This is the presentation that I gave at the end of my 5001 “Historical Practice” class, April 2008. I think it gives you a good idea of where the project came from, how it evolved and where I was at the time.

Enjoy.

News ladies and gentlemen. I have a presentation to prepare for. I’ll be at the CERLAC Graduate Student Research Conference on Latin America and the Caribbean 7-8 November 2008, York University, Toronto. I’m presenting on the “Fergusons of Farm Road”, a.k.a. my research to date. Research that I will be sharing with you here as time goes on. So basically I have a month to prepare. The sound you hear is me hyperventilating.

This week went well as far as work was concerned. I went through 3 episodes, note taking and annotating. TA duties took away a good deal of my moxie this week. I severely underestimated the time it was going to take me to mark a map quiz. Thank God that another TA is now working with me. I was quite glad and grateful to give her half of the stack.

Going through the episodes this week, what stood out to me was that the character archs could be a source of meaning. For instance, there is a character named Samuel, and he develops from an irresponsible carouser into the assistant manager of the hotel where he works. Remember that while the show was running the Bahamas was going from a colony to an independent nation. Could that Character’s story have any greater meaning? Could he be a metaphor for the country’s development? I have to read more to find out for sure. But this angle looks promising.

I’m also working on a thorough redesign of the site. Should be done in a couple weeks. I’m trying to get it done before the conference. Hopefully the work on that doesn’t interfere with me getting my presentation together. Just a hunch, but I think that is more important.

(Although a redesign would be so very nice.)

In Search of Suburbia

A work in progress

Allow me to introduce you to a device that I have become acquainted with recently. It is called the ‘Bahamian detector’. It’s a hypothetical top-secret device and its still going through rigorous testing. What it does is register the amount of ‘Bahamian-ness’ present in any person, place or thing. Its scale starts at a high of ‘True- true Bahamian’, and a red light goes off whenever it detects something that isn’t. The device has a rather broad mid point, but there are no markers on it for those, shall we say, ‘grey areas’.

The powerpoint presentation

Why am I doing this again? Yes. This is supposed to represent my academic doings and be a place where I can rant on my topic, rail at my school and complain about my superiors.

It is a place for mourning. It is a place for things academic. It is where the 150 pages that will be my thesis project will unfold.

Enjoy

This is the start of something. What exactly, I’m not sure I know. I was trying this another way, but it wasn’t working. Now me thinks I will do it the wordpress way. Again. So that brings my total number of blogs to three. One more to get started actually…

Progress is such a bitch.