Study diary

As planned, I spent most of the week reading, finishing two books. In between the reading sessions I studied Japanese, which is a nice break from the screen. I’m exhausted at the end of each eight-hour workday and fall asleep easily, sleep soundly.

Nice week weather-wise, I’ve tried to be out a lot. Today I passed by the Şehitlik mosque and realised they had the yearly ‘offener Tag’ (‘open day’), so I went inside and they were just starting the afternoon prayer. It was beautiful to see men of different ages, walks of life, and style of clothes praying together. I was moved by it.

Monday

• Applied for a three-day course on ‘queer autoethnography’ in November 2021. This included writing a bit about my research to explain why I’m a good fit for the course.
• Emailed about a queer seminar in Hong Kong in December 2021, but it was only open to those who would present.
• Applied for the ethnographic film festival in Göttingen in 2022 – I have friends there so it would be fun to go there.
• Ran in the park.

Tuesday

• Had an unrelated work meeting.

Wednesday

• Walk and talk with Ale on beautiful Tempelhofer Feld.

Thursday

• Zoom introduction to the eprog platform of my university.

Friday

• Had a talk with O over coffee at my place.
• Ran again!

Saturday

• Biked with A to Südgelände, an amazing and unique park where I hadn’t been before. He brought a protein bar called ‘PhD smart’.
• Was invited to a fig with gorgonzola at my friend and neighbour O’s in the evening.

Sunday

• Submitted an abstract for a special issue of a journal.
• Registered for the Yucatan conference in November 2021 and paid my fee (44 euro).
• Visited the Şehitlik mosque.
• Recorded my impressions of Georges Bataille’s book Eroticism:

Course

• Research Integrity (last module)

Books

• Galbraith, P. W. 2021. The Ethics of Affect: Lines and Life in a Tokyo Neighborhood. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press.
  • 4: The Ethics of Affect: Drawing Lines with Bishōjo Game Producers and Players (p. 157–94)
  • 5: Hajikon: Bodily Encounters and Dangerous Games (p. 195–236)
  • 6: Conclusion: A World that’s Ending: Do You Love Me? (p. 237–52)
  • 7: Epilogue (p. 253–56)
  • 8: Appendix: Notes on Perverse Methodology (p. 257–70)
• Weeks, Jeffrey. 2009. Sexuality. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.
  • 1: The Languages of Sex
  • 2: The Invention of Sexuality
  • 3: The Meanings of Sexual Difference
  • 4: The Challenge of Diversity
  • 5: Sexuality, Intimacy and Politics
  • 6: Private Pleasures and Public Policies

Japanese

Anki, kanji, news, anime, and:

• Try N2, chapter 9-1, 9-2, 10-1, 10-2 (except the last test)
• Sōmatome N2 reading, from 2-5 to 3-5

Life

It became October.

My first week as a PhD student was quite intense! In the mornings I took an online course on research integrity. Except the online events and some school administration, I spent most of the time reading, especially Patrick Galbraith’s new book, which is very fitting for my research.

I had my first meeting with my supervisors. We agreed that I will focus on reading background literature and theory during the first semester and on more subject specific literature during the second. Both will result in some kind of writing, one for the mid-year review in January 2022 (end of the first semester), the second for the end-of-year review in June 2022.

I’ve decided to be diligent in treating this PhD as a full-time job, so I created a spreadsheet where I enter everything I’m doing that is part of the PhD (seminars, reading, learning Japanese, etc), down to the quarter, until it reaches eight hours per day – eight effective hours that is, and damn, I’m working into the late evenings to succeed with that! But it’s good to have this structure. I’m also diligent in eating well and getting exercise every day – usually an hour’s power walk in the nearby park.

Monday

The first day of my PhD studies – here we go:

Tuesday

• Creative Arts Research Network/Benjamin Thorne: After Law: Atrocity Archives, Plural Memory and Arts-based Research (presentation and discussion, 1h)
• Faculty of Humanities: Online induction (2h)

Wednesday

• School of Arts, Languages and Cultures: Online induction (1h)
• 94th Stockholm Seminar on Japan: Patrick W. Galbraith: The Ethics of Affect: Lines and Life in a Tokyo Neighborhood (1h)

Friday

• My first supervision meeting! (2h)

Saturday

• Tandem training (Japanese and German) with K, while we watched the inlines marathon.

