Femiknits and the Papers of DOOM

Ok, so I’m totally going to be blogging about school with appalling frequency between now and Christmas. Forgive me. I’m a grad student and the end of the semester is disturbingly close. If you’re lucky I’ll have some knitting to sneak in from time to time (hello, perfect procrastinating activity!), but it’s mostly going to be boring details about my progress on three papers. Starting now.

I’ll start by giving you the basics. I’m taking three classes this semester, and each of them has a final paper of roughly 15-20 pages due in mid-to-late December. Two of the papers are historiographies, which basically amount to writing some argument about the history of history. I’ll take a few books, find the strong and weak points of each, pick out the arguments, and write a paper where I make the books argue with each other or make some kind of observation about the work that remains to be done to give a full picture of the particular thing I’m studying. The third paper is not a historiography; it’s the one I’ve been nattering away about and visiting the NYPL for. This one is a seminar paper, and requires lots of primary source research to make an independant argument. I can’t rely exclusively on other scholars’ works for this.

Now for details about individual papers:

Technology, Culture, and History paper: Ugh, it’s due too soon! December 14th, to be exact. I haven’t started it yet, though I’ve had some idea of the topic since the beginning of the semester. It’s one of the historiographies, and I want to make an argument about the different authors’ perceptions of modernity. How did they define modernity? What were the markers of a modern society? Was modernity desirable? Etc. I’m going to use Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization, Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space, and David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old. Now that I think about it, I should start rereading those books soon so I can get started writing. It’ll probably take me a week to assemble quotes and think of my argument, and another week to write it. It’s the only assignment due all semester – 50% discussion, 50% paper for the final grade – so I feel I need to get at least a B+ to get an A in the class.

The Making of Race in Latin America: Don’t know exactly when this one is due, but it’s due relatively late. Like, around Xmas day late. Yay! Thus, it will be the last paper I worry about. It is also a historiography, and I want to look at the transformation of race relations in Cuba between The War of Independence and the beginning of Fidel Castro’s regime. I’m interested to see what, if anything, changed in the ways that different races were defined, and how these different races interacted with each other. Did the ways in which people identified themselves change? Were perceptions of racial categories reflected in social or political structures, and did these structures undergo any significance changes? Particularly interesting to me are Castro’s assertions that race did not exist, and that Cuba was a racism-free society. In this regard, I’d like to draw parallels between Brazil and Cuba, and see if the scholarship for each country poses similar questions or draws similar conclusions about the realities of these race-free claims. I think I’ll find that both nations made these claims and in both cases the claims are widely regarded as myths. If my suspicion is correct, I want to investigate why these claims were made: what purpose did they serve? Who made the claims and why? How have they shaped race relations? I haven’t gotten all my books in yet, but once I do figuring out where I want to go from here will be much easier. For now, though, I just know that changing race relations in Cuba in the twentieth century and a comparison between the way historians have written about the similar claims of Castro’s regime and Brazil’s racial democracy are things I want to address in the final paper. It’s a big topic, and I may cut it back to the Castro’s Cuba v. Brazil comparison. We’ll see….after I’ve finished everything else.

The last paper, for my seminar class, is a MONSTER. Seriously, my bibliography has about 15 books on it and I’ve also done a lot of primary source research at the NYPL for it. This paper is all about how women’s relationships to technology affected their involvement in world government, disarmament, and peace movements. It’s really complex – I’m starting to think it’s too complex – and I don’t yet know if I can write the awesome paper I proposed to my prof before Thanksgiving. Yikes! I really just need to keep my nose in my books, think think think, and write write write. I should also go back for some archiving soon. I never did make it to the NYPL this weekend. I decided instead to spend Friday fixing my car (which broke down the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, ugh) and to spend Saturday reading. When I looked at the finding aids on Thursday night, I realized that I didn’t have a clear enough idea of what I wanted to look for so a trip to the library would have been a waste of time. All the reading today helped immeasurably, though, so I should be able to spend this weekend at the NYPL. I have a much better idea of what I’m writing and what the structure of the paper will be, so my archival time will hopefully be productive. I’m glad that this paper isn’t due until 12/18. I know that sounds like a lot of time, but trust me when I say I’m going to need all of it to do a good job.

Ugh. Ok. All that writing made me remember that I need to go do more academic writing – namely, on the 17 books I’m surrounded by. Seriously. I counted them. See?

I wasn’t lying. Oh! And for those (crazy? bored? stalkerish?) few who have made it to this point: CONTEST in honor of my female activism and technology paper! To enter, simply post a comment on this blog telling me what feminism means to you. I suppose I can toss an extra entry your way if you post these views about feminism on your own blog, too, and pass the contest along in the blogosphere. I haven’t chosen a prize: instead, I’ll blog-stalk the (random) winner and choose something that he or she would really like.

Enter my contest, and have fun for me tonight, y’all, because I’ll be here reading books for most of it.