It's been a few slow-news weeks... I'm still waiting on my grades (the first one should be in any minute now) and an answer on my PhD proposal (I'm starting to worry about that one now); we've been out celebrating essay hand-in and Chinese New Year, and out seeing the Leicester Tigers beat the London Welsh. That last thing was the first-ever rugby match I saw and attended, and I had great fun there. Whether I completely understood the game is a different matter entirely, but Leicester won so it was good enough all in all.
I went to see Les Misérables last week, and last Saturday I saw Hitchcock. Both were good; I cried through half of Les Mis (it was a marvelous film, though the 2000 French adaptation that lasts something like six hours is a much more faithful adaptation [plus I'm something of a fan of Christian Clavier because he did such a good Napoléon in the eponymous French miniseries]) and Hitchcock was just good because the meep-meep-meep of the Psycho shower scene brings back memories of watching it in my Film in Context class and going meep-meep-meep for weeks afterwards.
I've finished watching all Inspector Morse episodes (which I actually tried to do last year before me and Kristy went to a conference in Oxford but didn't manage then) and currently am contemplating whether to pay a small fee to watch old Lewis episodes on ITV player. I received some criticism for watching it because Morse is not very accurate of course, but I did enjoy it despite the - especially prevalent though certainly not the only characteristic worthy of criticism - misogyny. Besides, considering that in my past I was dedicated enough to watch entire series of CSI:Miami, I suppose I am a bit of a sucker for crime melodramas.
The biggest news so far is that my abstract has been accepted for the PALA annual conference, which will be in Heidelberg from July 31 to August 4.
I will be speaking about tax evasion by major multinational corporations (Starbucks is one of them, therefore my talk will contain a rather dull reference to both a coffee order that is relatively rare to hear in Starbucks [so to point out that it's somewhat about a coffee company, and that it's rare to hear anything of the sort {i.e. criticism of certain types of corporate behaviour} in this type of context] and something of an indicator of the sort of bitterness in the reporting on the topic - I went with the title of 'Black, no sugar' [followed by something academic sounding which I can't even remember myself at this moment]. It's a cringe-worthy title, I know...). Specifically, seeing as the conference is of course one of linguists, stylisticians and literary analysts, I will be talking about the reporting on the tax evasion, using mainly corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis.
This talk will use parts of my dissertation - my dissertation will go much more in depth with regards to tax law (seeing as the tax evasion was not actually illegal) and parliamentary decisions and whatnot, and perhaps will also take reader comments on the news articles into account. Seeing as this was not corporate crime (because not illegal) but has been portrayed as corporate wrongdoing, I also will look at other analyses of corporate wrongdoing representation, and of course into the whole theory behind corporate wrongdoing itself. So my dissertation will be much broader.
I am also contemplating registering for a conference on Cultural Criminology in Amsterdam in early July - I might even be able to adapt another segment of my dissertation for that and send it in as an abstract, see if I can get to present there too. The only thing that bothers me about that is that it's just a little difficult with regards to timing - I'll be flying to the Netherlands to attend this year's UCR graduation on June 7, then there's the Amsterdam conference in July, then the PALA conference in late July/early August. I can't justify flying back and forth between Stansted and the continent three times in a two-month span no matter how much RyanAir drops its prices (that is, unless return tickets drop to under 10 pounds, but I highly doubt that for June and July), but the events are also just a bit too far apart to justify staying with one of my parents for two months while I've got a perfectly good room of my own here in Leicester. I'll also have to move out of my room in late June, so I presume some of the timing also hinges on whether I'll need to move somewhere else. This is the case mainly because my mother and stepfather insist on helping me move and so if I have to move elsewhere, I could perhaps arrange it so that I fly to Eindhoven for UCR's graduation, then drive back to the UK with them, fly to whatever's the cheapest Dutch destination from the airport closest to my (hopefully) new home to attend the Amsterdam conference, stay with my father for a week or two, take the train to Heidelberg and then eventually fly back home from Frankfurt.
I guess that would work best, but it hinges on so many ifs that I'd rather not plan for anything as of this moment.
We'll see. Who knows what happens (fingers crossed for the good stuff though!)
PS I've been reading too many articles on 'personal branding' on the internet lately, so don't be surprised if you see the lay-out of this blog change very often etc.
PPS Of course my fulminating against UCR's change of everything didn't do much but (probably) raise my blood pressure.
Goodbye RA (it's a goodbye, not a farewell - it's a name that won't ever die!); hello UCR and your still-pink website...
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