Newsletter #12 (February 2021)

Hi Everyone

I am trying to keep on schedule with a monthly newsletter. What’s new?

The series of Lantern talks has now become quite firmly established as a weekly affair, with recent talks by:

• PhD alumni Magdalena De Stefani (who got up early for us in Uruguay and the birdsong on her patio in the early hours of a Montevidean morning was a lovely accompaniment to a fascinating talk), Duygu Candarli in Dundee, Scotland (whose talk, amongst other things alerted us to the importance of ‘waiting’ – e.g. to be published, to find a position post-doc etc – a conceptual lens likely to be adopted by Xian Zhao in her revised proposal), and Fida Sahar in Malaysia (who is now exploring the issues of supervisory cultures as a supervisor herself);
• current PhD student Huran Mirillo (whose talk raised interesting ethical issues in narrative research and decisions about what parts of a participant’s story are ‘relevant’ and for whom); and
• research associates Natasha Tsantila in Athens (who spoke powerfully about her long-term motivation for a PhD and presented her ambitious ongoing doctoral work).

These talks continue to bring the Lantern community together and, to judge by our WhatsApp group, this is an expanding community.

The series continues on 26h Feb with updates on Year 1 ‘curiosity’ about their topics by Xian Zhao and Jing Wang (for whom the rebooted Lantern talks were originally conceived). We then change focus (5th March) slightly with a research update about the refugee language education project with the local charity Cornerstone (Gary Motteram, Susan Dawson and me). On 12th March, the plan is to have a Lantern planning meeting to decide where to go next (eg a summer ‘event’, a book project, etc), and then on 19th we have a session to support Ivy Taslima as she prepares for her viva the following week. Finally to bring things to a close before the Easter break, Nahielly Palacios, Zeynep Onat-Stelma and myself will talk about refection as professional development, work building out of Nahielly’s PhD and recently submitted as an article (reviews pending).

I hope that, after Easter, the talks will continue culminating in a ‘summer’ event (maybe completely online, or maybe mixing onsite and online modalities). This may provide an opportunity to also connect with doctoral communities elsewhere (e.g. I have started conversations with MMU and Leeds).

Meanwhile, please keep your news updates coming (e.g. new roles, submissions, publications, talks, etc).

R