not the motorcycle diaries

I’ve recently been assailed by the conviction that my PhD research is boring as batshit, dull as dishwater and other such alliterative metaphors; and that this fact makes me intrinsically both un-interesting and un-sexy. In this dispiritedness, I have spent the past two days filing 18 months worth of paper in the hope that some kind of visual organisation will provide some inspiration (this was preceded by a visit to Officeworks for possibly the first time in my life. Why the first time? Because up until recently I have either had a job I could nick stationery from, or I have lived in the same city as Martini and she has nicked stuff from her job for me, or Melissa has furnished me with stuff her Dad nicked from work in the mid 90’s. Buying one’s own stationery is a foreign concept to me and therefore my trip to Officeworks was quite the adventure. I mean, have you seen the number of shapes and colours that Post-It notes come in? But I digress).

The top of my chest of drawers now supports a number of handsome, mottled-black, old-school ‘lever arch’ folders that sport the following headings:

- MST/Brazil: field notes, corro, media clips, MST and Via Campesina info

- MST: academic articles by Navarro, Wolford, Harnecker, Stedile and NACLA

- Social movement theory, new social movements, recognition and redistribution

- General social theory, misc theory

- Reflexivity: aesthetic, emotional, and social movements, Lash.

- Postcolonialism, whiteness

- Woomera and Baxter convergences, individual campaigns, activist discourse, Australian social movements.

- Globalisation (general), World Social Forum, People’s Global Action, Third World and the global justice movement (GJM)

- Autonomy, Italian Autonomia, anarchism and post-anarchism

- Academic scholarship on the GJM

- Feminist theory, gender theory, feminism and gender in the global justice movement

- Friendship (Derrida), Foucault’s political ethics, affect and emotions, methodologies (ethnography, field work, narrative and discourse), art and the image in activism.

With the possible exception of the last folder, I am still not convinced that my project is at all interesting.

Sigh.