Well. After much lost sleep and many long days, I have made it. My thesis has been approved for honors! What a relief. The truth is that, over the past few weeks I had grown increasingly detached from and disillusioned with the whole thesis process. After spending so much time so close to this paper, I could only see the very worst in it— the holes in my conceptual framework in need of patching, the moments of awkward grammar, the things I could have written but didn’t, etc, etc. And every time I looked back at it, it seemed to transmogrify into something worse, something more grotesquely flawed, more obscenely naive.
Call it nerves, call it mental exhaustion, a lack of confidence, a lapse of faith — but what ever it was, it had given me a completely warped view of my work, and had me fairly convinced that honors was surely out of reach. That said, it is quite a relief to have a group of people that I so greatly respect commend this 60-odd-page tome, and reassure me that the hours of work I have poured into it have been productive and worthwhile. I think I knew this all along, I just needed a reminder. So with this new reassurance, a fresh perspective and a bit of respite, I hope to be able to return to my thesis in a few days with a more positive attitude, so that I can feel unreservedly proud of the final draft I turn in on May 1st.
Regarding this final draft, my honors committee gave me some very valuable feedback regarding my treatment of “utopia” and “utopianism” throughout the paper. Their concern is again related to the contradictory meanings and narratives that are contained under the umbrella term of “utopia.” They specifically pointed out that there is an important difference between Masdar developers’ treatment of utopianism as a public relations tool and critical scholars’ discussion of the emancipatory potential of utopia. The honors committee also suggested that I address how the term has been “degraded” as it has entered professional planning discourse and the popular imagination more generally. To restate, I need to be more careful and diligent about acknowledging that “utopia” is a very loaded word, historically speaking. I also need to acknowledge that when the average layperson uses the word, they probably mean something very different from what Slavoj Zizek or David Harvey do. The level of intentionality I need to apply when using the term “utopia” is comparable to that needed when discussing “sustainability.” They also suggested that I parallel my discussion of the political work done by sustainability with a discussion of the political work done by utopianism. It is these concerns that I will be focusing on addressing in my final draft. Until then!