Pumpkins and hay bails in the streets of Montreal, it really makes me appreciate the juxtaposition of agricultural harvest and urban landscapes. Happy Halloween!
Unfortunately my survey last friday got cancelled (or perhaps postponed) and my follow-up meeting at a farm yesterday will also need to be rescheduled because of a fire. This week I emailed every actor for whom I was missing data to complete their survey as well as the majority of actors who have not yet done the survey. My objective is to wrap-up data-collection for the second week of November so that I can start my analysis. Already, it doesn’t seem like that will be entirely possible as someone emailed me to let me know that they wouldn’t be able to get me the missing data until the end of the month.
I must admit that I am getting impatient to finish this section of my thesis. I want to explore the data, synthesize, tell a story about it, and publish. On a positive note (as there almost always is), I did get data to complete two of the existing garden surveys.
I finished reading the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath and a great blog post on creating change (especially useful for thinking about how academic work can instigate effective social change) and I am trying to start thinking about how I would be able to frame this UA and P project so that it could actually help change urban management.
I also had my first rehearsal this afternoon for the creation of the piece that will be presented march 1st. I had initially used a spinoff bilingual-version of the 1-minute-science story I had created earlier. However, physically moving in space I am having to restructure and simplify once again. It is such an iterative process. I feel like the narration/dance part is progressing along nicely though and I have been inspired by the fact that I could be captivated for a whole 10 minutes by this piece (my piece should be about 8 minutes and I had been worried about keeping the audience’s attention), and also about how science can be “accidentally” beautiful (here is a post from one of my friends on accidental aRt).
Sustainable Resource Management Lab 