Perhaps this interest is both a product of and contributing factor in my enthusiasm for conversations about social theory in slightly inappropriate contexts? Is this taking reflexivity too far?

What I do know is that it usually means a lot of unanticipated reading.

So you can describe instances of policies framed in one place ending up trying to be realised in other places as ‘urban policy travel’, here is a quote from the article in which I first noticed the term.

‘The city is increasingly conceived of as relational and coconstituted (eg Amin and Thrift, 2002; Massey, 2005; 2007; 2011). The starting point of this relational perspective is that it is impossible to understand cities as territories prior to their engagements with other places (Massey, 2011). As Ash Amin (2002, page 397) has put it, the city “is a place of engagement in plural politics and multiple spatialities of involvement”. This has been demonstrated, for example, through literature on urban policy travel, for instance, in studies of the mobility of particular policies, ways of thinking the city, imaginaries of urban futures, urban plans, or military urbanisms [see, for contrasting examples, Graham (2010), King (2004), McCann and Ward (2011), Nasr and Volait (2003)]. Emerging work on what Eugene McCann calls `urban policy mobilities’ (eg McCann, 2007; McCann and Ward, 2009) is one important example here. This disparate work has considered, for instance, how certain cities draw on particular policy discourses of urban redevelopment in their plans for the city, whether in the circulation of urban policy knowledges, discourses of `knowledge cities’, or neoliberal, revanchist and punitive ideologies (eg see McCann and Ward, 2009; MacLeod, 2002; Peck, 2005; 2006; Peck and Theodore, 2010; Smith, 1996; Swanson, 2007; Wacquant, 2008; Ward, 2006).’ (McFarlane 2011 :663-664)

Reference

McFarlane C. 2011. The city as assemblage: dwelling and urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29:649-71

In our last meeting she described me as being a ‘very independent worker’. While I would certainly not consider myself self-sufficient, I can see how my surprisingly passionate verbal and email defences of positions that I am actually rather ambivalent about can be interpreted as me defending my independence. My supervisor is a lovely person (and not in that insincere, manipulative, always wanting to look like the selfless martyr, sort of way), so she does not take the bait. While she will indicate when I am being completely incomprehensible, she seems to be unwilling to be be as upfront or challenge me a much as many other people would. She asks very little of me, but it is not because she wants to do as little work as possible. When I contact her asking to meet her replies are usually enthusiastic and state explicitly that she had been hoping I would contact her.

In our last meeting I was upfront with the sort of help with refining ideas I had found very useful from another member of my committee recently. As much as she draws on rather ungrounded theorists such as Bauman and is willing to mount an argument based on fixed assumptions about social phenomena she has not directly witnessed, I think underneath it all she is an empiricist. Talking about a concrete example of what I found helpful did slightly alter the tone of the rest of the meeting. I also granted myself permission to take the time to justify my answers to her questions with examples from my fieldwork, and I felt okay doing this because I was able to stop myself catastrophising what my lack of communication skills was doing to the meeting and instead engage her in some meta-communication to clarify that she was finding the type of response I was offering useful.

It has been through giving up defending my observations and interpretations, and instead working on answering the questions she put in front of me in an intelligible way, that I feel we are starting to build a shared understanding of my project.

When I was doing honours I knew many of the staff in the department relatively well in an academic sense. The disagreements between staff members, the types of questions they asked in seminars, and the direct instructions they offered us in our coursework were very useful for gaining an understanding of the various opinion they held as to what constitutes good research, a valid claim and an adequate text. While I have been slowly piecing together an understanding of how my supervisor approaches research, I still feel like I have much to learn about how we can think together.

Whether my understanding of how to work with her and her growing picture of where I am coming from with my data will allow us to get to the point where I can write a thesis which is engaging (basis of her criteria) and adequate for examination (the basis of my criteria) is yet to be determined.

I am not sure why I am bothering to chart the supervision journey on this blog. Many of the things I say could be very offensive, and these sorts of posts certainly do nothing for any sort of image of me as a confident and savy research student which I might find reason to cultivate in the future. However, every PhD information event I go to people seem to want to know how they can better communicate with their supervisor(s). I would like to know the answer to this too, but I think ultimately a student such as me needs to take responsibility for understanding how I do or do not provide the space for my supervisor to relate to my project.

• For a change to have occurred things have to have become ‘different’, if they are the same then nothing has changed.
• For a procedure to work you have to know what situations count as the same for implementing the same procedure.

These might not be particularly interesting points in their own right (and I certainly have no plans to mention them to my supervisor unless she explicitly asks be about keywords I am thinking with at the moment), but I think research and policy interventions into the social world are often very much about making decisions about what counts as being the same enough to come up with general accounts.

While I came across the reference as part of my scamper through literature related to ‘community studies’, when I plucked it off the library shelf I thought it might be more relevant to the methodology paper I am intending to write. My planned methodology paper is going to look at the rhyme and reason behind my fieldwork successes and failures, looking not only at my limited skills as somebody who is learning to do research or my social position within the field, but focusing on the political and economic dimensions.

However, chapter six of the book is a tour through key players and the disciplinary shifts of British community studies, with attention paid to the move away from focusing on places and towards change on a range of other scales. The discussion of the crossovers between anthropology and sociology is useful for how I understand both my project and myself as a researcher.

