Kimberly Hirsh

📽️ Watched Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Wasn’t sure how I would like it, given the responses I’d seen. I decided going into it that I would have fun. For the first 30 minutes or so, I thought, “Uh oh, am I NOT going to have fun?” Then things picked up and I DID have fun, but I also teared up because Carrie Fisher, because speeches about hope and working together and not being alone, because fan service services me, a fan.

Carrie Fisher is gone. But “what she stood for, what she fought for… that’s not gone.” 🎥

📖 Currently reading: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern 📚

💬 Replied to

None of the kids wanted toys for Christmas this year, they just wanted cash. Understandable, but cash as a gift, while practical, always feels impersonal, so I made special packaging. Went over well pic.twitter.com/urXVCHtDyW

— Donnachaidha O’Chionnaigh (@TwoClawsMedia) December 26, 2019

This toy-inspired cash gift packaging is amazing. Definitely saving for use with next year’s holiday gifts. 🎁

📔 Hi there! I’m considering migrating my WordPress site to micro.blog, and am playing with the post interface today.

📔 I know I just took a hiatus because of comps, but now I’m taking another one for the holidays. See y’all January 6!

📖 Read Frozen II (Midwest Film Journal) by Aly Caviness

I was going to write a whole blog post about Frozen II and why I like it better than Frozen (which I both loved AND only saw once, because TOO MUCH CRYING) but then I found this film review and can simply point to it and add a few notes.

The main thing here is that, as this review points out, this sequel is Elsa’s story in a way the first one wasn’t. I think many people, in light of the juggernaut that is “Let It Go,” don’t realize that Anna is the protagonist of Frozen. Yes, Elsa has an arc, but Anna is the one who goes on a journey, gets assistance, experiences betrayal, etc. The climax flips it a bit, but if we’re looking for Campbellian narrative, Anna is the one who gets it in the first movie. In one sense, Elsa is a MacGuffin as much as she’s a character.

Frozen II works beautifully in parallel with Moana.

“The call isn’t out there at all; it’s inside me.”

“You are the one you’ve been waiting for all of your life.”

I could go on at length about how people don’t give Anna the credit she’s due, how love is a power that’s not as impressive as manipulating ice but seems to me much more valuable. And maybe sometime I will.

(In one sense, Elsa is her parents’ love incarnate, but her magic renders that love inert in a way that is the opposite of Anna’s openness to love, Anna being, I feel, her parents’ love incarnate and activated.)

Anyway, I’ve just gone on longer than I meant to and will probably have more to say later. But really, read the linked review and you’ll get a good sense of how I feel about Frozen II. 🕸️

📄 I didn’t feel ready to write a year-in-review post before now, but here we are! So what did I get up to this year?

This year I:

• keynoted IndieWebCamp New Haven
• had my first freelance librarian gig
• visited Knoxville, Atlanta, DC, and North Myrtle Beach
• dealt with at least 5 house contractors
• finished Project READY
• worked as an exhibitor at a professional conference for the first time
• weaned M.
• went to 3 fan conventions
• learned how to use MaxQDA
• hosted M.'s third birthday party
• moved M. into his own bedroom
• got anxiety meds
• tried and loved flotation therapy (still waiting for my ESP to kick in, though)
• cosplayed 3 different characters
• special ordered pies from Phoebe Lawless
• wrote my lit review
• drafted my proposal
• passed my comps

I decided to focus exclusively on the positive here. There have been a lot of hard days this year, a lot of illness, a lot of scares, but even the worst days each had something redeeming in them, and I think that's important to remember.

Cosplays of 2019: Luna - Cat Version (Sailor Moon), Ariel (Ralph Breaks the Internet), Wednesday Addams (The Addams Family, 1991 film)

My word of the year for 2019 was PHASE. My goal was to accept cycles and understand that all things pass. I’m pretty satisfied with how I did with that. I think I’m a much more chill parent at the end of this year than I was at the beginning. In addition to embracing that energy, I wanted to own my personal goth aesthetic, read for pleasure, and have a good time. I think I did all of those really successfully.

With respect to my aesthetic, I expanded it so that it shifts seasonally (tying the phase energy in even here!):

I always transition to Gothic Girl Fall in September, leaving behind my Summer Mer-Goth Sea Witch vibes... In winter, I sport full Holiday Goth (lots of dark green velvet) and my spring aesthetic is Goth Fae... https://t.co/HmHMcgcu3W

— Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) September 6, 2019

I read a lot for pleasure in the first half of the year, but once comps really ramped up, my brain just wouldn’t take in any more words. I met my goal for the year, thanks to counting single comic issues as books. And of course, if I’d counted every article I read, well… I’ve read a lot. I’ve also read many words of visual novels, but I don’t think GoodReads tracks those.

I definitely feel like I’ve had a good time this year. I went to Retro films several times, went to Silent Book Club a few times, had a blast wandering around DC with SILS folks for dinner, an escape room, and some Harry Potter Wizards Unite fun, and watched my kid continue to grow. I saw Frozen II and laughed and cried, and Will and I saw Knives Out twice and Benoit Blanc is my new favorite character.

The year’s not over yet, and I’m looking forward to a lot of family fun, submitting the final draft of my dissertation proposal, another trip to North Myrtle Beach, and maybe seeing The Rise of Skywalker before the year is out.

…but onwards, to 2020!

My word of the year for 2020 is FULL.

While there’s been a ton of good these past couple of years, I have more than once felt empty or hollow, like a pumpkin after you scrape its guts out. I’m done with that nonsense. I’m going to fill my well.

