This is just a quick update as it has been a while that i haven’t written in this blog. My PhD clock is ticking fast and i am concentrating on thesis writing which is quite demanding, therefore i find that i am so immersed into this text that adding text to the blog has taken a back seat…it is so useful though for me to be finding resources from earlier readings and processes in the researh recorded in here, in this virtual space of my research, that i can copy and paste and work on further in the main body of my thesis…i feel like a chef  (researcher) at the moment that i am cooking my stew (thesis)…i am experimenting with the ingredients and creating new dishes for each chapter. Good food needs slow cooking at different temperatures…this is where i am at right now…i just hope that i dont put on too much weight (phd writing makes me hungry…especially for chocolate …lol…i bought a second-hand exercise bike, it is in the office, i saw the cleaner of our department ‘flirting’ with it one of these days…she said that she needs one of those too!)

It has been so fortunate that our University library had a copy of an excellent book: Papadopoulos, R. K. (ed) (2003) Therapeutic Care for Refugees: No Place like Home. London: Karnac

this volume has contributions by various authors around trauma and therapy with refugees and asylum seekers (forced migration) which is not my area in the PhD. However, i have found some very interesting ideas and discourse around the concept of ‘home’ and recorded some quotes that can go into my thesis. Papadopoulos offers an excellent account, drawing from ‘Home and Homer’ which connected me to my own Greek background and the symbols and stories of departure and homecoming in my nation, i have been thinking about the links between the individual and the collective level and all the transgenerational heritage we carry at a psychological level. This is an area of experience that comes into my PhD topic but it is quite subtle and i have been feeling it at a gut level without having the words to clearly articulate it. Today’s read has given me food for thought in all the ‘cooking’ an currently doing in my relationship with my data, myself as researcher and my writings.

It  has been nearly a month since i wrote a post in this blog, this having to do mainly with some health-related issues that have run me down but also cause i needed to withdraw from the public sphere and immerse in the interview transcripts that am working on…it is a slower and more time-consuming process than one may think!

I had some very positive feedback by two participants in response to the refelxive summaries of our interview that i had sent me which gave me a further boost to continue as i do, even if slow, i want to respect my heuristic pace and also make good justice to the transcripts.

A fellow research student was asking my advice about how to go about heuristic data analysis, in order to help her make a start with handling her own interview data. I am recording my email response to her below, which was agreed also by our supervisor that it is a good understanding of heuristics and good way forward: … Read more »

My seeking for clarity in the PhD phase i am into at the moment, i have been reading literature that i found either in the library or though online searches and realised that the next step for me is to write the Literature Review of my Phd thesis, as it is formed through the main themes of my findings. It has been some time now that it was clear to me that it is not easy to do the Literature Review, given that there is not much written on the particular angle i am taking. So, i had arranged for meeting with my supervisor so discuss some dilemmas and strategies i could follow to approach the matter. I looked at 2 doctoral theses (one on existential migration conducted in UK and one on the evolving cultural identities of immigrant psychotherapits conducted in the US) and identified what could be relevant to my writing. Although i have strated reading voraciously at an early stage of my phd, i was advised not to do a Literature Review chapter then so that i could be less pre-occupied around what i was seeking and also cause there is an argument for doing one once the data gives you the angles that require attention. I have now made a list of 22 main themes that come out of my data. … Read more »

It is a few weeks now that i have been trying to write a chapter that i will place before the methodology one in my Thesis, where i present ‘my own story’ in relation to how it links to the PhD topic, given that i am very much ‘data’ of what i am researching and my lived experience of the inquiry is inevitably influencing all the stages of the research process, from chosing the topic itself to my interaction and meaning-making of the data and the writing style. I find this a difficult section to write, i start and stop and find myself facing numerous decisions around who am i writing what for, how far do i go with self-disclosure and what are the motives around that, what is relevant and what is not and so on. … Read more »