Two weeks ago, I handed in my thesis for examination. In Australia, we call this event the ‘submission’, where three heavy, bounded copies of your work are entered into all manner of administrivia before being distributed to two anonymous examiners, and a third if those two disagree.
There’s no defence as such; just a presentation to a panel of academics, usually from your own department, relaying the main achievements and where any concerns (typically the students) are allayed.
The final title was “Reframing Space for Ubiquitous Computing: A Study of a National Park”. In hindsight, I would have subtitled it differently, going for something like ‘The Case of a National Park” to make it sound like there was more of a story inside.
I was satisfied with it in the end, but need more space between then and now before commenting on the work any further. It was a truly fulfilling experience, but an exhausting one, and I plan on taking my time savouring its completion and recovering from it. I’ve applied for a publication scholarship from RMIT to turn some of the research into a more disseminate-able form, and will hopefully spend some of the next three months working on a couple of journal articles. That will distract me from the long wait for my examination results.
After that, I’ll publish excerpts from my thesis here, and offer the full thing for download. I’m inspired by Philipp Vannini’s Ferry Tales, and want to start experimenting with different ways of presenting and communicating ethnography online and in an interactive way.
For now, i’ll be enjoying reading this, this, this and this on various beaches.
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