As it turns out, our thesis assignments have come to an end. In the midst of my rejoicing, I realized that although we don’t have any more “busy work” (which was barely even busy work since it was actually very helpful in guiding my topic formulation), this is the harder part. Now is the time that our own perseverance, stamina, determination and hard work will actually pay off, since we are embarking on the long and winding road of independently carrying out our thesis proposals. To help us with this daunting task of prioritizing something that isn’t due the next day (or hour), but rather in a few months’ time, Liz proposed that we hold “thesis bootcamp” sessions during which we meet up with someone and have a designated time slot to work independently, together. I loved this idea! Daphne, Perri and I met up once or twice to that earlier in the semester and it helped to have that kind of camaraderie. We held a class Doodle Poll to coordinate our schedules, and the grand total times we have gotten together to meet this week: 0. This will definitely be something I have to prioritize more to make sure it happens, because it’s too easy to feel “too busy” when in fact just setting aside an hour or two could be very productive.
Alas, although there was no thesis bootcamp this week I was still able to put in a good amount of time reading a few relevant sources. The first one is a novel titled A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit, recommended to me during my meeting with an expert (Bruce Podobnik). I just got through the introduction and first two chapters this week, but I already feel as if I’ve struck gold! Solnit describes community responses after disasters, usually describing neighborly interactions. After a huge hurricane in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Solnit describes a conversation with a man who was present in the storm: “He spoke of the few days when everything was disrupted, and he lit up with happiness as he did so. In his neighborhood all the people had come out of their houses to speak with each other, aid each other, improvise a community kitchen, make sure the elders were okay, and spend time together, no longer strangers” (Solnit 4). This reinforced my hypothesis that neighborly interactions are an important “first wave” of response after a disaster. She mentions someone else who had been affected by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and how she “glowed with recollection about how her San Francisco neighborhood had, during the days the power was off, cooked up all its thawing frozen food and held barbecues on the street; how gregarious everyone had been, how people from all walks of life had mixed in candlelit bars that became community centers” (Solnit 5). These two accounts, among a half dozen others that Solnit has compiled, reaffirmed a lot of the ideas I have been having, while being just different enough to stay interesting. She discusses also discusses utopias, a topic I was interested in while taking Environmental Theory last semester, so I’m intrigued in the possibility of weaving that into the background/introduction of my thesis.