Liberation… or liberated

One of the grant proposals that I’m preparing asks what a DEAF hermeneutic of Christian theology might be… It’s an important question, for the simple reason that the Church, through education, clubs for ‘the deaf’, missioners… and so on, has been the single biggest historical organisation working within and for the DEAF community, and the most influential gatekeeper to the DEAF communty. Even where education, science, medicine and welfare have taken over, they had done so through the lens of a Christendom (or in the case of the French secularists, anti-Christendom) that has lasted since the dark ages.

Hannah Lewis brilliant ‘Deaf liberation theology‘ has been really helpful. However, it’s led me to engage with liberation theology proper – which leads me to a bit of a problem.

Maybe it’s just me… but my initial approach to liberation theology has the same slightly ‘odd – hard to pin down’ taste that I find so unpalatable in some postcolonial, nationalist, racial, religious, or Deaf writing… and I don’t like it… actually, I do like it in a way (see below), I like it very much… but I don’t have much academic respect for it.

Let me be clear… I’m not saying that those disinherited by the Church don’t have a right to be angry. They do.

Nor am I saying that  contestation isn’t needed. It is.

Nor am I saying that there is not a good case for needing to find considerable leverage to force those who maintain the status quo to release their grip on power. I think there is…

What I am saying is that to approach theology with the aim of ‘reading in’ a political justification is interesting… but only of limited use…

The reason I think it’s of limited use is because – in my limited understanding – Liberation theology has confused and conflated Christendom and Christianity… the relationship between creator and created and the organised mediation of church favour… into one foul smelling pile of oppressive practice which can only be shoveled away by reading the voice of the oppressed into scripture… Within that framework, biblical hermaneutics have to serve the oppressed, in the same way that they have previously been made to serve the powerful.

Doesn’t that fundamentally cause the same situation… just from the other side… and render the decortication of God’s relationship with humanity just as impossible to discover within a fetishised, produced reality that is just as twisted?

Of course… it could easily be said that I’m a part of the problem. White, hearing, British, middle-class, English native… what’s to say that my motivation isn’t entirely self-preservation? Well, nothing.

But it strikes me, in the same way that my work on DEAF space revealed the possibility of a DEAF history that allowed both histories of deafness and Deaf histories to exist, but recalibrated them by demonstrating the extent to which they relied upon each other… work on liberating theology has to do the same, by proposing a framework that is bigger than both and, therefore, describes the production of oppressive Christendom, and the emergence of resistance to it theologically…

Perhaps in the same way that DEAF history is inherently an historiographical project… what I’m looking for is a hermeneutic of theological hermeneutics…  whatever that’s called!

Working, working…

Phew!! The first couple of weeks of the year have been busy… moving house, getting ready for a new baby… oh yes, and then there’s work.

The latter has largely consisted of BOS admin. Early year account mount up and it’s a question of getting to the bottom of the renewals pile whilst also dealing with helpdesk enquiries. Fortunately, this is just about done now and, although I need to get to grips with next month’s renewals and get them sent out, the air is clearing slightly.

More problematic has been making time to write grant proposals. I’ve got two on the go, with another one just about ready to surface… they have to be done in addition to normal work though, which makes things quite a stretch. They also require mental focus which is tough when there’s lots going on at home and elsewhere at work.

In some ways, though, the big problem has not been focusing on the proposals, but focusing the proposals themselves sufficiently to allow me to write them. My interests are polyvalent, and it’s quite a challenge to pin down exactly what it is that I want to know in a given situation (you can’t just write ‘everything’) and then justify it on paper.

The learning curve is still near-vertical, and I could do with getting them in before the baby arrives at the beginning of March…

Goodbye 2009… hello family!

We call it Christmas… in the US, they call them the ‘holidays’… “Happy holiday season” they sing as they whoosh off in plumes of Disney snow.

