Well, it has been a hectic few weeks, i have been working on various things related to the PhD in one way or another (readings, writings, meetings, dialogue with peers, identifying next steps, supervision, literature searcher etc etc). The last week has been particularly busy as i am flying to Berlin tomorrow morning to present a paper at the XIXX International Congress of Psychology about Counselling in the context of the Greek culture.  so much work to do really and at the same time so many ideas are floating in my head about how i can use my research for my carred development post PhD. BUT….i really have to focus this year and say NO to other activities in order to reallhy focus on my main job which is THESIS WRITING.

I see that the months are passing quickly, the writing process in heuristic terms cannot be rushed really and i have to now give my best shot to produce a good enough, rigorous PhD Thesis. Whatever i have done during the PhD years will not show its value if i now do not manage to make a good synhesis in the Thesis i need to produce, this is what i will be assessed upon anyway…so, i am off leaving UK for a while and i will be recording my process as and when web access is possible…here i take off soon!

just a quick input in the blog. still working on research transcripts, data analysis, communication with interviewees and refreshing my reading on methodology so that i can start writing a draft chapter, parallel to preparing my presentation/paper for the conference in Berlin. Also, i have found somebody from the PhD group who has graduated now but has good understanding of issues related to heuristic research and its process to interview me in order to find a way to articulate more comprehensively my story for the auto-ethnographic/biographical chapter i will include in the Thesis and actually record the conversation so that i can then write the narrative in a reflexive way. I am glad that i found this way forward in relation to that, it is like a ‘midwifery’ kind of exercise, will write more about it when it actually happens. Back to work now!

It is Good Friday today (at least for the Catholic parts of the world…the Greek/Orthodox fellows will celebrate Jesus victory over death about a month later…) and it has been a quite emotional week, in terms of being encountered by ’synchronistic’ incidents and conversations that reveal the underlying ‘political’ dimension of my PhD topic. As i am talking about cultures and mobility, i see that there is so much we carry from our histories, some of whihc still present, and they operate at an unconscious level at least very powerfully. And as my supervisor puts it in one of his writings: “I do know from my psychodynamics in families that some children do carry unresolved psychological material from their families and end up wrestling with problems that don’t really belong to them” (West, 2006 – The Friend’s Quarterly). This statement seems to expand to national and collective dimensions aslo, especially when certain countries have suffered a lot of violation and trauma that appears to be carried through from generation to generation, often in very subtle ways. And of course, where all this eventually ‘belongs to’ is a whole different story, as in my eyes at least, we are all connected. And even when a specific experience is not directly lived by an individual, when it comes to national collective experience with huge impact, the psychological echoes can be very strong … Read more »

I have recently had a lot of conversation and incidents around race, discrimination etc and am glad to receive the update of the Race and Equality Scheme conducted at my University here in Manchester (see report here), having as an aim to eliminate racial discrimination, promote understanding of religious and cultural beliefs and promote equality in these areas.

I came back from a weekend in London and i have to say that i was left with many reflections around ‘culture’. We had this joke between me and my friend that the city shall be really called BLONDON, due to the ammount of blonde women we saw there, it was as if the whole Eastern Europe has immigrated! London feels like a different country, as if its not UK, you hardly hear any english on the streets and the variety of races and ethnicities encountered is phenomenal…there was a sense of inner freedon in all that, sth that i have felt on other occasions around the experience of being an immigrant myself in a country with so much diversity. I feel that my attention and awareness around culture and identity are heightened due to this PhD topic that i am working on…i was recently saying to my supervisor that i feel my eyes getting bigger and bigger, as if my vision expands around what culture is and how it affects and relates to our sense of being that sometimes i want to close them down, to stop seeing, it is as if it nearely hurts. When in london, i was also aware of the matter around sub-cultures in the same country…the urban as opposed to the rural, the crowded as opposed to the serene…and mainly, the fact that the ammount of nationalities that live in london is so big that itis like a miniature of the globe….this is so different to Athens, for example, where i grew up….when i am travelling to Athens now, after living in the UK, i feel like going to a village, although it is a capital city of 5 million population. i guess this also related to the different mentality, although things are changing indeed, maybe in ways that my awareness cannot even realise or hold as yet. There is less tolerance around self-exppression in Greece. On the other hand, there is more warmth amongst people, or certain ‘restrictions’ keep things more safe…so much to reflect on really, will let it rest for now