My first #AcWriMo!

#AcWriMo starts tomorrow! I am participating, though I don't think I will be truly writing academically. I'm not quite there yet in my #homegradschooling, though I'm pretty close.

So, I think this November will be, for me, about writing my academic subject/interest(s), but aimed at this here blog, as well as a bit for my Unitarian Universalist church's newsletter (I just joined the archives team & volunteered to start a 'column' on UU history.)

I've been out of school for 3 years now, and my writing is extremely rusty (and by that I mean it sucks), not to mention that I have no habit of writing or time built into my schedule for it anymore, so I'm hoping this will help me really gear up and grease the mental wheels before I attempt to dive in to journal article writing (and hopefully I'll be able to turn some of my blog writings into a more formal piece of writing down the road.)

Here are just a few of the articles I have been reading to prepare myself:

literature review step one, scoping. #acwrimo work in progress (patter)
not all literature ‘reviews’ are the same (patter)
doing the literature review – thinking about patterns and groups (patter)
mapping your literatures (patter)
dealing with the space between literatures (patter)
literature know-how – beware too much naming, not enough framing (patter)
History Resources (University of Mary Washington)
Thesis Whisperer's Top Tips

I'm going to be coming into work about an hour early to take advantage of the nicer computer & the fact that I can't do anything while sitting at home (and I have no laptop!), and possibly stay a bit later, we'll see. Good luck to everyone else who is participating in any of the WriMos!

Kew's Forgotten Queen: Marianne North

How excited was I when the BBC put out a documentary about one of the women I read about in my studies on Imperial-era Women travelers?! SUPER. I watch an obscene amount of BBC documentaries every month, but they're rarely about anyone or anything I study specifically. And, while Marianne North isn't my Isabella Bird, she has been in several of the books and articles I've read lately (such as Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Ninteenth-Century American West).

I assume North got a whole show on herself due to the collection of botanical paintings she left to Kew Gardens and it probably needed a bit of publicity, but really I wish they would have just gone all in and done a whole series on her (BBC history docs are usually a series of around 3 'films', an hour each).

While this one-off special was enjoyable to watch, and actress Emilia Fox was adorably and appropriately excited to learn about her and follow in her footsteps, it's treatment of North was, of course, quite superficial. My BBC ladies, Drs. Amanda Vickery & Lucy Worsley, do such a great job in giving their topics some intersectional feminist 3-dimentionality, I suppose I'm just spoiled now. There just wasn't enough time to do any imperial traveler justice with only one film/episode!

This is particularly unfortunate because it's a show about an imperialist, shown on BBC, with pretty much no mention at all about the negative aspects of imperialism that her work helped to perpetuate (by giving British folks a taste of all the flora and fauna out there in the wild, that they then wanted to go and see and collect, encouraging the continual greedy and entitled Imperial British presence in countries all around the world). Awkward.

But, I was still able to turn my academic brain off long enough to just enjoy the ride. If you have a British ISP you can watch it on iPlayer for the next few days, otherwise, BBC shows can often be found on youtube!

Within Kew Gardens stands an extraordinary gallery, celebrating the work of one of the most prolific botanical artists of the Victorian age. At a time when women barely left their parlour rooms, Marianne North's globe-trotting exploits defied convention as she travelled alone at the height of the British Empire. From Borneo and Brazil, to Japan, South Africa, Australia and India, she fearlessly navigated the world twice over in her pursuit of capturing every living plant on canvas.

Actress Emilia Fox tells the story of how this Victorian rebel changed the face of botanical research, propelling her to the top of a male-dominated world of science and exploration, gaining the admiration of Charles Darwin and even Queen Victoria. Retracing Marianne's footsteps and her passion for the natural world, Emilia revisits the awe-inspiring locations of some of her greatest experiences.

With exclusive access to Kew Gardens and Marianne's wealth of personal memoirs, letters and paintings, this is a tantalizing tale of a visionary who rejected marriage and social convention for a pioneering life of conservation and adventure. Her artistic legacy remains as mesmerising today as it was in 1882 when her gallery opened at Kew Gardens.