Sunday

• Marathon in the morning – O came over and watched it from my terrace.
• Voting in the afternoon, together with A. Afterwards we had a walk and tried Victoria Tacos. Tasty but not so much food – you have to order plenty of them.

My thoughts right now

Things have become clearer. The first year of my PhD will basically be about reading, which suits me well, but demands structure, which I created the spreadsheet for. It feels good to have set targets with my supervisors, and to feel that we are thinking the same way about my research and that I have their support.

Course

• Research Integrity

PhD related

My Manchester News:

• PGR Development: supporting you every step of the way

Journal article

• Shedlosky-Shoemaker, Randi, Kristi A. Costabile, and Robert M. Arkin. 2014. “Self-Expansion through Fictional Characters.” Self and Identity 13 (5): 556–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2014.882269

Books

• Georges Bataille: Eroticism (part 2).
  • 5: Mysticism and sensuality (p. 221–51)
  • 6: Sanctity, eroticism and solitude (p. 252–64)
  • 7: A preface to “Madame Edwarda” (p. 265–71)
  • Conclusion (p. 273–76)
• Galbraith, P. W. 2021. The Ethics of Affect: Lines and Life in a Tokyo Neighborhood. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press.
  • Introduction (p. 1–38)
  • 1: Imaginary Sex and Crime in Japan: A Brief History (p. 39–76)
  • 2: Coming of Age in Akihabara: Imaginary Sex in Public (p. 77–116)
  • 3: Moving Images: Affection by Design (p. 117–55)

Japanese

Anki, kanji, news, and:

• Try N2, chapter 8.

Articles

• NYT Newsletter/Shira Ovide: On delivery businesses
• BZ: Autofrust an der Schönhauser Allee – Parkplätze werden zum Radweg
• BZ: Massives Wahl-Chaos in Berlin! „Bundestag? Geht hier nicht. Nur Berlin? Bitteschön!“
• Bulletin/Henrik Alexandersson: Kan vänster och höger lära sig leva tillsammans?
• Bulletin/Nina Lekander: Identitetspolitik – för bortskämda överklassungdomar

It’s time to start up the study diary again! I wrote it every week during my two years at FU, where I studied for my MA degree in Visual and Media Anthropology. It helped me get on top of things and inspired me to read more.

I’ll start with a little summary of the summer 2021, sometimes going back a bit more.

Concussion

It’s been a hard summer for me, because I had a concussion on 1 May 2021 which took about three months to recover from. It was a violent bike crash – I have no memories from it, the next thing I remember is waking up at the hospital.

The hardest thing during recovery was that I had to abstain from all cognitive work, a nightmare of sorts. Finally being able to get back to reading, writing, watching, creating feels like getting my life back!

PhD studies

In one week I’ll start a PhD in Japanese Studies. This has been in the works for more than a year:

• In February 2020 I met a scholar in my field at an event in Tokyo. We had coffee afterwards and realised we had similar research interests.
• In September 2020, while finishing up my master’s thesis, I contacted her and asked if she would be interested in supervising my PhD studies. She said yes.
• In November 2020, after having submitted my master’s thesis, I crafted a research proposal, which we perfected together over two months. This was a lot of work, but it paid off:
• In January 2021 I applied, in April 2021 I was accepted, and in May 2021 I was awarded school funding for my PhD project.

And now in September 2021 it will finally start – I’m so excited!

(Top image by Citysuitesimages via Wikimedia, CC-BY 2.0.)

Conferences

Last year I got a taste for academic conferences after having attended EASA 2020 as a listener. Now I’ve started to attend conferences as a presenter, which seems to be the norm.

March 2021: RAI Film Festival and Conference (London)

Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

I had been invited by my MA supervisor to present my master’s thesis (or some aspects of my fieldwork) in a panel he convened.

• Panel 26b: Empirical art: Filmmaking for fieldwork in practice | Ethics of engagement
  • My paper: Negotiating controversy: Understanding sexuality and desire in Japanese shotacon subculture

June 2021: 15th SIEF congress (Helsinki)

International Society for Ethnology and Folklore

The theme of the conference was “Breaking the Rules: Power, Participation, Transgression”, which felt like a good fit for me and my film, which had been selected for the audiovisual programme.

