Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November…

I don’t know how many of you have actually seen the film V for Vendetta, but I was quite surprised to learn that they actually do celebrate November 5th here. It’s known as Guy Fawkes day, and they used to burn him in effigy, as a commemoration of his failure to blow up the parliament. But now it’s turned into a giant bonfire and fireworks (which we’ve had to tolerate for the last 4 nights in a row).

I apologize for the delay in this week’s post. Yesterday while most of Britain was celebrating the demise of Guy Fawkes, Z and I were celebrating the demise of our first essay! Everything went quite smoothly – no work was lost the night before, and we tried to spread everything out over several days. I felt a little rusty after not writing a paper in nearly 5 months but in the end, I submitted what I think was a decent piece of writing. Most importantly, I did pick up a lot of helpful information for my dissertation. One of the authors I reviewed talks a lot about proper methodology in media audience research. A big problem according to him has to do with researchers wanting to start with the media and then somehow draw connections to the audience. So for example, if you’re looking at how violence on television affects people, a common starting point is the television shows with scenes of violence, and then trace the viewers to measure their reactions. Well in that case, of course you’ll find some kind of conclusions in your favour (for example, increased heart rate or shorter tempers or what have you). Anyways, what this guy says researchers should be doing is starting with the people who are violent and working your way back to the cause of their behaviours (which may or may not include certain media outlets). I never really thought about conducting research in that manner because in our discipline, we’re always so quick to link most of society’s attitudes and behaviours to the media as the sole and direct cause. Even with my research, I was thinking of starting with advertisements and working my way backwards. But after reading this book, I’m more tempted to start with the young women and then examine what factors have shaped their representations of beauty culture, focusing on media’s role of course.

Speaking about dissertations, we had an entire lecture today about the whole process of writing our dissertation and conducting research and acquiring ethics clearance…it was nice to finally get a breakdown of how this is going to work. It doesn’t feel like such a daunting task now that I know what those 18,000 words are made up of. What does sound like it’s going to be a pain in the butt is getting my ethics clearance for my research. There’s a lot of bureaucracy involved…if I want to work with any human subjects under 18 I need a background check done by their criminal department which can take months for international students (but luckily once I get it it’s international – so I can test subjects in the UK and Canada without needing a separate check). So I think the toughest part of this is going to take place before I can actually start writing my dissertation!

To be honest, not much else has really been going on this week other than us working on our essays. Oh, we did go to a Halloween party that the Canadian Law Society held on the 30th. Z went as Aphrodite and I was a belly dancer. It was fun but I think both of us were feeling so anxious about our papers we didn’t really enjoy it as much as we could’ve.

We have a couple days before we head to Budapest (we leave Friday afternoon). So tomorrow we have to come up with a list of sites we want to see there and things we want to do. For sure I need to spend at least half the day at one of their spas…Budapest is renowned for their Turkish bath-houses and spas. Apparently, the natural hot springs are so hot that they have to add cold water to them so people can bare the temperatures! I don’t think it’s hit me yet that we’re really going to Budapest…what an adventure! I never thought I’d have the guts to just take off like this with nothing but a backpack and visit a completely foreign place. It’s such a surreal experience being here.

Christmas decorations are slowly creeping onto display windows in town. It’s exciting to hear the ads on the radio and the Christmas sales starting – England is supposed to be beautiful at Christmas time – dripping in multi-coloured lights and evergreen trees. I think instead of planning a specific trip somewhere in December, we might just take several smaller trips around England and maybe Scotland or Ireland at that time. Save the Mediterranean for warmer weather : )

I promise I’ll have much more to say next week – wish us all the best on our Hungarian excursion! And Happy Diwali for those I don’t speak to before we leave!