The blog is back!

I’m back in China for the 5th time and so, almost 3 years after my last post, I’ve decided to start up my blog again. Because of the need to protect the confidentiality and identity of my research participants, I can’t post anything related to my research on here (stay tuned for a publication in 2019 though…). On the consent forms that my research participants agree to, they understand that I will publish in academic mediums about what they tell me, but do not consent to being published on a blog. Many of you know that I removed my blog from public access for a few years because I was concerned about the safety and identity of my research participants. As it has been a few years since those events transpired, and I feel confident that my informants are no longer at risk of suffering any political or social consequences, I feel comfortable making my blog public again.

Since being back in China I’ve gotten the itch to start writing and blogging again. I need an English-language intellectual and emotional outlet while I’m here. And so in an effort to stay connected to the academic community, my friends, and family in the US, I’ve decided to write posts focusing on three specific, and sometimes overlapping, topics:

1. Lessons learned during graduate school and things I wish I would have known earlier. This will include tips and advice for PhD students, specifically focusing on the challenges of life as a graduate student. Also includes question and answer advice posts. Post your questions in the comments section or email me.
2. What I’m reading this week. This will include summaries and thoughts of the books I’m reading, both academic and non-academic stuff.
3. Life in China not related to my research and/or general reflections or thoughts about life.

I will be posting every Friday!

So a little bit about myself and my life right now (a quick update on events that have transpired since my last post in 2012):

I’m currently working towards getting my PhD in geography. It’s an (approximately) six-year program. I have three years down and three more years to go. The kind of geography that I study considered to be a social science that basically combines political science, anthropology, and sociology. My research interests focus on identity, urbanization, gender, and migration in China.

I started my graduate degree in geography at University of Colorado-Boulder in 2012. And what an amazingly challenging and exciting journey it has been for me since then! I engaged full-time in coursework and teaching (TAing) undergraduate students during my first year in Boulder, and returned to Nanjing during the summer of 2013 to finish up the Fulbright research (the stuff I was working on when I was writing in this blog before) for my Master’s thesis. I started my second year of graduate school in August 2013, and during that year I took classes and taught undergrads. I wrote and defended my Master’s thesis in spring of 2014. Stay tuned for some publications from that in 2016!

I got some really, really awesome news in spring of 2014. I had received a 3-year fellowship from the National Science Foundation that would fund the continuation my graduate studies (the fellowship covers my tuition, books, living expenses, and research costs, such as visas and airplane tickets to and from China). This fellowship meant that 1) I could continue on to the PhD program (up until that point I was seriously considering dropping out because of lack of funding), and 2) I would be able to engage full-time in doing research in China because I wouldn’t have to teach on campus during semester, which is what I had been doing to cover my tuition and expenses during my first two years.

So I returned to China in June 2014 to start research on my PhD dissertation. I stayed in China for 7 months. This involved preliminary fieldwork for my dissertation and learning the local dialect of a new field site. I returned to Boulder in January 2015 to finish up my coursework (took classes on ethnographic theory and statistics), work on some publications, prepare for my comprehensive exams, and present findings from my preliminary fieldwork at conferences. Now I’m back in China doing more preliminary fieldwork for my dissertation. I’m focusing on migration, urban governance, territorialization, and citizenship in northwest China. I plan to take my comprehensive exams in February 2016.

I’m also a blue belt in Brazilian jiujitsu. That pretty much takes up all my free time. I also have some really, really awesome friends, both in Boulder and elsewhere, who have been incredibly awesome, supportive, and wonderful. They always keep me laughing and remind me that I am loved and cared for during both the good and bad times. You know who you are. I probably don’t tell you enough: I love you and am so grateful to have you in my life.

My heart is bursting with gratitude for the wonderful opportunities that I’ve had to live and travel extensively abroad. I am also extremely grateful for the opportunity to engage full-time in my studies and research-- to be able to spend all of my time reading and writing about the things I am passionately interested in is certainly a privilege. I'm so thankful to have an extremely supportive adviser, to have the opportunity to learn a third language, and to have the mental and physical health and monetary resources to work on a PhD, practice jiujitsu, and live in China at the same time.

What is geography? I get this question a lot.

Human geography is about the location and distribution of people around the world. We’re interested in how various populations engage with different spaces and places! For example, how and why people fight over territory, or how and why populations migrate to various countries and cities.

Contrary to popular belief, geography is not about making maps! Seriously. The only time I’ve ever attempted to make a map was during my first semester of grad school when I took a GIScience course and my group mapped out the findings of our classmate's archaeological dig for ceramics. Anyway, geography is also not about discovering new places or knowing the capitals of different countries. My degree is in human geography, which has nothing to do with human anatomy or mapping the human body, which is a surprisingly common misconception. Geography is also not keen on environmental determinism. We don’t attribute social and political phenomena solely to topographical or physical geographic features. While we engage with spatial distribution and are interested in the way people move in and through space, our main focus is on how spatial patterns converge with historical, political, economic, cultural, and social phenomena.

For those other social science nerds out there, that means our favorite theorists are Marx, Lefebvre, Foucault, and Agamben. We are absolutely obsessed with David Harvey. The most popular theoretical approaches right now are probably post-colonialism and post-structuralism. And our methodology of choice is ethnography.

That’s pretty much my story.

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