• Roundtable: Mediating Empowerment

Upcoming in November 2021: IUAES Yucatan congress (Mexico City)

International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences

• Panel 54: Exploring the potential of creative visual methods in creating worlds that upset the definition of possible
  • My paper: Drawing desire: Queering the past through Japanese shota comics

Submissions

• In November 2020 I submitted an abstract about West German gay magazines’ image of Arab men and boys in the 1970s to a theme issue of an academic journal. It was not accepted, but I got a very positive rejection email (not a good fit).
• In February 2021 I submitted the same abstract for a roundtable at DGSKA-Tagung 2021 – it was also not accepted (the convenors found it interesting but it was not a good fit).
  • I refrained from submitting this abstract to another theme issue of a journal – because their website didn’t have an SSL certificate (https instead of http) and I find that unprofessional and decided to trust my intuition!
• 15 May 2021 I submitted a chapter proposal for a book based on the RAI panel. Not all of us will be selected for the book, and my brain was mushy when I wrote it due to the concussion I had two weeks earlier, so we’ll see.
• 30 June 2021 I submitted an abstract for a paper for the IUAES Yucatan congress, which was accepted (see above).
• On 20 August 2021 I submitted my first full article for an academic journal. It was the West German gay magazines again, which is a semester paper that I had rewritten, something I had planned to do for a long time, but I think I was intimidated by the weight of academic publishing. I’m happy I finally got to it. Rewriting and fixing the reference style to that favoured by the journal.
• And on 30 August 2021 I submitted my whole master’s thesis (essay and film) to a competition, which involved some formatting and anonymising work. Exciting!

Submitting is such a wonderful feeling, the best! (In that regard, I keep coming back to Kim Liao’s “Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year” – first read in January 2019. I don’t take it literally, but I like the attitude.)

Unreal Boys

Submitting my film to film festivals is another matter and mostly done through Filmfreeway. My film has been out for a year now, so I’ve got a good understanding of where it fits and not. It is obvious that regular film festivals are uninterested. Ethnographic film festivals, however, have loved Unreal Boys:

• March 2021: Days of Ethnographic Film in Slovenia was my first selection. I participated in a Q&A (Youtube link) and watched all the films! A great experience throughout.
• June 2021: SIEF, as detailed above.
• June 2021: The selection by Kyiv Film Festival was a bit of a surprise. A regular film festival – and Unreal Boys won Best Director!

Coming up

• November 2021: And I’m happy to reveal that Unreal Boys has been selected for the prestigious Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival 2021!

I’ve also heard from two quite fitting festivals that my film almost made the cut. Well, too bad for them!

I’ve given Unreal Boys what it deserves now, and I’m happy it has had success at exactly the kind of venues where I think it should be shown and discussed. That will be all I do with this film. Due to several factors I can’t publish it online, which is a pity.

I still think I want to make a trailer though. Unreal Boys deserves one.

Events

Thanks to Covid, events and courses started moving online and I could participate in a plethora of them, although not always so actively:

• 20 & 27 November 2020: Queer Methodologies Graduate Symposium (The Irish Sexualities and Genders Research Network)
• 8-10 April 2021: Transitions 9: New Directions in Comics Studies (Birkbeck, University of London)
• 17-18 April 2021: Insideout: Goldsmiths Visual Anthropology MA 2019-20 (discussion)
• 24-28 May 2021: Sexuality Summer School (University of Manchester) – had to abort due to the concussion still being so fresh
• 8 July 2021: Pathways to reconnection (discussion) – my classmates’ online exhibition, open until June 2022
• 20 July 2021: The Academic Chorus (Creative Arts Research Network)
• 28-30 July 2021: Manga and Anime Days (Wacom)

Plus the Second Life Book Club often on Wednesday evenings, and once an extra event with Tom Boellstorff.

Coming up

• 16-17 September 2021: ENQA workshop
• 21 September 2021: The Academic Chorus?
• 17-19 November 2021: Queer Autoethnography?

Japanese

Anki

I finished the Japanese Core 6000 in Anki from the hospital bed (not knowing better – I should just have rested!). I kept repping for a couple of weeks before I realised I had to take a complete break from Japanese to not threaten my recovery from the concussion (more than I already had by not knowing better). Instead, it became the summer of Swedish radio.

