Updates

What is this?

In a bid for greater reflexiity, and hoefully as a resource for PhD researchers in future, I am going to attempt to detail my PhD journey on this site. I have been a PhD student for around four (official!) weeks, and so at the start of my journey I think it would be beneficial to record my thoughts and updates on my research progress. 

End of 2025✨

This year has been a very busy one! I've managed to publish two papers solo and one with the Concept Analytics Lab! This is a massive milestone for me, a dream I wasn't sure I'd achieve. My first paper, published in Social Media + Society, was on a project I've been working on in my spare time on softblocking, a novel affordance on Twitter that is reshaping how users think about disconnection online. The second, in Language@Internet, is about the difference between public (main) and protected (priv) accounts amongst members of the K-Pop fan community online. I'm really excited to have these published! 

2021

23rd May update

So, it's been a while! Apologies to myself (since I doubt anyone else reads this) for not updating soon, but I have had a busy few months! I attended several K-Pop concerts as part of my PhD fieldwork in the Netherlands, Germany and here in the UK. I had a very good time and got loads of interesting ethnographic observations. It's wonderful to be able to see my community united together again after COVID, and to be able to document their interesting practices, talk to people about their take on things, and of course enjoy the concerts myself! 

Also, I recently passed my Progression exam, which means I can become a 2nd year PhD student. Yay! More work ahead, but I'm excited to get to it!

25th Februrary update

A long awaited and much delayed update! Since the last post, I have graduated from my MRes (with distinction!), got into the amazing Copenhagen Winter School in Sociolinguistics (this March!), got into my first CONFERENCE, and also got COVID. Swings and roundabouts! It's so difficult when submitting to conferences, putting your work out there and knowing more likely than not it'll be rejected. But an acceptance, to Sociolinguistics Symposium no less, makes me feel incredibly confident in and proud of my work and myself! Enough to soothe my aching throat! 

21st December Update

Lots happening in a short space of time! I completed the first semester of my PhD, celebrated my 25th birthday, and I'm preparing to submit a version of my MRes thesis to a journal! I'm incredibly nervous about this latter one, and although I'm not that confident my paper will get published, I figure the experience is always good, and I do think my work has good ideas even if I need some more work polishing my writing. I'm hoping to start publishing my work sooner rather than later, partly for job-getting reasons later on, but also because I'm aware this field is rapidly changing, and I want to make sure I get my ideas out there! 

9th December Update

After some back and forth on the nature of my project, I'm really feeling like it's starting to take shape! Although I'm not so certain about the gap in the literature that my work will strive to address, as is demanded of most academic output (much to my chagrin - what's wrong with academic exploration for the sake of academic exploration?). However, I do have a clearer sense of what I'd like to address, and how I'll go about it, which is a big leap for a first year PhD student. I had a really helpful meeting with my Supervisor and her other supervisees, none of whom work on digital media or ethnography. It was fantastic to hear from those pursuing studies on things like grammatical gender, perception of variation, and production of dialect variation, to both get to know my colleagues and to hear their feedback on my ideas. This experience, as well as a fantastic talk I attended by Dr Emily Hanink (who, in fact, was my TA in Linguistics 101 at the University of Chicago in 2016!) on nominalisation structure in Washo, reinforced to me how essential it is to interact with all areas of the field. Nearly Christmas too!