Monday, June 18, 2007

5.5 hours reading/researching, 0.5 hours emailing/administrivia

Please welcome this week's monitor, Diana Kapizewski, in Oakland. Diana's a fellow graduate student at UC Berkeley. She's interested in courts as political actors, knows nothing about my topic but is happy to comment on it anyway. Left to her own devices, she'd rather run, bike, and sing (and accelerate the process of learning how to play guitar). Welcome, Diana!

Continued today with the four strands I've been pursuing since Thursday: math, methodology, Latin American security forces, and Blood and Fire. The more I read of B&F, the more excited I get about what I'm on to here. The control of the police and their relation to the army are just crucial for the story that goes on in the Colombian countryside in the '40s and '50s, and it's a side of the story that hasn't been explored from the institutional-design angle I'm taking here.

Tomorrow, I'm off to the NY Public Library to gather regional studies of La Violencia, the 1946-66 period of civil war in Colombia that's one of my primary foci for this project. On Wednesday, I plan to grapple with the question of whether a comparison of two regions makes sense for my dissertation.

Saw an amazing movie this weekend, La Vie en Rose, which features one of the most impressive acting performances I've ever seen. Marion Cotillard plays Edith Piaf, and it's just unbelievable the range and passion she displays. The film itself takes an interesting narrative approach, moving back and forth between Piaf's youth, adulthood, and old age in a thematic rather than linear way. I didn't find it distracting, however, and the 2h20min running time went by quite quickly. Well, that's two of my Best Actress Oscar nomination slots taken, and it's only June!
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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Having been remiss in blog-reading to this point, I'm going to pose a challenge that hopefully will push you and also help me understand where you are. How, in a couple three sentences (en serio, no more), do the math, methodology, Latin American security forces, and Blood and Fire strands come together? (If you've already explained this to us in the past, can you expand or contract or pinpoint or tighten the connection?)

Regarding Wednesday's task, I'm psyched to see what you come up with - sounds like an intriguing idea. Sub-regional comparisons are awesome b/c you get so much leverage from being able to hold so many things constant.

Good work today, Cristobal!!!

(And on a side-note, your stuff is in at Doe and I will run over there tomorrow or Weds. at the latest and retrieve it and check it out!)

June 18, 2007 at 4:05 PM
Unknown said...

Me again! I just re-read what you told me on Friday in an e-mail, and I understand I'm supposed to administer a verbal raspberry, or instigate public shaming if you don't do four hours of reading/ruminating/research and two hours of writing. So... looks like you fell down on the writing side of that today. Words on the page, my friend, words on the page. There must be some nuts and bolts stuff that you know will end up SOMEWHERE that you can type out for an hour or two a day, no? Don't even think of it as a chapter, just think of it as "stuff that will go in the book somewhere."

Oh, and I meant "sub-NATIONAL" comparison in my previous post.

OK, think I'm done now! See you tomorrow!

June 18, 2007 at 4:11 PM
Chris said...

Hey - great comments, thanks!

The math will help me better evaluate whether I want to/need to/can include a formal model in my dissertation; the methodology I'm reading is Gerring's new book on Case Study Research, which helps me think more about my own particular case study; the Latin American security forces gives me a regional context for the "Colombia in Comparative Perspective" chapter; and Blood and Fire helps me think more sharply about how the mechanisms by which my independent variable (institutional design of security forces with score police = politicized) affects my dependent variable (types of armed challenges to which the regime is susceptible).

They won't necessarily all come together at one point, but are all strands that I'm weaving together into the larger, uh, tapestry, I guess.

(There was a super-interesting profile of the musician Bjork in the NYT a couple of months ago where she talks about making music with electronic mixing software as being aking to weaving; in the software, each piece (instrument, effect, sound) is represented by a colored line along a time continuum, and the work of mixing is to weave the different colored strands together. Is making music becoming too visual? she asks.)

June 18, 2007 at 5:36 PM

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