Archive for PhD things

Is it a coincidence?

October 6, 2015 · Filed under PhD things

Wow, It’s quite a while since my last writing in this blog. I have been very busy with my study and motherhood things lately.

However, I want to share one story which is interesting for me. I was following the MOOC on How to survive your PhD lead by Dr. Inger Mewburn from Australian National University recently.

In one of the session, people were asked questions about references.

”Does the reference add direct credibility to the argument? Is it required to give substance? or is it used to present another point of view which might be argued against?”

Inger replied that it is for All the above!! She goes on to quote Bruno Latour, from the book, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (pp. 33-34). He talks about using reference to build up an ‘army’ for our paper to defend itself.

I was asking to my friend in whatsapp about it and she was asking why I am using it since there is no direct relation with the ”institution thing” which was my field of study now.

Okay, I think it is interesting, I am just digging the book online and find it. It was saved on my book shelf now :).

Book cover_Latour

Source: Amazon

Incidentally, yesterday, when I was skyping with my supervisor, He suggest me to add the actor-network analysis on one of my chapter.

Well, I have no idea what’s actually inside the theory, however, my supervisor just suggest me to have a look since he wants me to describe the linkage of each stakeholders in my study.

Today I was just wikipedia-ing the Actor Network Theory (ANT) since it is the easiest way to have an idea on what it is about. I have heard a little bit about this theory from one of my friend since she use the theory in her study, and she write a lot of notes about Latour.

Then, something was surprised me.

It was described that ANT first developed at the Centre de Sociologie de I’Innovation (CSI) in Paris in the early 1980s by Michael Callon and Bruno Latour. Moreover, the ”state of the art” of ANT in the late 1980s was well-described in Latour 1987 text, Science in Action.

AHAA… what a coincidence!!

Without knowing that I will use it for my research, I’m just download the e-book and save it to my library… 🙂

I feel that I’m lucky and blessed. I feel that God always accompany us and guide us to go through the best path..

Great! Let see when I can read this 276 pages book in the middle of filtering all the statements for my Q..

It also was so refreshing to write again in my blog since quite long time ago 😛

06102015

–jovianiastari-

 

Comments (7) »

Political Scientist

December 18, 2013 · Filed under PhD things, Uncategorized

Being a new and a cross ”political scientist” is strange… Because, i almost never know anything about this field. However, perhaps in the future I want to keep my ecological knowledge and combine it in political science field, resulting the political ecology field…

However, I have just read nice article about how political scientist is..interesting. From someone, which is an Associate Professor in political science field:

 The best political scientists are the following five things: smart, creative, diligent, honest, and nice. Smart is obvious. The rest are not.

The best political scientists are creative. They look at old problems in new ways, or they find new problems to look at. A good way to land a middling job (or no job) is to find a marginal improvement on an existing estimator, or take lessons from Paraguay and apply them to Uruguay. The best political scientists show us how our estimators are incorrect, or better yet, find new things to estimate.

The best political scientists are diligent. They think about problems for years and years, they rewrite their draft papers repeatedly, they collect giant datasets from scratch, and they go into the field, learn the language, and stay there until they have learned something. There are no quick research trips, there are no obvious philosophical points, and there are no datasets that you can download with results you can write up in a week.

The best political scientists are honest. There are many points at which you might fudge your work: creating a new dataset from scratch, during fieldwork, in writing up your results. You will be astounded at how frequent this is in our profession. Don’t do it, for it always hurts you in the end. Being wrong and honest about it is OK. Being wrong and hiding it never works.

Finally, the best political scientists are nice. It is tempting to be prickly to make yourself seem smart or to protect your ego. But the same person you criticize today might be in a position to give you a job tomorrow. As they say, make your words soft and sweet, for you never know when you may have to eat them.

 

Source from this forum.

rotterdam 18/12/2013

–jovianiastari-

 

Comments (3) »