Learning to Do History outside of Academia

Since I'm currently on my own with my studies, I haven't had any senior historians taking me under their wings and teaching me how to actually.. you know... do history. I feel that lack of guidance acutely at times.

 I've been at all this for some months, though, and I've managed to find a few resources that have been a significant help in how to conceptualize the work of a historian, as well as learning how actual research and actual writing is done. These aren't the only History podcasts I listen to, but they are the ones that either explicitly talk about how Historians do/should think & how actual research and writing is done (like the first few), or ones that talk to authors of historical books and are particularly helpful to hear how other researchers actually work.

Podcasts:
The Way of Improvement Leads Home
Doing History Series on Ben Franklin's World
Practicing History
The Art of the Review
Ben Franklin's World
New Books in Biography
New Books in History

  Academia-oriented blogs:
(Not history-specific, but have also been quite helpful)
Thesis Whisperer
The Research Whisperer
PhD Talk
Get A Life, PhD
ProfHacker
Tenure, She Wrote
The Professor Is In
Inside Higher Ed

I've also been finding other historians to add on Twitter and Academia.edu on the social media side of things. It's hard to bee too active on Twitter currently, as I spend all day at my day job (no twittering there!) and then at home I rarely get on a computer. I need to figure out a good plan for that. And of course, Academia.edu is a bit sad when you don't actually have any papers of your own to list! But, hopefully I will someday!

Finally, an introduction

Okay, I need to use this blog for more than keeping track of the podcasts I listen to (though I need to do a better job about that, as well).

I keep not-writing because It's been so long since I've written anything in any serious(/ish) capacity, and I know I'm horribly rusty. And, I feel like my thoughts aren't yet particularly coherent on any of it.

So, of course, writing a whole bunch is exactly what I NEED to do to for both of those issues. So, I'm going to start trying to write regularly, even if only a bit, even if it's not great writing or entirely coherent.

It also strikes me that I haven't made any kind of intro post yet either. So, I suppose I should start with that!

I'm Ameya. My educational background is complicated enough to warrant it's own post sometime, but in super-short, I have my B.Sc. in City & Regional Planning from The Ohio State University (2013), and I'm planning on going back to school for a PhD in History (my life-long love) when I can afford it, but that will take at least a few years.

I'm not waiting for school to dive right in, though. This #homegradschooling project comes out of the fact that I "homeschooled myself" (no input from any adult whatsoever) after I left high school at age 15 (I bounced in and out of both HS and college for years), and this is just a far more rigorous and academic-y version of that.

I haven't managed to articulate my research interests very well yet, and they are still developing anyway. But, my current focus of interest started from a love of Imperial-Era British Women's Travel Writing (Especially Isabella Bird), but a significant discomfort in how very very problematic the works always are. I realized how little vocabulary and conceptual frameworks I had to make sense of and explain these issues, so I started digging into papers and books related to the topic.

While I'm still studying that, I have expanded my scope to learn what I can about issues such as scientific racism, social darwinism, discourses of feminity, imperialist discourses, intersections of race-class-gender, female intellectualism, social theory, social control, critical theory, etc.

Everything I read leads me to more new concepts which I then feel a pressing need to dive into. It's both heaven and hell for a legitimately ADD researcher for myself. There is so much to learn, and I love it, but there is very little focus in my studies right now, as I bounce around from idea to idea.

But, it's alright. I really do have so much to learn, and, what I see as one advantage of my particular brain, is how very interdisciplinary it is, and good at synthesizing information from various different fields. The time will come where I will focus myself more intently on certain things, but for now I'm just getting a broad overview of all the various topics that are related to the 19th century/early 20th century British and American women writers, thinkers, and travelers and their brilliant and extremely problematic works.

In fact, I need to go work on this blog and organize my reading lists and other bloggy things. Note to self: I really need to learn how to end blog posts....