Holidays. Humbug… The bit from the 23rd to 28th December was less like a holiday and more like a crayzee road-trip around the UK to visit family all too fleetingly, and then a return to Bristol for Jo to go back to work and for me to try and get as much admin out of the way as possible whilst the forces that be conspired against it. The Solicitor was on leave. The car was dying ever more each day. The new car was snowed in and couldn’t get to the MOT test centre.

The first few days of the year were a frustrating case of hurry up and wait.

And then came a break-through day… Sunny, bright, crisp, clean, busy and very productive.

Now, we have a pretty good idea that the house-sale should be completed by the end of January (and everyone else in the chain agrees). I’m already looking forward to moving into a house that is heat-able above 10 degrees without a fire, doesn’t have a half inch gap under the front door and in which we can sleep without our breath condensing and raining onto the duvet overnight. We’ve already started packing in preparation.

We also managed to pick up the new (old) car which drives beautifully and is so much bigger.

Work-wise, the year is looking interesting. I’ve got a number of grant applications gently bubbling. Things based in Deaf Studies are still uncertain because of the bigger picture. However, once we’re a bit clearer on that, I’m going to be working hard to get applications in there too. There are also several opportunities to publish, including an outlet for regular, critically commentated translations.

Family-wise, things change completely too… because, of course, the 3rd of March sees Jo reach 40 weeks… and we’ll be three!

Which all means that the entire focus changes. To be honest, last year was tough. It was very much a short-term year with our eyes fixed only a few weeks ahead… we didn’t know the bigger lay of the land, or where things were going to go and we were really stretched.

Our priority in 2010 has to be different. Now, we’re here, and settling and setting up for 5, 10, 20 years time… which means refocusing on targets that are further away. And that means that we’re working on getting to long-term goals. That in turn will mean overlooking some short-term possibilities.

So here’s my wish list for 2010…

First priority has to be to have time for Jo and the baby… nothing can get in the way of this.

Second has to be to set up for an academic career… and to do that I need to get funding, publish and think about dissemination opportunities and teaching. So I’m looking to:

• Submit at least three grant applications in the next twelve months (one ESRC, one AHRC, one Leverhulme) and two postdoc applications (ESRC, Britac)
• Publish at least three papers (with at least one to the Deaf field and one to the geography field)
• Present at least twice in different formats in the UK if possible
• Regularly post on this blog

Third is to enjoy the extra time that not running after every possibility will give me at home, at work, at Church, with friends, and with myself to get involved in at least one theological pursuit group, extend my learning of Welsh, take up some kind of regular musical activity and ride my bike more.

I didn’t realise that I was writing a list of new years resolutions… but I appear to have done just that.

The pressures of being a ‘tweener’

At home, we’re currently watching the T.V. series ‘Prison Break’. One of the key characters is David ‘tweener’ Apolskis. Caught somewhere in allegiance between the prisoners and the police he never appears quite sure who he should side with to best ensure his future… does he follow his heart and ally himself with the cons? Or take the more pragmatic step of cooperating with the police?

Having just passed my PhD viva, but without any immediately secure research destination, I know a little bit how he feels. During my Masters and PhD, I did everything I could to ensure that there would be research work waiting for me when I finished. However, despite volunteering, lecturing, tutoring, supervising and publishing my way through the last seven years, I’ve come out virtually empty handed.

In truth, I’m not surprised. There are few academic departments in the UK (world) working with Deaf studies at anything higher than undergrad level… so it’s largely a case of dead-man’s-shoes. However, even when there are dead men, the shoes are taken away by recruitment freezes. Add to this the distinct possibility of a drop in equality and social science funding brought about by a conservative win at the elections next year, and the complete failure of academia in general to perceive the enormous importance of Deaf Studies as a test bed for re-writing theory on what constitutes ‘valid humanity’… future pickings look thin.

However, I can’t stray too far. If I do, I’ll never publish, never win a grant, never get back in. With my heart in academia but no option but to find work elsewhere, I’ve become a ‘tweener’.

