flip side of that: loneliness and isolation. I’m particularly interested in community in non-traditional urban spaces, and how the internet changed the game. I want to look at it from the various disciplines of psychology, anthropology, geography, and sociology… so I’m doing two degrees at the same time so I can fit in as many papers as possible. I love university; I have always thrived on learning, analysing, debating, critiquing, exploring. Now I’m doing it officially. The benefits are worth the hard parts.

My friends are great but my cats are no use at all when I’m trying to revise my notes.
Yes, this is a gratuitous kitten picture.

I asked my son’s opinion on university for this post and he said “I don’t want to give you any answers, think for yourself.” So I asked if he wants to go to university one day: he said he does, he wants to learn writing. “What kind of writing?” I asked. He said “I want to learn to do the squiggly writing.” So in conclusion, here is a picture of his notes from a lecture, compared with my notes. He’s pretty close.

I particularly enjoy the full stops at the end of each “sentence”.

Doing fieldwork with kids: Part I

Recently I started a new research project looking at the social impacts of three Sistema-inspired orchestral music education programmes operating in low decile schools in the Wellington region, where I live. El Sistema is a Venezuelan music and social development initiative that began in 1975 and is today one of the world’s largest and most famous orchestral music education programmes. Sistema-inspired programmes operate in over 60 countries and there are at least six here in New Zealand, including Auckland-based Sistema Aotearoa. My new project involves working with kids: those involved in the orchestral programmes, and my own. In this post I reflect on what it’s like to do fieldwork with my kids in tow, and in the next I’ll discuss how I plan to work with the children in these programmes.

It took me a good couple of years after finishing my PhD to start a new major research project. There were a few reasons for this. Two weeks after submitting my PhD I started working as a lecturer on a series of short-term contracts which meant constantly developing and teaching new courses. I needed to publish from my dissertation so I could secure a permanent academic position – something that is extraordinarily difficult as an adjunct, as many blogs, news articles and #quitlit posts on social media have pointed out. I had my daughter in 2012. And I needed some space to think about what I wanted to work on for the foreseeable future. In 2013 I was employed on a 3-year, part-time contract, meaning I could access university research funding not available to those on short-term contracts. This, combined with the fact that you need to be research-active with a track record of obtaining funding in order to compete for academic jobs, meant it was a good time to develop a new research project.

When I started my PhD I had not yet met my husband and children were not on my horizon, so everything and anything seemed possible. Now I had two other people to think about in deciding where, how, and what I wanted to research – in that order. I wanted to do ethnographic fieldwork in Wellington and continue my interest in development and social justice. Basing my new project in Wellington was also a practical decision: I could take my daughter with me, I wouldn’t need to be away from home for extended periods of time, and I could get started without the security of funding or a permanent job. Coming up with a feasible project was more difficult, but a serendipitous sequence of events led me to Sistema Aotearoa and eventually the charitable organisations that run Sistema-inspired orchestral music programmes in Hutt Valley and Porirua.

I was pregnant with my second child by the time I established relationships with the organisations, developed a research proposal and obtained funding, and received ethics approval to begin the research. Ethnographic fieldwork was relatively straightforward to begin with as I could take my music-loving daughter and composer/conductor/musician husband along to interviews and performances. Things became a bit tricker after our son was born last year.

2015-09-26 08.45.32 — Part of my field-and-carework kit

For a start, my fieldwork kit expanded significantly from a pen, notebook, iPad and camera to include nappy bag, frontpack, and buggy as well as preschooler snacks and activities. I didn’t always have my daughter with me but my son was now a permanent attachment, meaning I relied heavily on family and research assistants for help. He still breastfeeds frequently at night and at the moment my fieldwork doesn’t extend to evening rehearsals as it is just too difficult to get away after the dinner-bath-bed routine. I do go to some evening and weekend performances, usually with one or both kids in tow, and my husband or mother-in-law (also a musician).

Combining fieldwork with carework is not easy. I no longer write notes in the field while my kids are with me, instead relying on my memory, what Simon Ottenberg terms ‘headnotes’ (in the 1990 book Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology edited by Roger Sanjek), and my GoPro camera. I miss things when I’m breastfeeding or changing nappies or leaving the room with a screaming baby or taking a preschooler who’s had enough somewhere else to play. (I have a keen recollection of my then 3-year-old daughter standing up during the middle of a concert and loudly announcing, “That’s enough, everyone wants to go home now.”) My kids miss me when I pay attention to the person I’m interviewing or spend an afternoon at music lessons without them. I often don’t get time to write up my fieldnotes in Evernote at the end of the day, and I definitely don’t have the same amount of time or headspace available to just think.

Despite the difficulties, there are a lot of things I enjoy about combining fieldwork with carework. I like my children being able to see and participate in what I do and love watching their interest in music grow. I get a different perspective when sitting on the floor with my son. My daughter often makes interesting observations about things that I hadn’t noticed, and I value being able to discuss the musical aspects of performances with my husband and mother-in-law. I also appreciate the connections I can make with the children I’m working with, who invariably ask “whose mother are you?” upon meeting me, and also with their parents.

Doing fieldwork with children in tow is not new; a number of anthropologists and geographers have offered useful insights into how one’s children can shape the research process. Kelly Dombroski’s excellent blog post on carework in fieldwork discusses some recent publications on this topic (including her own). However I have not yet come across much work that reflects on fieldwork at home with children. Even this “Family in the Field” survey of anthropologists undertaking fieldwork with their children assumes that ‘the field’ is somewhere away from home.

Do you do ethnographic fieldwork with your kids at locations close to your home? Do you know of people who have written about this? I would love to hear of your experiences!

Version 3 — At a concert with my 5 month old (note the buggy doubling as a tripod)

Confessions Of a Poverty-Class Academic-In-Training

Thoughtful and thought-provoking piece on class differences in academia. I found a lot to identify with in this essay (although, unlike the author, I became bogged down with debt) and think we need more conversations like this at university.

Writing with Brown’s Eight Questions

I’m juggling several different writing projects at the moment (book chapter, journal articles, conference paper, research proposal) but no matter what I’m working on I always begin the same way: with Brown’s Eight Questions.

I can’t remember when I first came across Robert Brown’s 1994/95 article Write Right First Time, but it radically improved the way I approach writing. In this article Brown provides eight questions, or writing prompts, for academics to use before they start writing. His goal is for academics to take more time at the start of the writing process to think carefully about what they want to say, so that they will become better writers and more likely to produce high quality work that is “right the first time.” Although he intended the questions to be used as part of an action learning group (where a small group of people get together and peer review one another’s work), I find them just as effective in my own independent writing process.

Brown’s Eight Questions are:
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It’s not just about the thesis…

Great post – wish I’d had these tips when I was working on my thesis.

The Thesis Whisperer

In a recent lecture at ANU, the esteemed research education expert Dr Margaret Kiley claimed that if we set out to design the Australian PhD from scratch we wouldn’t start from here. The PhD assessment (in most cases, a long form thesis), she argued, does not not necessarily develop the full panoply of skills we expect in a working researcher, inside or outside of academia.

One of the clever students in the audience absorbed the implications of Margaret’s lecture straight away and asked:

If that’s the case, what should I spend my time on? At the moment I spend most of my time reading and writing because that’s what I’m being assessed on. Should I be doing more?

Joyce Seitzinger and I being silly in a photobooth for the Canberra Tourist board.

The student’s question went right to the heart of an issue that has been frustrating me…

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