Work never really stops

After 2 months of paternity leave, I finally feel like the pace of life is slowing down. It has been a lot of fixing in and around the new house and travelling to and from friends and relatives. And work kept me busier than I thought.

First of all, I'm still working on the first article, be it with some more distance to the text. On 10 September, Mats, Dieter and me had a meeting. Some comments on the text have come by mail from friends in the Netherlands and a few days ago, Mats and me had a meeting in order to summarise all that should be done before we can send the article to a journal. It feels like there are a lot of smaller things, such as numbers and figures that should be double checked and some diagrams altered. Well, this is gonna take some time during autumn, and then I'll work with it full speed after my return on the workfloor in January.

The editorial work with the reader about images of Bergslagen is showing some nice results. With the help of the editors, my chapter starts to take real shape and the reader should be published within a few months' time. That would mean my first academic publication, and it's even in Swedish!

Other things are the financial side of paternity leave, which is quite difficult to arrange when you have as an administrator earning real wage prior to your PhD studies, and now have an income made up of 86% scholarship and 14% wage. It took a half a year, but even that seems to be okay now, and I will soon be able to pay C. my half of the table that we bought for our house.

Planning for next year, I haev filled in a form with my wishes for lecturing. If all goes as planned, I will be lecturing approximately 200 hours in 2010, on courses in "Population Geography", "Culture, Tourism and Regional Development", "Geographical Area Studies" and other courses.

Last but not least, we are celebrating 2 new Doctors of Philosophy in our discipline; Max and Moa! This means an official defence, followed by a dinner and party on which we created the tradition of singing a song composed by us, accompanied by some Geographers playing the guitar. Often hilarious, not so much beacuase of the text, but rather due to our (mediocre)performance :)

And then of course, to gether with C. I'm still taking care of Lucas and our new house. A journey to the Netherlands is also planned for the end of the month. Purpose: visiting an emigration fair in Bunnik!

Paternity leave

As we start seeing the end of summer here in Örebro, it is time for a resume of the past months. Before the summerbreak, I've been working a lot with "other things" such as the PhD Section, Lecturing and writing a chapter for the Anthology/Reader "Fram träder Bergslagen" (Bergslagen Emerges). This was all fun and worthwile, but together with moving houses, my 'real' work was somewhat neglected. Around the 14th of July, I finished a first manuscript for the article that I had been preparing from the coruse in Norrköping onwards. After comments on the congresses in Örebro and Turku, it is now quite close to a "Publishable" version I would say.

On a few weeks time, I will meet my two supervisors Mats and Dieter in order to see what should be changed in the article before we can try to submit it to an academic journal.

Now, as I am on paternity leave until mid-January, and C. works full time, I have to take care of Lucas, who just awoke from his mid-day sleep. More about the paternity leave later and perhaps also elsewhere in cyberspace.

Getting serious

So, now that the last exams are graded for this course I was lecturing and Peter and me gave our lecture on Geographical Area Studies, I can seriously concentrate on my first article. It will hopefully be finished by the start of the summer, and I have received some good comments by my second supervisor from Umeå; Dieter Müller. An 8,000 words paper cannot be too broad so the aim and questions need to be specified to quite a large extent. This first article will be about characterising the Dutch that migrate to the Swedish countryside and I will travel to the Netherlands in order to find som more statistics and conduct some telephone-interviews.

The article will be quite quantitative and it will introduce the phenomenon from a more national perspective. It will discuss why I choose to study the Dutch, why they are recruited and why now. Quite simple questions, but the answers may be quite complicated. We'll see! At least, I can thank a good friend of mine for reviewing the first version of the manuscript :)

Now, I'm off to the spring-sun, my "caught a cold"-son and some sports before the weekend starts!
Cheersio, /Meimer

Article 1 - the orange wave

Good news about the course in Norrköping - I passed! Yeah, the course leaders sent me an e-mail yesterday and I couldn't have a better start of the weekend. They praised my work and encouraged me to try to publish the course-paper in a journal.

This is exactly what I'm trying to do. The work with my first real scientific article has started. Inspired by concepts as transnational entrepreneurship, regional growth and literature about why Dutch migrants leave the Netherlands, I have written a text. This text was commented on during a conference in Örebro. I will revise it soon and send it to Dieter Müller, my second supervisor from Umeå. He will visit us in Örebro at the end of March and comment on my paper. His comments are of course valuable and I will revise the paper again and try to submit and present it at the Nordic Geographers Meet in Finland at the beginning of June. Who knows, after this, I might be able to send it to a scientific journal such as Population, Space and Place or Entrepreneurship and Regional Development. In the meantime, I need some more statistics and references to relevant literature.

Also in the meantime, I am and will be lecturing in various courses. Economic Geography, the same course as last semester; a course on how to write a thesis; and a guestlecture in a course about social work. This last lecture is a good challenge to me, as I will try to combine some interesting knowledge about migration studies with Area-studies and my own study.

Also, it is interesting to follow the current developments in the migrant recruitment industry. A close familymember to me has visited the Emigration Fair in March 2009 in Utrecht and sent me some interesting information and a good report about this. Placement will organise a fair in April and Region Dalarna is of course continuing their recruitment.

It is really exciting to try to combine this information into a good article just around the time of celebrating my 30th birthday, as well as raising our son and preparing for moving houses!