I’m also choosing full in the sense of going full something, in my case Going Full Kimberly. This means refusing to suppress all of the weird bits of myself that make me who I am. Obviously, we behave differently in different contexts, and that’s fine. But too often I find myself thinking things like, “Oh, I won’t double down on my affection for Star Wars because W. is out on Star Wars,” or “I won’t wear those sparkles because I’m too old,” or whatever. And I’m done with that. I’m 38, and it’s time to just be myself unapologetically.

Embrace imposter syndrome.

Revel in the fact you have fooled everyone.

You are a Trickster Goddess.

You are the Imposter Child for Deception and Clever Ruses.

— i’m a skELIton (@EliLizzieLizbet) March 17, 2019

I told W. that for my mid-life crisis, I’m just going to brush up my sewing skills and start creating adult-sized versions of all the sparkly little girl fashion at Target.

When I was a teenager, with only a few rare exceptions, I really liked being myself. Leonie Dawson talks about how you should love yourself, because you’re rad. I’m rad. You’re rad. Let’s stop acting like we’re not rad, y’all.

In the spirit of going FULL KIMBERLY, of being Kimberly af, here are the things I’m feeling, my non-resolutions, for 2020:

• Continue to read for pleasure.
• Play video games.
• Pursue my core desired feelings of ease, creativity, and connection.

And then my beautiful, auto-text-generated resolution:

Reviving this from @thephdstory but for 2020... My 2020 resolution is to be a part of the team. https://t.co/dkeCjW6coX

— Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) December 18, 2019

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Featured image is a photo I took during Bull Moon Rising, when the Museum of the Moon (by Luke Jerram) was in town.

I passed my comps last Tuesday, and I thought I’d take some time to write about it today.

Previously, on Dissertating in the Open:

1. Inspiration strikes and I write a prospectus.
2. I work with my advisor to select five areas for my comprehensive examination literature review package.
3. I contact five faculty members - 3 internal, 2 external - and ask them to be on my committee. They accept.
4. I had my first meeting with my committee and we narrowed the scope for my lit review a bit.

And then I didn't really blog about the process for 9 months because I was too busy actually writing the literature review.

Over the course of that process, some things shifted.

As I mentioned in my post about my first committee meeting, my lens on information literacy changed from a broad one to one that narrowly focused on information literacy practices as a set of sociocultural practices, tied to a particular context and set of social interactions.

When it came time to write about theory, I decided to write exclusively about the theoretical concept of affinity spaces. I discussed collective intelligence and participatory culture in the information literacy chapter instead, and decided to included Sonnenwald’s work on information behavior as part of my proposal.

As I wrote about affinity spaces, I learned about some new-to-me methodologies: connective ethnography and affinity space ethnography. I took on ethnography as my broad research design, taking a constructivist research approach, and then used connective/affinity space ethnography as my stance for how to conduct ethnography in the cosplay affinity space.

Over the next several months, I drafted chapters of my comps and sent them to my committee for review. You can see the first drafts here:

1. Information Literacy as a Social Practice
2. Cosplay
3. Connected Learning and Libraries
4. Affinity Spaces
5. Connective and Affinity Space Ethnography

I prepared for and wrote each of those drafts using some variation of my start-to-finish literature review workflow, drawing heavily on recommendations from Dr. Barbara Wildemuth and Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega. I didn't always follow the workflow in a truly linear fashion; sometimes I would find myself needing to memo a subset of literature before I could move on to another concept at all. Other times I would write a memo that was basically a draft, then mark it up with pens and rearrange the whole thing. Sometimes I would cut entire sections after writing them. I'm a little sorry I didn't document this process better.

As I finished each chapter, I sent it out to my committee. Different committee members provided different amounts of feedback, but none of them were under any obligation to provide any feedback at all. I’m grateful to them for their help.

When I started writing the final chapter, the methods chapter, I first began by memoing articles about my specific data collection methods. As I tried to turn these into a cohesive literature review, I realized I needed some guidance. So I emailed my advisor, Dr. Sandra Hughes-Hassell, and my research methods expert, Dr. Casey Rawson, asking them about this chapter. Casey suggested that this chapter should be about my research design and approach - constructivist? pragmatist? participatory? and ethnography? case study? narrative? - more than my specific data collection and analysis methods, which would be a key part of the proposal rather than the lit review. This help determining the scope of the chapter was invaluable, and let me really focus on connective and affinity space ethnography conceptually.

I revised the chapters based on my committee member’s feedback and my own notes, compiling them into a single document along with my prospectus, also slightly revised. I also sent the committee a brief statement of my research interests.

I submitted all of that to the committee at the end of October. We scheduled my comprehensive examination date for December 10. In my department, the literature review stands in lieu of a written exam.

Over the next month, I drafted my dissertation proposal, which will be another post, though I did finish it in time for my committee to have it for a few days before my comps.

For the comps exam itself, my internal examiners were physically present, while my external examiners called in via Zoom. We began the exam with me delivering the following brief presentation as an overview/refresher:

(Note: If you are a cosplayer or photographer featured in this slideshow and would like your image removed, please let me know and I’ll take care of it ASAP.)

After this, Sandra asked each committee member to ask me a question, working around the Zoom/room clockwise. Each committee member had one or more really insightful questions to ask that helped me think about my methods, my plans for data analysis, the role of theory in my study, and how I conceptualize cosplay and the relationship between cosplayer, character, narrative, and costume.

In the end, I passed and came out of the exam with several ideas for how to refine my dissertation proposal, which I’ll write more about in my next Dissertating in the Open post.

Hey guess what I passed my comps. Taking a post-comps hiatus. See y’all Monday.

It’s remarkable how chill I am about my comps oral exam tomorrow. I guess I’m just… ready.