When I decided to get back in the saddle I had 3,000 or so reps waiting for me. I realised that I was so easily distracted that I needed a God’s eye watching over me if I would get through it. I’m a bit proud of what I came up with: For seven consecutive early mornings I livestreamed myself doing Anki for about 2,5 hours each day. It worked! The potential global audience of Youtube became my God’s eye. Here is the 15-hour (!) playlist:

As a tech guy I enjoyed getting the streaming set-up right. It was learning by doing, so the first sessions are not technically perfect – but that was also not the point!

Kanji

During August 2021 I’ve also got on top of the jōyō kanji list again, that is, I have repped the 2,200 meanings in Heisig’s Remember the Kanji, and for this I use Flashcards Deluxe on my Ipad while writing the kanji on a paper, as shown in the one kanji writing livestream I did:

This is not distracting at all. In fact, it’s one of my favourite pastimes and I’m excited to learn more kanji – but first I must get on top of the readings (not just the meanings).

Manga

One of the few things I could do while recovering from the concussion was to read shōjo manga, so I finished the whole series of Kokoro Button:

Anime

Not much watched during my recovery. I finished Wataru, watched some more Granzort, and just this week started the legendary space adventure Macross from 1982.

Japanese Language-Proficiency Test

Today I registered for JLPT N2 which takes place on 5 December 2021 – it was cancelled at my venue last year.

Research

I’ve recently come into contact with a group of new research participants whom I have corresponded quite intensely with. They are providing new perspectives to my research, and that makes me very excited.

In May 2021 I purchased Atlas.ti for qualitative data analysis, but realised I was not fit to work with it since I was too fragile still after the concussion.

It’s a challenge to find a way to consolidate and store research participant data in a secure way. I’m still in the process of creating some kind of structure that lets me be on top of things.

Articles

Just some random articles that I’ve read:

• Politiken: Ny dansk forskning: En rystet hjerne skal ikke kun hvile – den skal også udfordres (January 2020, this article healed me in one go!)
• All the anime/Jonathan Clemens:
  • Books: Erotic Comics in Japan (November 2020, great review of a book which I will buy if/when it becomes cheaper than 100 furiiikingu euro!)
  • Books: Otaku & Imagination (2019, Patrick W. Galbraith’s Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan)
• Vox: Netflix’s re-translation of Neon Genesis Evangelion is drawing backlash for queer erasure (2019)
• Jeff Bezos: No thank you, Mr. Pecker (2019)
• Kvartal/Håkan Lindgren: Så fungerar den svenska dubbelmoralen (August 2021)
• Kvartal/Oscar Swartz: Carina Bergfeldt ser bara spikar (September 2021)

On Franziska Giffey’s withdrawn doctoral dissertation, a trope in German politics:

• Der Spiegel: Darum geht es bei Giffeys Plagiatsaffäre (May 2021)
• Tagesspiegel: Verstöße prägen die gesamte Arbeit (June 2021)

Films (Varda)

I’m keeping track on Letterboxd now, but I think Agnès Varda deserves a mention as a new discovery (thanks to my Editing Forum teacher):

• Black Panthers (1968)
• Women Reply (1975)
• Daguerreotypes (1975)
• Mur Murs (1981)
• Documenteur (1981)
• Kung-Fu Master! (1988)
• The Gleaners and I (2000)
• The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002)
• Varda by Agnès (2019)

Books

Worth mentioning is Writing Culture by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (editors) from 1986, the book that defined the “crisis of representation” in anthropology. I recorded summaries for each chapter and put them into a playlist:

• I recently read Cal Newport’s self-help book Deep Work, which made deep impact – I did a video.
• Angela Duckworth’s Grit is also helping – I’m halfway through.
• Georges Bataille’s Eroticism is a hassle to get through but highly relevant to my research.

Life

It’s been a strange period in my life, both the concussion and other private matters.

I’ve got my two vaccine shots, visited an optician to get new glasses, and started to meet some people. Yesterday I met my classmates at Südblock to celebrate that they have now all submitted their master’s thesis, after almost a year of Covid extensions.

As I’m getting back into life, after not having been fully myself, I hope things will become good.