One of the comments on my last post about my use of ‘Orientalist grand narrative‘ as a core concept in my book made me think again. Thank you for that Mona. It made me realise that the book is not about the Orientalist grand narrative, but instead uses it as …
I have, at last, completed the first half of the introduction to my new book to some degree of clarity. (Meaning that I will still need to do back to it again and again.) A key strategy that really helped me to move forward was to find a phrase that …
All my blogs posted since 2013 are now collected together in a single document on my books page.
As I write about my time in Iran at the age of 23 for my new book, I have to accept that I underwent extreme culture shock. It had all the features that are commonly described in the literature except for one crucially important one. It was about dealing with …
I’m now getting back into writing my new book. I have been stuck for some time. I appreciate how this happens to doctoral students. I have written some substantial parts but feel that I can’t go any further until I revisit what the whole book is about. I have a …
Especially when we are starting out as researchers, we are confronted with a number of theories about the world and about research. Often these are produced by well-known people. They can be intimidating, difficult to understand, and seemingly way above us. However, the people who make them are in many …
A while ago I was leading a seminar on intercultural issues with a group of masters students in migration studies. They were particularly diverse with backgrounds from across the world. I showed them a photograph that I had taken myself of a café in downtown old Tehran, Iran. In the …
What would be the conditions for it to be OK to congratulate someone on their English on first encounter? I don’t somehow think it’s enough that they might be just someone one meets in a country where English isn’t … and as soon as I begin to write this sentence …
This blog is partly from the common memory of what happens so often in doctoral vivas, when examiners say ‘why didn’t you explain that in your thesis?’ But it also comes from lots of situations when people just don’t tell you what you need to know. I was talking to …
Following my last blog, how should we write about data? There’s a chapter on this in my qualitative research book, plus another chapter on writer voice. Here though are some thoughts about basic principles. I’m writing about qualitative data; but I have also heard examiners make it clear that they …