For those of you who have questions about my PhD, please feel free to ask by emailing me.

Off to rest for a few more days and think about life after the viva…

I had no idea how someone like me, who was so excited about my topic, about mobilities, about Intimate Tourism, about all my ethnography, could ever be in the same situation. But then something happened to really really distract me from writing. And no, I didn’t get pregnant. Or get married. Or move to Bali. I became an indie folk pop star.

Ok, perhaps ‘star’ is going a bit far. But after moving to Warsaw to lecture back in 2009, I started singing and playing my violin with a friend of mine. That bit of singing turned into small concerts, which turned into larger club concerts, which turned into other band members joining us, which turned into recording a demo, which turned into getting a manager, which turned into being booked by the biggest summer festivals in Poland, which turned into playing in Germany and Iceland, which turned into getting a record deal, which turned into recording an album, which now turned into being on various ‘top 10′ lists, which turned into being nominated “Person of the Year” by a few cultural newspapers, which turned into tour dates and interviews and even  getting  national airplay in Canada and the US and being in Guardian’s “World Sound of 2011” list.

So how the heck am I supposed to finish this PhD? You tell me. I am only a few chapters away from finishing the first draft. This is realistically just 2 weeks of sitting and punching away on the computer. I am now contemplating locking myself up in a cabin somewhere. If anyone is reading this and has any tips or ideas let me know.

Because it’s now gotten out of hand. My academic career. And my pop star career, that is.

And if you’re procrastinating from writing your own PhD, here is a link to our music: www.paulaandkarol.bandcamp.com

Things I reccommend to those who are in the same situation as I am:

a) Cowork: Work with somebody/a group of people who are also freelancers.

b) Take real breaks. 15 minutes every hour to do all the stuff you were doing when you were procrastinating.

c) Get out of the house. Don’t only work at home! The bed is too close to your workspace! You’ll just roll into it at around 3pm and wake up at 4:30 wondering why you didn’t finish that last chapter…

Oh, and don’t blog. Yikes… what am I doing here then? Time to get back to work.

ps: I just submitted a residency proposal with my friend Alex. More info soon if/when we get accepted.

I admit, I went into it not really knowing anything about the format or my exact purpose for going there – all I knew was that it was being organized by a Berlin-based gallery and non-profit art association called Uqbar – Society for Representation Research. I spent the 8 days in a hotel in Palanga, on the Lithuanian Baltic, being the only sociologist there – the rest were performance artists, photographers, intervention artists, painters, and architects. We all were interested in mobility-related issues and used the town of Palanga as our workspace, canvas, atelier, social universe in which to create works which would interest us and hopefully those beyond our workshop.

My specific workshop (there were three to choose from) was led by Austrian architect and curator, Michael Zinganel, who, funnily enough, is part of the Cosmobilities research network and met one of my supervisors in Munich at their last conference. The aim of his workshop was to develop on location a “first draft” of an intervention, performance or installation on the mobilities theme; and at best, the realization of a further stage – a “work in progress”. I worked on a project with Asa Elzen – a Swedish artist based in New York.

Asa and I agreed that the concept of tourist is entangled in an identity of consumption of a place and the tourist rarely becomes a producer, giver, creator in that given place. We wanted to find a way to give gifts or provide services for the people in Palanga. This would be something they needed. Something that didn’t disrupt their daily pattern of living. We really wanted to try to avoid common artistic strategies to get in touch with ‘natives’: the use of disguise, manipulations, or a staged performance. We decided to use the weather as a way of creating contact between us and the strangers in Palanga. We would take out an umbrella and offer people shelter from the rain.  And in the sunny days, we went on the beach, and offered people a bit of our sunscreen. This work helped us untangle relational issues between mobile/local as they relate to intimacy/closeness, giving/taking, producing/creating.  We documented our meetings in writing and hope to develop this project further.

And so, my take on reality expanded yet again. I learned a lot about other ways of representing and communicating research, and just the thought of developing the project ideas with the truly talented artists I met last week makes me giddy.

