Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Two months, too many time zones.

Random person: "Hey. Congratulations."
Me: "... OH. Thanks!"

According to some of my other newly-minted PhD colleagues, this may go on for about a year.
Hard to believe it's only been two months since my Doctoral defense.  Feels like much, much, longer because of the intensity and pace, but I thought it would be good to give a recap of the last little while of what is turning out to be something like a new normal. 

So two days after my defense, I went to The Netherlands to do the site visit for an EU-funded project on a mobile application for which I was a Research Analyst.

After wrapping up the Dutch site visit, I stopped off in Barcelona for a very quick 2 days giving a workshop on ethnographic research at El CIEMAT (Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas), and attending the European meeting of the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC).

I then headed back to Vancouver for 4 days of meetings and wardrobe change, and took off for visiting with some troublemakers in New York City and Boston to see what was happening in the local tech/games scenes.

From there, I headed to Phoenix to present some current work on social games at the International Communication Association (ICA), where I am proud to be part of a growing membership in the Games Studies section (a modest couple hundred as opposed to thousands in other sections). 

The Phoenix Comicon was a happy coincidence occurring at the same time.  Cos players and academics swarmed the Convention Centre district of downtown Phoenix. Pictures here.

RIGHT after, I buzzed back East towards Toronto and the Kitchener Waterloo area to give two talks at CGSA (Canadian Game Studies Association) and 2 talks + plus chair a games studies panel at CCA (Canadian Communication Association), part of the larger Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities meetings that happen in a different Canadian city every year. 

Then I came home.  Took a nap.

Stay tuned for July. 


The scrawlings of a madwoman.