My working life has become a strange combination of two different worlds. Four days a week (approx) I work as an administrator and computer help-desker for the ILRT at the University of Bristol. Two days a week I spend working for the Centre for Deaf Studies as a temporary researcher. Work to write academic papers, grant proposals, make contact with potential funding sources and research collaborators etc. vies with phone-enquiries and spreadsheets… I have completely different CVs, two e-mail signatures, two professional personas…

I’m being supported at every turn. The ILRT have been enormously flexible in allowing me to drop my hours to do additional research work. CDS have bent over backwards to find me ways to be involved. However, it’s clear that my ‘tweener’ status makes satisfying both quite difficult. I’ve been told, for example, that in order to get funding and get through the ‘research door’ more permanently, I need to publish more and put in grant applications… but the one thing that I’m not prepared to sacrifice for this is my family… so when do I write them?

I guess it’s good training in being a ruthlessly efficient administrator for when I finally do get a lectureship… but it seems to be a gap in an academic career progression that is not often talked about by those who have successfully navigated their way through it…

Viva voce

Interesting that although it’s called ‘viva voce’ [live voice] (and I admit that I did choose to speak), my viva was conducted in both speech and sign…  It makes me wonder whether we should look further down the list of definitions for voice… have a look at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/voice for example… numbers 1-5 are typical, but these are more interesting.

6 – something likened to speech as conveying impressions to the mind

8 – the right to present and receive consideration of one’s desires or opinions

It’s rather like the re-work of ’silence’ that I did a few years ago, where I defined silence not as a lack of sound, but as a lack of information presented in a form that can be perceived… ‘captured’… it’s interesting how well this links into Amartya Sen’s work on ‘Cap-abilities’… but that’s a post for another day.

Anyway, the viva went well… I’d like to thank Steve Emery and Mike Heffernan for the opportunity to discuss something that I’m passionate about for a whole three hours…  I am now Dr Gulliver (I’ve been reliably informed that I have the right to use it as soon as the decision is announced… and it’s proved to be remarkably useful in getting Mortgage Advisers  to take us seriously even though we have more-than-fragile incomes) and I begin the slow process of finding a full-time, long-term research position… not easy for a wide variety of reasons.

I’m currently working as a computer help-desker, with some additional research work at the Centre for Deaf Studies.

At the moment, a tenured lectureship seems a loooong way off.

A new academic’s quandry

Post submission, I’m in a bit of a quandry.

Essentially, the problem lies in how to disseminate the material that I’ve written for the PhD, in particular, how best to explore the concept of DEAF space. There’s a basic tension.

In the world of academia, it’s not a good idea to start talking about something that you’ve formulated unless you know that you’ve got ownership of the concept… ie: that you’ve published something peer reviewed (etc.) that explains it and that people will refer back to as the ‘first paper’ on the subject, you’ve got recognition from your academic peers for your work and so on…

However, not only is DEAF space not simply an academic concept, it’s not my academic concept, but one that belongs to the DEAF community. It’s an attempt to describe the very real, everyday life experience of DEAF people all over the world. So I don’t want to hold onto it and pretend that it’s mine, mine, mine… it’s not.

If there is a concept that’s mine… it’s probably the concept of a geography of (cap)ability… but even that’s a combination of several other people’s work… Lefebvre’s, Rob Imrie’s, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, Ben Bahan amongst others with a good dose of Paddy Ladd and others in there too…

So, on the one hand, for my academic future, I need to publish before really being able to openly exploring… And, on the other hand, I want to get the information out there as soon as I can so that DEAF people can start using it, thinking about it, taking ownership of it… and then I can work with them to explore it better and understand what it means to them.

Publishing for academic purposes is not an easy task… particularly since what you’re aiming to do is get as many papers out there as possible on different aspects of the concept. There’s no point writing one paper that skims the entire thing and having nothing left. So, ideally, you want to carve up the thesis and publish lots of detailed, but discrete papers.

