Working on paper

At the ACSIS seminar, I met an academic who is teaching at a University in the south of Sweden called Högskolan Trollhättan-Uddevalla. We chatted over lunch when she was in town and were in contact via email afterwards. She has invited me to give a paper about my research.

Today I have been working on an outline of the paper. I'm really nervous about the prospect of presenting my work in public. I can't gauge at all whether it's even in a coherent enough state to be presented. Really very nervous...

Still, I have a bit more time to work on it. I might even prepare an abstract and post it up on my blog for comments. I know people who have done that and it seems very brave. Well I'll consider it.

Meanwhile, if you'd thought I'd forgotten about Part 2 of reflecting on cultural studies then you'd be so wrong but I'm guessing this may only be of interest to a very select few. I have actually been giving this a bit of thought and time and have had some very fruitful discussions with Johan, the Director of ACSIS. He helped to situate Scandinavian cultural studies in the world picture. It has been very helpful for me to reflect on this, since I am in a cultural studies research centre. The truth is I am producing my place in cultural studies, and my works relevance to some of the concerns of cultural studies are partly present but largely emerging in process. Since this PhD heralds my return to academia after a long 10 year sabbatical, I have come to 'cultural studies' with a vague sense of its scope and breadth, feeling comfy with only a few patches of the quilt, so to speak, but now am starting to move on to neighbouring patches.