While pulling together some job materials this weekend, I got out ye old Sage Handbook of Qualitative Methods (5th ed)–see below–and stumbled upon this scribbled delight, this marginalia wormhole (could we say wordhole?–that seems weird) to the Summer of Dissertation…
Continue readingDissed are excerpts from the dissertation that have been cut, killed, excised, burned on the altar of common sense and distance before being left here to not die…
This one hurt to cut. I remember thinking how clever I was and how it "Explained Everything. Duh." And, certainly, in looking back I can see the early versions of what I was just really starting to grasp. I did bring a good chunk of this up in the epilogue, but it took some reshaping. I like having an original (albeit excerpted) version of it here as part of this archive. After all, Sally and this comic were integral parts of the dissertation, critical actants that sat in my eye-line (tacked above the computer) the entire time I wrote and reminded me --without a word, with just a glance, without even really realizing it, in fact I'm only really realizing it right now as I type these very words-- why I was still sitting in my office chair, still looking for answers. Touchstone is too mild a word for that level of presence and pull in the overall phenomenon. But my true love didn't make it into the final draft: the incomplete tracing of the other actants at the end. I read that list and that timespace snaps into place around me. I'm-back-there-again-here.
It’s kind of sad that a lot (for me, most) of coursework doesn’t really find a second home, whether because of the direction your scholarship goes or just the structure/nature of the original writing. I was searching for a word in the hopes of finding a file I’d obviously not named well-enough to find it again years later, and this paper popped up. A throwback to Science Fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene–one of my favorite classes. I enjoyed reading it again four years later (yikes!). I sound quite important 😉
Continue readingI fell down a rabbit hole today, combing through old computer files to curate a project I want to work on later, and found so many old writings I had forgotten about. Some are cringe-worthy, some surprisingly good, some hilariously melodramatic (I blame the genres). Then I came across this. And the nostalgia hit me hard enough that, no matter the quality of this piece, I had to share it here.
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Sarah A. Shelton, Ph.D. 