One year to go on my PhD. And I am wondering if anyone had the brilliance to conceptualize these levels of self-doubt, time-idling, lethargy, self-frustration, and downright struggle I feel every hour to motivate myself to get some freakin’ work done. I’m not hiding anything here folks – I admit to joining the club of PhD procrastinators. The sideeffects of being a cultural creative. The temptations to just browse the net for new music, to facebook, and drink more coffee, are upon me. Oh, and to take on more and more projects that seem like they’ll never get finished.

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 just came back from a summer camp. I’m 27 but felt 13 again. The workshop embodied the utopian freedom that physical mobility often creates: people, togetherness, openness, creativity, and mutual discovery of the space surrounding us. It was Intimate Tourism at it’s finest.

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.

I just returned to my “home” city of Warsaw – home, a constructed concept, one which I defined myself on my own terms, and realized it to be here, Warsaw. I came back feeling as if I had never left. Despite the fact that I don’t actually own any physical space here, I still feel this is mine in some way.

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.

Fellow Intimate Tourists!

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.

Greetings my familiar strangers,

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/

Lancaster is taking me by storm! Finally, it’s time to post some of my rough work up. Take a glance at my latest paper, discussing why friendships come into being, or the purpose behind friendship.

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.

It all takes it’s toll on your system. The traveling, yes, the constant mobility. It all takes its toll. Sometimes in a good way one can say. The toll can be a mark, a change in you and the way you feel about yourself. I just realized from personal experience the way an environment influences one’s personality.

Personality is in most part a something individuals acquire through socialization, and it’s the physical stagnancy which aids in a sort of stagnancy of development or progress in that personality. And just as your feet are cemented into the ground when you stay in one place for a long period of time, so does your personality, cement itself to that set place. For those who never leave their place, it is my ardent belief that their personalities are quite strongly formed, yet they are resistant to change, resistant to thinking about a life without ‘the person’ within them, more specifically, they are resistant to any sort of existential, futurist thinking – a type of thinking which would crack away at their cement.

I just moved to Lancaster, or perhaps more specifically I should say I am moving to Lancaster at this very moment, on this very bus which is making its way through the outskirts of Leeds, westward, past Bradford, into Manchester, and then to Lancaster. I just had the experience of being between both worlds – localities which I’ve chosen to live in. I came to Lancaster two weeks ago, stayed for one week to find an apartment and to settle some of my things, and then I headed off to Warsaw, my former physical home, but my still-present personal home, a home which cemented my personality into what it is now.

The one week in Lancaster, living in my new house in the rural village of Lower Dolphinholme, I felt like another version of myself, it was as if I were a lead character in a video game, where Warsaw was home base, and Lancaster was already “Level 3,” and I had cracked a code getting me to that level. Level 3 was fascinating but a bit scary, because I had all these personality qualities which did not belong to me in the original level. After a week of finding a home, I traveled back to Warsaw, to reset my character back to it’s original position where it didn’t have any of it’s new features, but it felt safe, at home, and very much like the “true me,” which I am beginning to realize is a bit of a hoax.

Personality is in many ways a construct of your ego, an expression of your spirit, or a combination of both. But another ingredient we tend to overlooks is the influence of local socialization and environmental factors. If the individual stayed in the same environment, they can quite easily adopt qualities of that environment. Have you heard of the saying “you are what you eat”? Well, what about adding “you are where you live?” Is it just me, or does this ring true?

Greetings to all readers. In an act as unfair to my own creative mind as it is to my readers, I’ve put this blog on hold until late-September, when I once again re-enter the world of academia. At the moment, I am between MA and PhD studies, and am traveling around Ontario, Quebec, and New England.

More insight soon, I promise.

Cheers,

Paula

In the span of two weeks, Poland has witnessed the heat of political scandal. A priest with the most political and religious power in Poland was secretly recorded trash-talking the current president and his wife at one of his university lectures, and then having the tapes publicly broadcast all over the media (story here). Then a simple-minded leader of a political party gets kicked out for corruption. Now, the country is officially in mourning (the Rolling Stones were even asked to postpone their concert, they refused) after a bus on a pilgrimage to Rome crashed near Grenoble, killing 26.

My Polish grandmother, politically-minded, an ardent newspaper-reader, is shocked as to why I’m not more enraged/excited by all this scandal. I don’t have it in my heart to tell her that I simply don’t care. Emotionally care, that is.

My lack of ability to produce any sort of emotion when listening to Polish politics is, in my opinion, a product of being in a state of mobility. Events happening within a given locality one temporarily inhabits are interesting, like watching a film or hearing a piece of gossip about a friend-of-a-friend, yet rarely are pieces which make one feel rage, sadness, fear, shock, or any other emotion usually common among the politically-engaged. Why? Simply because when in a state of mobility, it is easier not to take ownership of the events happening around you. It’s easy to say that what will happen is an issue for the Polish people, not for me. When the longevity of one’s residence becomes unpredictable, so does the impact of a local political event.

Scandal is looked at as more of an amusing joke and not as something which can seriously mar the Polish political ground. News is just information but not something to get heated up about. The emotions which accompany events are reserved for permanent citizens, not for the mobile.

I realize that political apathy is something common among all citizens, not only the most mobile of us. Mobility, though, provides individuals with yet another excuse not to take part in politics, actively or passively.