24th January 2025 by Genevieve Clifford
I realise it’s been a while since I last updated this blog, so here’s (some of) what’s been happening over the course of the last year.
My supervisory team has changed since the start of last year. Simon has been on extended parental leave, and Troy has taken over as my primary supervisor. Charlotte remains as my secondary supervisor (and is officially recorded in this role on the university’s systems), but Megan is also a secondary supervisor (though is recorded as an “advisor”). Tom remains as an advisor to my project.
I have unfortunately had to step down from my position as co-organiser of the FITLab Reading Group, as I don’t presently have capacity for this role. The slides from my most recent reading group talk (about collaborative LaTeX editing without using Overleaf) are available at https://git.sr.ht/~mun-tonsi/whither-overleaf. I am trying to get more involved this year in the GENCAS and Education, History, and Philosophy of Computing research groups, as well as TVCE which I have recently joined.
I am planning to publish the literature review section of my PhD thesis as some kind of provocation at the start of this year; I am currently looking (with my supervisors) for an appropriate venue for this.
The 2nd Queer Kinship International Conference is taking place in April 2025, for which I plan to submit early work (again, based on the literature review). Though I haven’t submitted an abstract, I am participating in Nordic Summer University’s workshop on Queer Materialism in Oslo next month (I hope to share some material from my time there).
I am working on my ethics application for phases 1 and 2 of my PhD project, which I hope to submit next week, and start data collection within the next couple of months for phase 1. I will share more information about these phases when my project has received ethical approval.
As I move into the empirical phase of my PhD project, I have elected to keep my calendar as clear as possible for participants. This means I am keeping my teaching (demonstrating) hours as low as possible, while doing as much marking as I can (as I can schedule this when I’d like, preferably over weekends). You can see the modules I am teaching this semester on the teaching page of this website.
I have joined Trans Aid Cymru as a volunteer in their IT team, where I am currently helping to implement social media functionality into osTicket, as we switch away from Zoho; PHP is a horrible language. I have also done something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: launched a working group within Swansea University’s UCU branch representing the interests of postgraduate students who work alongside their studies; our website is: https://swansea-ucu-pgr.gitlab.io (which I need to update, ah admin…). It’s early days for the working group, but I remain hopeful in our ambitions.