Project Update – May 2023

Hi everyone who is reading this blog, I thought it was about time for a brief project update.

Progress on my thesis is somewhat behind schedule, principally as a result of long-covid and some other health and life complications that have evolved in the last year or so, but the project is still ticking along.

All of the research interviews and online fieldwork were wrapped up in 2022 just before I got covid. I am in the midst of the “wading through a huge mountain of ethnographic data and slowly drafting and re-drafting thesis chapters” stage of the PhD. Initial analysis insights are starting to coalesce! I’m having great chats with people about solarpunk things informally as well as at the university and occasional conferences! I even got interviewed about solarpunk for Debate Magazine which is a student-run publication at Auckland’s University of Technology!

The most recent preceding blog posts have all the things I’ve presented about solarpunk at academic conferences so far.

I am aiming to try and have a rough-and-ready initial draft of the thesis analysis chapters by the end of 2023. Unfortunately life keeps finding a way to get in the way, so a complete, polished, readable thesis and any associated more digestible publications are still a ways off. A reminder to all of you as well as myself: good thorough anthropological scholarship takes time. I will keep updating the blog as things come together.

Keep imagining more hopeful worlds and working to make them a reality solarpunks!