Telling myself I could work just as well here as I could in my office in Lancaster might have been an overstatement. During the first few weeks, I became a bit of an urban nomad, wandering from caffee to bar, catching any WiFi available. I am now living with a friend of mine in the south side of a city. The apartment is in a new gated community (eeeek!) in Warsaw, and I finally have a bed and a desk to work on. Still no internet.

But contrary to popular PhD student belief, I find that the more activities you do, the more you get done – with your thesis work and otherwise. So many PhD students around me in Lancaster and elsewhere just sit on their project and don’t leave their little caves for days. What are they doing this entire time? I have no idea.

So now I’m involved in my dear ethical consumption NGO , I teach a course called Mobility, Interaction, and Social Change at the Department of Sociology at the Univeristy of Warsaw, I go out a heck of a lot, I do yoga almost every day at my favourite studio, and I just try to work around four hours a day. That’s all you need, I swear.

So if you’re a PhD student, don’t whine, just get out and do more. Interact with your environment. It really is inspirational.

As long as you have a place to work, of course. Urban nomadism isn’t as exciting as it sounds.

Just wanted to extend a warm invitation to a gathering this Thursday in Paris to celebrate the French book translation of Intimate Tourism.

The French edition was a collaborative effort on part of my publisher and Clotilde Madoumier, Marie Thomasson, Jean-Marie Bernard, Frederic Brodeur, and Antoine Rolland.

The press conference is at 19:00 and is an invite-only. Please let me know if you’d like to hear a bit about the book and I can put you on the guest list.

The party will follow and is open to everyone:

Where: L’alimentation Générale (www.alimentation-generale.net)

Time: 9:30

Date: Thursday, January 22nd Please RSVP with me (the author).

Hope to see you there!

Paula

Ps: Intimate Tourism: Enquête dans un réseau d’hospitalité. (Limoges: Solilang, 2008), will be available to order in two weeks, or at the book launch.

Just an update to feed your fancy. I have noticed that this blog has been getting more attention than usual and felt a bit ashamed for not having posted much for the past… well… year?

That’s what you get when you try to read an academic blog of an overworked PhD student.

The good news is that my MA thesis on Intimate Tourism is currently being published in French (Intimate Tourism: Enquete dans un reseau d’hospitalite. Limoges: Solilange, 2008). The book will be available in January. More details for those french speaking Intimate Tourists soon.

As for the original thesis, or for more details on what Intimate Tourism is all about, please feel free to email me for a copy here: p.bialski [at] lancs.ac.uk

For more on my work, please check my Lancaster site here: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/pgrprofiles/262/

I’m proud to say that I finally hit my first PhD low, and came up strong and triumphant. This paper I’ve posted was the first in a series of papers I wrote in the past semester, where I actually felt that I wanted to write something.

So more to come, I promise. And now, back to the books…

Greetings my friends. Yes, friends. I am calling you all that because isn’t that what we are? On a close personal intimate lets-chat-over-dinner, face-to-face sort of way perhaps not. But on a symbolic level? Why not?

Both corporeal and virtual mobility as well as the vast, networked complexity of our global society is deeming the old notion of ‘friend’ obsolete. As we attempt to set a straight definition for the chance-encounters and informal ties we are recreating within our daily lives, how are we defining those with whom we are interacting with? A friend? A best friend? A social tie? An acquaintance? A networker? How can we categorize the person we talk to at the bus stop on a daily basis, the individual we chatted with online for the past two hours, or that someone who we were visiting on vacation last summer? We are increasingly stumbling for words or exact definitions. Moreover, the actual functional magnitude these friends have on a societal perspective, known as the social capital, is just beginning to be understood. What is the relationship between who we know, and how we function and become mobile within the global complex web we are living in?

This is an issue I am currently investigating. Do you have thoughts? Who are friends to you?  Is it a good thing having all those facebook profiles just a click away?

For those of you still interested and care to read more, I suggest:

Adams, Rebecca G. and Allan, Graham. . 1998. Placing Friendship in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

boyd, dana. 2006. “Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into being on social network sites.” First Monday Online, (December). http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/#author (October, 2007)

Chambers, Deborah. 2006. New Social Ties: contemporary connections in a fragmented society. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.