During our monthly supervision session today, i shared a poem with the group that i wrote as i am drafting my methodology chapter. I feel that i do not want to disclose it here in public as my supervisor advised me to actually it unclude it in my thesis as an expression of the ‘heuristic illunimation’ phase that seems to be happening and is giving me insights in the forms of metaphor and more creative forms of writing, i.e poetry. I read the poem in front of the Phd group and this generated a fruitful discussion where i expored further how all this images and metaphors that come to my head are related to my PhD topic and the researh process…othe members of the PhD group made their own connections too. I notice that the more i am focusing on producing Phd text, the less am writing in this blog , which is what works for me now and it matches my prioritising. More will come as and when necessary, any comments from readers are still welcome!

I attended the viva exam of my dear friend today in our research group and it was excellent, she achieved the best result of what a PhD student could expect, well done! most of the questions were around the process of conducting this piece of research and requesting some refelctions from the students around how she made certain decisions during the research journey, so this is something to keep in mind for when my turn comes. Another good point was the examiners asking the student to explain how she chose where to write what in the Thesis that resulted in creating for the reader such a good flow, coherence and real sense of how the research journey had been for the student…really inspiring this viva was, such a good example of a good piece of work, good choice of examiners and excellent research defense by the student who appeared to be calm, honouring her research, knowing her thesis well and presenting it in a rigorous way

I discovered this very interesting book which is available for me to read online via my library access:

Liamputtong, P. (ed.) (2008) Doing Cross-cultural research: Ethical and Methodological Perspectives. Springer Netherlands: Social Indicators Research Series (vol.34)

some featured chapters for me to read are:

I find myself feeling quite stressed out around oganising my time whilst having a a flow of thinking, reading and writing the thesis. I realy cannot believe how time flies so quickly and when i look what i have actually produced in terms of text, this is not much at all, although several PhD students that i have spoken with told me that they were at similar stage of productivity. I know that this is very much due to all i have been recovering from during the PhD years so far in my personal life and i know that to be really on time or manage the demands of what the PhD requires, I would need to have everything else more or less stable which was not at all and those events where beyond my control. So, in the light of this realisation i know that i shall be compassionate towards myself too. ..However, the truth is that PhD thesis writing needs to be the top priority now, even if other areas of my life that appear urgent too need to wait – simply cause the more i work on the PhD and the sooner i manage to complete it, the more clear space and time i will have for everything else.

Although i started working on the Findings chapter about a month ago, i figured out that it is very confusing and time consuming and it leaves me with the feeling that although i may be spending a whole day in front of the PC, not much gets complete (although i have completed just over 10.000 words). For this reason or cause i need to comfort my anxiety around having the sense that something IS actually getting done, i decided to engage with the literature again and try to  write the methodology chapter by the end of November. I will then have at least a chunk done (maximum 15.000 words). When talking to my supervisor today, we also kind of concluded that i need to writing about 8-10.000  words per month from now on, if it is to be able to hand in a first draft by the summer, at least! This feels daunting and i do not feel that  the heuristic process i am going through can be really forced…but then, I need to do what i can and evaluate maybe a bit later the quality of it, given the challenges of the topic and methodology

Meaning-Making Lenses in Counselling:Discursive, Hermeneutic-Phenomenological, and Autoethnographic Perspectives
Article from: Canadian Journal of Counselling
Article date: April 1, 2008
Author: Strong, Tom; Pyle, Nathan R; Devries, Cecile; Johnston, Dawn N; Foskett, Allison J