Case Review Chapter, Update 1

The ethnic cleansing class at Antioch has but me in high gear. We start the first of the historical case studies, the Armenian genocide, this week. I still have to type up the blurbs for the Adalian piece and impose an outline on them. I forgot to handle that this week and must do this very soon.

I’ve started in on the Yugoslavia pieces. I’ve marked up the two Mann pieces and I’ve finished off the chapter from Stoessinger all the way through outline stage. We cover those readings in roughly twelve days. I gotta bust my ass. I may strategically not cover Bell-Fialkoff if I run short.

I need to devise a review table for the kids. The rows should be specific time periods in each case. The columns should be how the different theories do at dealing with each period. I’m probably just going to have them deal with “types of variable” rather than specific theorists, so maybe I should drop the theorist names altogether. The four variable types are: politician agency, psychological interpretive bias, larger socio-structural conditions and culturo-structural conditions. I think that’s how I ought to review the cases in the chapters as well, except I have integrate different theorists back in.

Theory Chapter Reading Update 3

I haven’t been keeping up on graphing, even though I’ve been working. First, I need a new kind of graph for rewriting theory. I’m still working on the proposal and yesterday I got a lot of progress. I’m hoping to have the document done sometime next week.

At the start of class, I assigned two chapters of Grossman, so those were blocked and outlined a while back.

I’ve blocked all the Armenian case reading that I’ve assigned for the case study. I may look at more material when it comes to the four genocide comparison in the dissertation, but I won’t touch anymore for a while. I have to type in the blurbs for Adalian and type in the outline and they grunt work will be done. I think I need to make a table with all the narrative’s details and compare each of the texts for coverage as my next step.

I’ll work on the proposal until it exhausts me. Then I’ll work on Adalian. Actual writing is by far the greatest burden. I need high quality focus for that, my most precious resource.

I also need to get more photocopying done. I need to find a way of coordinating the big picture using this blog. The more I can keep looking at the these tables, the better I coordinate the larger tasks of writing. I have to avoid falling off the wagon.

Theory Chapter Reading Update 2

Moving right along...

Theory Chapter Reading

I’m going to need some of the reading that I’m doing for the theory chapter blocked before teaching the Antioch class. Most of the book is already marked up, as you can see. I thought I would get a category going for that.

If I make tables for everything, maybe I can come up with a coordinating system that gives me the big picture. I feel that’s what I lack the most in life.

Text Acquisition Update 1

New idea. I need to make a table for everything that goes into the research process. I’m constantly becoming decontextualized and it causes me to lose time. Right now, I want to lower the number of library books I have taken out. Most of the pieces below are for the theory chapter and don’t have to be read immediately. That said, having the books out is a serious recall-war liability, an invitation to expensive fines.

Moreover, the more information I represent about the writing process visually, the less I have to hold it in my brain, the less likely I’ll forget and the less likely I am to fall off the damned horse every time I get distracted.

We’ll see if it works.

Proposal Update 8

Okay. I’ve gotten comments and I’m on to the second draft. I realized that I’d fallen off of the wagon in documenting progress. That’s always bad because I lose track of time between completed phases of what I’m doing. I lose time and focus. It’s already halfway through June. It is pivotal that I have the next draft by next week. I need to start making appointments with faculty to get reviews of the document. I need the second draft to be done prior to making those moves. I’m not confident enough to make the appointments and write against that deadline. But it is pivotal to have the document done this week. The Antioch course is from scratch this term. Of course, the Antioch class is two chapters from my dissertation, so it’s in no way in conflict with what Susan Whiting once called (and very optimistically, I might add) my research agenda. But I have to have a proposal document and must rewrite it to other specifications for other grantors. I need the next working document.

The current work chart is below.

The rest of this table is a little harder than the finished portions. I realized that I didn’t have enough about the concept of “framing” itself. I was wondering if I needed to add another section, but I’ve realized that I need to add a little to each of the section I haven’t finished. This complicates matters. I need to integrate key information into each part. 33I just finished reading a 2000 review article from the Annual Review of Sociology by Robert Benford et alia. It had useful goodies, but I have to do triage reading on the material to get the proposal done and then really read it in depth for my theory chapter. Moreover, the review article is old (so depressing to think that the year 2000 was a decade ago!). I don’t know what’s been happening with the idea of framing lately.

This table is the rewrite for the theory section. I need to do more to retrench the cases, too. That table can follow this one. Right now, let’s get the last theoretical considerations out of the way.

Wish me luck. I’ve got miles to go before I sleep.

Proposal Update 7

Well, my efforts today didn’t totally suck. The table is somewhat misleading. Nelly prudently suggested to me that I seemed to be getting repeated coverage in separating the lit review from causal model. Moreover, she pointed out that the SSRC would only give me one big “Relevance of the Research to Disciplinary Concerns and Other Fields” section to cover it in. So I rewrote the whole thing. I now have five, 1.5-spaced pages in Times New Roman 11-point font. The citations need work, but I’m saying that they’re edited anyway. Here’s the table for the rest of the proposal: