Friday, September 7, 2007

Labels and the surgical strike

1 hour writing, 2.5 hours reading, 0.5 hours phone meeting, 1.5 hours emailing / administrivia, page count = 115

I had a good phone conversation with the historian on my dissertation committee today, and she was very encouraging about the prospects of doing a "surgical strike" type of data-gathering trip to Colombia this fall to gather state and municipal data - or rather, to see if such data is even available, and get what there is. Since I know exactly what I'm looking for, and it's likely to be clearly labeled as such, I should be able to tell relatively quickly what's there and what's not. As she pointed out, there's likely to be a file called "police" in a well-organized municipal or state archive, given that the police are an institution of the state - it's not like researching women, she observed, where there's not going to be a file labeled "women," and you have to piece what you're looking together for from multiple sources.

Heartened by that conversation, I started looking into possibilities for travel in September and October, and it looks pretty good as far as making plane reservations. There are a number of factors to consider for the timing, including the September 17th meeting at which my human-subjects protocol will be reviewed, which includes scripts for soliciting interviews. I hope to have made solid plans by the end of next week.

In terms of reading, I began going through the pile of books I brought back from LASA. Up today was a new collection of essays on regimes and democracy in Latin America, including a piece by Villager Jay Seawright and another Berkeley compatriot, Sebastian Mazzuca. Given that my outcome of interest is regime stability, it's important for me to be up-to-date on what's going on in that field. A number of the conversations I've had in the past couple of weeks have been centered on issues of how to classify the level of democracy going on historically in Colombia and other comparison countries, so those are some waters I'll need to wade into before all is said and done.

In terms of writing, I gathered together all the feedback I've gotten over the past two weeks, pulled out some recurrent themes and "to-do" items, and began identifying places in my manuscript (holy crap, that's the first time I've called it that - at 115 pages, to call it an "outline" is a little absurd!) to address some of those themes. I realized I haven't fleshed out what I mean by "critical junctures" and "path dependence," so there's a few pages right there. Moving along....

Thanks to my darling Cathy Sumner for monitoring this week, even as I was out of town. Next up is Tanja Schtschur, in Berlin. Our first international Villager, very exciting! Have a great weekend!

2 comments:

Rjewell40 said...

FYI, Tanja is in Cologne. But coming soon to a West Oakland bart near you.

:)

Unknown said...

Good job ekeing our a few more pages on the last day. Now that your conferences are over I want to see you really buckling down and hitting the writing hard in the new few weeks!