However, that’s exactly what you want to avoid when you’re providing a guide for those who either want to start at a more basic level, or who aren’t (yet) interested in the theoretical academic background…

So, for better or worse, what I’m going to do is to blog bits and pieces up here at the same time as writing academic papers and also try to get as much of it out there in BSL as I can too…

Ideally I’m looking for a place to host a website without all the marketing that comes with freesites… anyone have space they can spare?

The long-distance writer

To my shame, I’ve not read it, but my friend and colleague Steve Emery has published a paper on the challenges of the “long-distance post-graduate student” Emery (2007) see here. My guess is that he found similar things to me… besides the challenges of trying to get what you need from an unfamiliar library with a limited borrowing allowance (thank goodness for electronic journals, that’s all I can say), the biggest issues for me are simply keeping in touch with an understanding of the level of writing that the PhD expects and getting responses from people fast enough.

About a month before Easter I was well on the way to getting the first drafts for everything in… I’d written all the first drafts of the data chapters, had them checked, and I was about to go onto the theory… the idea was to get that in by easter, have a few days off, and then get on with the editing…

Then one supervisor went on study leave, and the other came back from study leave, requesting that I get all the editing done before they looked at the chapters.

Not a problem… after all, it’s all got to be done at some point… the only thing is that out of contact with others doing the same thing, and out of touch with the most recent trends in your field (it’s just inevitable if you’re 150 miles from the office and you can’t go in more than once a month!) every time you send a revised chapter, there’s that horrible moment of waiting for an acknowledgement, and then the comments, and then the realisation of what more needs to be done…and the feeling that you’re slowly drifting away from the target, whilst the deadline looms ever closer.

And all the time there is a feeling that my writing is not as good as the stuff that I’m reading… and no reassurance that that’s OK because I’m still only a PhD student…

So now it’s past Easter, and all the revised data chapters are in… but I’m no closer to knowing if they’re gooed enough… and the theory still has to be written…

web presence

Sure, it’s probably therapeutic to write… maybe for its own sake, but what is the point, really, if no-one is going to read it.

Having transfered attentions to a blogspot blog for the last few weeks, searching for myself on the web (only prompted, I assure you, by the fact that I was told that other people were looking for me) I found that the blogspot blog didn’t register with google at all… consequently, despite the fact that I still can’t work out how to change the password on this one so that I can remember it, I’ll be coming back here.

The point of having a blog, after all, is to use it and be seen using it… surely!

Just about submitted the second revisions of all four data chapters… there’s some real meat in their, hopefully I’ll take the time to outline some of it at a later date.

Only the theory to go now *gulp* and only a couple of months to get it written, polished and handed in.

Be glad when it’s over now

P.S… Have changed the password… phew!! How complicated is the dashboard on this thing?

Hmm

Yes, well… that commitment to keep this updated didn’t last long now did it!!

Still… quick note… more information and a paper uploaded to my profile on academia.edu site. The paper is pretty basic, a re-examination of Milan through a more spatial lens, but for those who haven’t read anything that I’ve written, it’s a start.

Second data chapter going to review today, so on to the third on Monday… article to review for Deaf Worlds later today and some fascinating thoughts on the distinction between deaf, Deaf and DEAF from a friend of mine at Bristol which I hope we we will be able to publish when we’ve had a chance to chew it through some more.

Also check out Annelies’ blog on her work on Ghana at naarengelandvaren.blogspot.com

Happy weekend.

Beginning again… again

Having finally finished with moving, holidays and faced with Jo’s departure to work at Nottingham Hospital… I’m back to work on the PhD… and endeavouring to keep this blog updated on a more regular basis…

Whether the aim of writing more often will actually come to anything is another question entirely… but since I have a blog, I ought to at least write something in it!

The first day or two back will be taken up with admin… there is a summer’s worth of e-mail to clear and a few household tasks that need to be sorted out… but as soon as that is done then I have two papers to write to present at the upcoming ‘Signs of God’ conference… I’ll publish them here once they’re done.

Watch this space… no-one will be more surprised than me if I actually do manage to get something consistent written here!