Guest Blogger #1 - DAWN LANGLEY- COHORT 2

Guest Blogger #1 is Dawn Langley from Cohort 2. Dawn gives a great report on what it’s like to experience “residency life”.

Getting settled in at the residency always takes a bit of a paradigm shift for me. I move from being a dean at a community college, where summers aren’t necessarily quiet (I had to settle a lot of interviewing, faculty-hiring, and paperwork before leaving), to being a student at a university where we are housed in a hotel in downtown Cincinnati. It’s always exciting to start a new semester, but this one will be a little bittersweet since the first cohort will be moving on soon, and our cohort (Cohort II) will be the “most senior.” That said, it’s important to start off with some Graeter’s ice cream, so I went there first and thought about visiting the Shakespeare company theater, the art gallery, and the museum I passed along the way. That will be what I do today. (I’ll exercise the new way of seeing we were taught in our first residency . . .)

Since I’m here before anyone else is, I get a chance to chill out, do some of the reading for the seminars we are scheduled for during this residency, and have a chance to reflect on the previous semester, as well as the one to come. It’s a bittersweet time, particularly because I know this is probably the last semester we’ll have a chance to socialize with the first cohort since they will be in comps this semester coming. Once they leave and start their dissertations, our group will become the most senior cohort, which will be kind of strange, because it will also signify our move toward our own dissertations.

Speaking of dissertations, I have struggled with going over the same ground in a different way this semester. My dissertation is focused on transgender authors, and there’s very little information already published about them, so I have to take my research right down to the very basic level of uncovering the authors themselves. My outlook and my perspective on the topic have changed a bit this semester, and I’m not sure how that will affect the final product, but I’m beginning to think that it will be quite different from what I originally planned. That said, it has also opened my eyes to the lack of literature on this group of people, as well as introduced me to the small group of scholars who have made the subject their lifelong research.

One of the great things about working with a group of like learners, as the ones in my cohort, is that they offer some feedback from their own perspectives, whether they come from a policy standpoint, a leadership point of view or the humanities (like myself). We all have a strong belief in civil justice and interdisciplinarity, so whether a person is working on research about nursing in other parts of the world or about Indian-American families or about Mexican women in baseball, they have something to offer in the way of how various groups struggle with their identities.

Funny, as I wrote that last line, I realized that we, too, are finding our selves by building our dissertations . . . certainly, many things have changed in my life since starting here. But that’s another blog!

Cheers
Dawn Langley/Cohort 2, Term 4