September 8, 2004

work talk

Posted by dogpossum on September 8, 2004 8:20 PM in the category

well, i'm going great guns on thesis. went back and re-read Floating Lives, and goddamn, i had a goddamn revelation. this stuff just didn't stick with me last time i read it.
but now... it's just a really nice way to hook all the shit i've been writing and thinking about together: global media and diasporas are a nice way to bring together the way the international and local swing communities use media and are related.

i'm thinking of them as a community of interest, to use somebody's term... i forget whose. i'll look it up...no, that was my word. gay hawkins used the term 'communities of taste' which i can't really remember her writing.... i think i need to follow it up. it's from her article "SBS: Minority television" in Culture and Policy 1.1 (1996): 45 - 63.

that's what i'll be chasing tomorrow at uni.

as well as having a bit of a love-in with that book, i've also had a bash at blocking out the chapter on video/AV use in swing communities. i didn't mean to - i was just jotting notes. but it turned into coherent writing, so i figured, why lose that?
i've also wacked together a dodgy overview of the thesis, drawing together all my theory/approaches.

it's still all a big mess, but at least now i know what i have to read (and re-read).

i do like my thesis. very much. in fact, my feelings for my thesis would prompt my less mature readers to exclaim 'if you love it so much, then why don't you marry it?' and i retort: "baby, if i could, i would". but i don't think this will be a long-term relationship. 3 years only... unless i decide to make it my postdoc work...

i am actually considering that. i'd like to do follow-up work, looking at the asian swing communities. which is actually kind of a stupid thing to write: there's a fair fuck load of difference between the singaporean (see this link or this link) and the tokyo swing scenes... and there are swing scenes in okinawa and yokahama, but the links are nasty for one (urky angelfire with horrid popups) and the other's not in english at all). and then there's also lindy hop in korea - staaacks of it in seoul as this site suggests.

it seems that lindy was mostly spread to japan and korea via american dancers (and it's kind of ironic that an american army guy was involved in seoul - seeing as how the american GIs in WW2 were blamed for its coming here... which i'm a bit curious about...).

so i'd be kind of interested in doing some postdoc work on asian swing dance communities. i know quite a few singaporean dancers, but haven't met any korean dancers. i know one guy from japan, and one american guy who lives in korea...

could be interesting....

Posted by dogpossum on September 8, 2004 8:20 PM in the category