Messy Room

My space is becoming increasingly disarrayed through the course of the semester. Here's today's arrangement.



Even better; the landlady told me someone will be covering my air conditioner soon. Since the leg of my bed is against it, this means I have to move my queen size loft bed far enough for them to get the cover on.

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Equally chaotic, but much prettier, here's a sunset I photographed from my parking lot in September.

Snow!

Holy crap. I just looked out my window and it's snowing. No accumulation, but there's a lot of it in the air! I'm going go outside and stand in it for a minute!

And then think about ordering those studded tires for my bike.

Grad School Reevaluation

So I just sent my advisor a letter saying that I think I've been on an entirely wrong path in grad school so far and I need to change my topic completely for his class that I'm half-way through. Fortunately it's a research *design* class where the end result is a research proposal; I haven't actually done any *research* yet.

I wrote:

Hi [advisor],

I’ve been working on the literature review for the project I outlined for your research design class and it’s been slow going. In fact, a lot of my work this semester has been really slow going. I’ve been thinking about the causes of that for a while and I have an answer; I’m not going in the right direction.

I wrote in my application statement that an activist approach to current issues is critical to me. That I love cities and want to make them better places. That’s still true, but the research I’m contemplating doing to pursue that agenda is not connecting to the passion that led me to apply to grad school and that led me back to school in the first place. What inspires my passion is looking at things as they are now and then finding out how they came to be. What they mean historically and in the present. How differently they were understood at different times by different people: the multivocalic understandings that come through dichronic perspective. That’s what drew me to photographing abandoned buildings and learning their histories, and it’s what draws me to historical approaches.

So as emotionally invested as I am in issues of current transportation accessibility and urban public transportation, I’m having a hard time getting intellectually invested in them. I’d much rather be sitting in a computer lab georeferencing historic maps, or combing through fifty-year-old public records in an archive. I’d like to talk to people about what their environment means to them and how they feel about it, especially people who have lived experiences of a different era as I did in my research in Kenosha on Pike Creek.

I started thinking actively about this when you told me that my proposal for public transit research was very presentist, and that it lacked a historical element. I realized that was very true, and I got back to reading Axsiom’s thesis that I’d set down a while ago and hadn’t found time for. As I read it, I got excited. I got excited in a way that I haven’t really felt since the more historically-focused work I was doing in Kenosha. As I read Axsiom, I thought about the other historically-focused material from our classes. When Bob Wilson talked about “wallowing in the archives” one of the other students later commented that she could see my eyes light up. I had the same reaction to reading Cole Harris’ article, which I suspect is the place that Bob got the phrase from. It reminds me of how happy I was working in the archives at Parkside, and how unhappy I’ve been here in comparison.

Perhaps these are realizations I should have made before going to grad school. I saw two paths; engaging actively with current issues of social justice, or diving into historical geography that I felt more passionately about but that I worried would be less connected to making change in the world. I chose the former, but as I take steps toward that goal, it feels increasingly out of line with what motivates me intellectually. Without that motivation and passion, the amount of dedication required for grad school does not feel worthwhile.

I’m now asking myself how to reconcile these seemingly disparate motivations. Is there such a thing as activist historical geography? Maybe we can talk about this more on Monday if there’s time, or schedule a meeting.

Regardless, if you’re willing, I think I need a new topic for the research I’m interested in, whether for the proposal for your class or anywhere else. As I noted, Axsiom’s thesis is quite close to the kind of work I’d like to do. I’ve been thinking of the idea of proceeding into transportation after after the 1936 Jubilee. Since I have to cross under 690 and 81 every day on the way to school or when I go to Lake Onondaga via the Creekwalk, I’m fascinated by the way these pieces of macro infrastructure shape both the larger built environment of the city and people’s experiences of their environment. Axsiom was looking specifically at the elevated railroad that became 690; I’d like to expand from that and look at the construction of 81 as well. I could research how that project was presented to Syracusans and how it has shaped their lives now, consciously and unconsciously. I can see a project that incorporates map comparisons, “official” accounts from newspapers and hegemonic sources, and perhaps even oral histories if I can find people who remember the construction, which seems possible given its date. I found a history dissertation from SU in 1978 on the topic of Syracuse’s highways: it was written by Jerome Allan Cohn in 1978, with David Bennett as his advisor . I may be able to incorporate insights from Axsiom’s and Cohn’s work with additional spatial, more recent historical, and experiential elements. Susan Robertson of the University of Brighton did something similar in a paper about an elevated highway in London. (Visions of Urban Mobility: the Westway, London, England. Cultural Geographies 2007 (14): 74-91)

Sorry this got long. Thanks for your time!

Chris