The plan of attack for getting a document written by the end of this month is to write as I read. In many cases I am revisiting texts, so I can anticipate what I am going to find. If a part of the text is not directly relevant to my review then I push myself to skim past. While there is a sense of danger that I may miss something, I am even more concerned about missing my deadline and I really want to hold up my end of the bargain. Getting this review done, and then having a committee meeting in the month afterwards was part of the timeline put together for my last review. Reading every word ever written about anything to do with my topic cannot replace having some academics read, and offer feedback, on what I write.

I am putting together a reference table of texts as I go and using Scrivener. While I am focused on using texts to complete this task rather than just engaging with them on their own terms, for books I am also trying to keep up a separate note file.

It is sort of nice to have a clearly defined task with a nearly impossible timeline. This sort of stress has distracted me a bit from my more general feelings of inadequacy. I feel less overwhelmed having something concrete to complain about.

It is rare that my supervisor suggests I complete any particular task. While some tasks seemed completely beyond my physical capacity as a human being who needs to find time for things such as sleep, and so I sort of ignored them (such as her suggestion to add in ‘time and motion’ studies for sites into my methodology), others I try to complete. However, I have this terrible tendency of doing the task with my own agenda. For example, when my supervisor asked me to write a reflection about everything I am bringing to this project, I simply sat down and wrote a rant about everything I was dissatisfied with regarding the research I did for honours. Her reaction was to thank me for writing that, and then to suggest that it is never shown to anybody else.

Time and time again I demonstrate that when I fail to enter into the spirit of the task, because I think I am ‘oh so clever’ and have my own agenda, the task ends up being a bit of a waste of time. Will I be able to exercise more self discipline this time around?

When things are depersonalised it is not such an issue, possibly because I am quite self absorbed and want to participate in the process of critical appraisal too. When I (rather than a project, piece of work, idea) is the subject of gaze then suddenly any opinion I might have also becomes part of the subject. Perhaps that is one of the issues I have with supervision; my supervisor is supporting me, as a student, rather than the project.

Today was very much about me, because I made it that way. In the form I discussed the things I have done and the anxieties I have. Sure it is nice for them to reassure me if I do these things and write those drafts I will get there in the end. However, I really want somebody to sit down with me and say, ‘So what is this saying about that? Let’s work it out.’  

This is work I have to do, and work I have to take responsibility for. In some ways that is what supervision can offer in small doses, but I have not been able to foster the type of relationship that will make that happen. Before I can get too annoyed/ filled with self pity, I first need to do the hack work of reviewing, coding and processing my ‘data’. Second on the list is that I need to clearly delineate what it is that I am trying to say something about, as I cannot expect anybody to join me in every direction which happens to take my fancy.

Slogging through notes, records and items sounds like the sort of job you can plan for and benchmark your progress throughout. Maybe I need to stop thinking about what system I could use and just start working within one?

I really do feel like a variation of Buridan’s ass, with both finding a question in the literature and processing all my data equally out of reach. I doubt that hovering in the middle writing blog posts is going to satisfy my wishes or needs.

The first part of the title of the document, Creating places for people is in itself interesting. The primacy of human needs is first and foremost, which is hardly surprising, but the active stance of ‘creating’, the approach to looking at ‘places’ rather than just buildings, and I choose to read into the word ‘people’ not just humans, but ones that are socially embedded.

That it is an urban design protocol for Australian cities seems to make sense in such a highly urbanised country. Furthermore, we seem to have some obsession with splintering urban and rural/regional research (and then remote ATSI communities are a whole other story), so I guess a blanket ‘Australian design protocol’ would be out of the question. However, it seems I misread what counts as ‘urban’ or a ‘city’, as the ’12 broadly agreed principles… can be applied to any project or location – whether it is in a large capital city, regional centre or rural town.’ (1).

In the foreword the protocol is described as ‘a collective commitment to best practice urban design’ which ‘is the result of two ears of collaboration between peak community and industry organisations, and governments at all levels.’ (iv) Indeed, the list of organisations involved does include the Australian Government, state government architect offices, Property Council of Australia, and others including the National Heart Foundation of Australia (v).

As for the content of the protocol itself, they certainly managed to meet what I would think of as being any vague ‘broadly agreeable’ criteria. People using spaces is an aim, and there is specific mention of respecting ‘the needs and aspirations of the community that lives and works there’ (9). There is mention of cultivating ‘cohesive + inclusive communities’ (7). As I am not used to reading diagrams it took me a few minutes (and moving onto the next page to work out that it is part of the definition of one the ‘five pillars, Liveability, which the ‘twelve basic principles’ are ticked off again (8).

Liveability is dealt with primarily through ‘design principles about people’ (comfortable, vibrant, safe, walkable), although it apparently also has a lighter grey tick against some of the ‘design principles about place’ (enhancing, connected, diverse), and one of the ‘principles about leadership and governance’ (engagement) (8). I was most interested in the ‘connected’ principle, which is defined as, ‘Connects physically + socially.’ (8). However, I was not too surprised in a design protocol that the ‘Attributes-How it helps to achieve world-class urban design’ did not include any mention of fostering connections between people.

In conclusion, while the document does appear to be something that you would expect to find broad agreement on, there are clearly some very big claims about people and places in this document. It is not necessarily a bad thing that such a document makes claims, just if I was to unpack it far enough to actually start to discuss the politics behind the protocols I would probably come across as being more than a bit of a tosser.

P.S. The little icons used throughout the report are sort of cute and do make it easier to see where each box in the summary (Appendix A) was drawn from in the report, but who decided that ‘comfortable’ would be a girl with pigtails holding hands with a man, who is holding hands with a woman, who is holding hands with a boy in shorts?