I have 3 unfinished post drafts, all on topics I find really important to put out there. Sometimes I find myself itching to write here as an avenue to organise my thoughts on a range of things. The image I get is this:
Update: Yes I am done with my viva voce (thesis examination)! It is an experience I do not want to go through again. The urgent and important thing now is to actually FINISH my dissertation and get that PhD award. What am I doing here then? I want to share one major thing I learnt that I believe helped, and would help, my research journey.
That thing is, to stick to what you believe in, even if it leads you on a harder road. Below is the paragraph I was editing before I was seized by the urge to write on SWE.
Seriously, it would have made my life WAY easier to avoid bringing in this complex structuration theory into my dissertation. I could probably have not mentioned or gloss over what exactly I meant when referring to ‘social structure’, and it would have been okay. But my researcher conscience would not allow the glaring unspoken to remain as that. For one, it would have been hypocritical to critique inconsistencies in others’ work while not attempting to clarify matters in my own.
The harder road involved plowing through some of Giddens’s dense writings in the past, and now, communicating my thought processes on how the abstract concepts (the details of which I’d largely forgotten by now) translated to my own research.
At the end of it, and even at this moment, I would feel proud of the end result: A piece of research holding ‘answers’ to not just the explicit research questions, but the fundamental nature of society and human agency. I think we often forget that PhD stands for Doctor of Philosophy. Eventually, when I get that PhD award, this is what I can look forward to: I can be confident that I have faced these difficult philosophical questions about the fundamental nature of things and produced my ‘best answer’ to them to be communicated to the world (if anyone deigns to read my thesis haha).
Social Working, Everything 