The third course

Well, after these first six months of the PhD education, all three obligatory courses at CUReS are over. The third course, Politics and Democracy in Cities and Regions, ended with two interesting seminars. The last one about other PhD students' dissertations, the one before about classical Political Science texts. For that one, I chose Patrick Le Galès book about European Cities. It provided some good insights but didn't leave a lasting impression for my own thesis. I had been thinking about reading Esping-Andersen's "Three worlds of welfare capitalism" or one of Castells' works in urban sociology. However, after reconsideration, it seems as though they won't be significant for my study. Moreover, I have already read "Three worlds" and four of Castells' books. So it was worth trying something new. However, at the time of writing I cannot spontaneoulsy think of what European Cities has contributed with. I am already getting oblivious!
On the other hand, the thesis that I chose for the final seminar was very interesting. Written by a human geographer from the "Umeå school", it provides many valuable insights in sparsely populated areas and their struggle for economic, demographic and social survival. Linda Lundmark wrote this compilation thesis, and it is interesting to see the structure of such a thesis, including the articles and the first few chapters. I am also thinking of writing a compilation thesis and I have started thinking in the direction of interesting purposes and subjects for my articles.
This third course, with the parts about discourse analisys, research design and the like, together with the other coursers, offers a broad base for the coming time! Now, our works focuses on the research proposal and other courses that we're doing (Pedagogics for Higher Education, e.g.). More news about that soon.

Emigrate 2008

Well, it's been a while since I last wrote, but here's an update about a trip I made: to Emigrate 2008. This is an Emigration Fair in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I was 'back home' during the first 11 days in March for this fair, but of course also for visiting friends and family. The idea of the fair is to bring people from the demand and the supply side together: certain regions or organisations anywhere in the world that want to attract immigrants on the one hand, and migrants that want to leave the Netherlands and look for a live elsewhere on the other hand.
During the two days of the fair, I conducted a small survey by taking questionnaires from all but one stand at the swedish part and 33 Dutch visitors that are interested in moving to Sweden. It was very interesting just to observe how this industry is arranged and even more interesting to hear the (live)stories of some potential migrants. Their reasons for wanting to move in a nut shell: looking for "Rust & Ruimte" (quiet & space), nature and a more relaxed pace of life, and being fed up with the rat race, traffic jams and 'overregulated Dutch society'. More about this can be found in a Survey Report that I wrote; just send me a mail if you're interested: marcoeimermann@gmail.com.
It has been a very useful pilot project and it helped me in orientating how I want to structure my research! More to come soon about the third course and the research prosposal.

IMER Congress

IMER stands for International Migration and Ethnic Relations. This field of study is interdisciplinary, with ethnologists, sociologists, social work scientists and human geographers amongst the interested. Botkyrka, a Stockholm suburb, hosts a multicultural centre where the Swedish IMER Society has its seat. A congress was arranged by them on the last day of January and the first day of February 2008.
It was my first congress outside Örebro and I was curious to see what the multicultural centre looked like and what kind of people there would be. It was a nice old building amidst the concrete suburbian flats, where we - a group of about 25 people - discussed IMER for two days. The group was mixed in age, gender and ethnic backgrounds. Young "ethnic" PhD candidates like myself (Dutch, Polish and other nationalities) were sitting side by side with experienced researchers from England, India, Denmark, Iceland, Turkey and of course Sweden.
We talked about diaspora, bilingual children and what it's like to be a "suburb-kid". Very interesting and it resulted in a nice idea for taking part in an IMER Seminar series at Uppsala University, amongst other things.
Completely exhausted, but many experiences richer, I returned to Örebro.

The second course

Cities and Processes of Social Change is the name of the second course we had as a group. This course, running from November 2007 to January 2008, was organised by lecturers from the disciplines sociology and social work. This was very interesting for me, as I had not followed any courses in social work before, and only one course in sociology (in Umeå). It was a good occasion to get to know some lecturers in these subjects and of course to get more insight in the disciplines themselves and some of their basic literature.
We read Giddens, and got interesting lectures about empowerment and international social work. It was very sad and chocking of course, that lecturer in sociology Fuat Deniz was murdered in December, just as we were in quite close contact with some of the lecturers in that discipline in the frame of our course. To see the sadness in the eyes of his closest friends and colleagues was really devastating. (see previous blog-post).
The course itself was organised the same way as the first course; lecturers, compulsory literature, elegible literature and seminars based on the papers we wrote. The completion of the course was celebrated with a diner at home at one of the lecturers in Brickeberg - a good way to end the course!

A tragedy

Today, it's exactly one month ago since Fuat Deniz, lecturer in Sociology, was brutally murdered in the gym at our campus. This really shook us all, especially the ones that knew him very well. He was a loved and respected friend and colleague to many. Moreover, nothing is known yet as to who could have done it or the motives. Many say political motives lay behind this brutal deed, but the police doesn't want to exclude any possiblity and works hard on the case, with the help of the National Police Service.
Only now, after some weeks of silence and time with friends and relatives at home, people have recovered somewhat. Of course, only now, after all commotion, the biggest shock arrives for Fuats closest friends and relatives. His funerial will be the 22nd of January, in Örebro.

Dissertation (part 1)

Monday 26 November 2007 was a day with an unexpected amount of snow. This resulted amongst other things in a beautiful white track and field stadium, white grass and white trees next to the small conference centre Östra Mark on university ground.

This was also the first time we had to produce a text about our dissertation, describing our aim, method, questions, literature and earlier eresearch in the field. The whole steering group was present, as well as some interested PhD students from earlier "generations." We all got helpfull feedback and enough comments for working on our "sketch" the rest of the year.

A month earlier, we had been to Åkerby, close to Nora, to witness two days of networking with external lecturers and commenting on other PhD students' work. This was a good experience, since this laid the ground for our work and we learned how to receive criticism with dignity :)

The end of the first course

It's been a while, but I'll summarise the first course and the final two seminars we had in October and November 2007. The fourth seminar was interesting and exciting, as PhD student MJ presented his work on Experience Economy in Bergslagen (Avesta) and connected this to the work of the Swedish Knowledge Foundation. In the restructuring areas of Sweden, new efforts are made to focus on the value of experience industries. Film in Göteborg, Food in Hällefors and so on. Special meeting places are founded and funded with many millions of crowns! What it all comes down to is that life is all about experiences. We discussed the effects this has on planning and local creativity.

This was linked to theories and literature by Allen J. Scott (The cultural economy of cities) and Scott & Dominic Power (the production of culture).

The fifth and final seminar took place on 8 November and here we discussed each other's essays. Everyone had read one of the other texts in particular and was supposed to discuss them in general for about 20 minutes. I wrote my essay about the value of theories of urbanism in the context of Dutch migration to Swedish rural areas. Other topics were: New Urban Politics (ALF), the concept "Networks" (AT), The late-modern city (MH), Social polarisation and immigrants (ML), New urban forms (PS) and Consumption, choice and place (SL). We realise now that our little group is all about studying identity!