Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Top 5 Tuesday will return

Sorry folks ... I have only so much RAM in my head, and it's SSHRC week. Something has to be jettisoned. I have some ten pages of this proposal still to write, rewrite, get vetted by various colleagues and administrators, and then write again. Oh, and there's some teaching and paper-grading in there somewhere, too.

Who, I want to know, decided that it would be a GOOD idea to have such deadlines right at the beginning of the school year?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

ten MORE pages? how long is that proposal? i guess it's a little more complex at that level. what's your area of interest?

Anonymous said...

SSHRC deadlines should be at the end of the third quarter of the fiscal year... (JULY) when we have time to think!!! I know your pain...

Chris in NF said...

Andrew,

Well, in addition to the fifteen-odd pages of forms to fill out, plus your attached CV, there's the project proposal itself, which includes (all single-spaced, of course):
-study summary (1 page)
-the detailed description of research, including objectives, context, critical history, your theoretical approach, methodology, contribution to knowledge (6 pages)
-selected bibliography (3 pages)
-description of research plan, which includes previous and ongoing research and how the project will employ graduate students (2 pages)
-budget justification (2 pages)

So when I said ten pages, it was actually a bit of an understatement.

Not that I can really blame them ... I am after all asking for somewhere in excess of $50K over three years, so it really only stands to reason that I should have to jump through a series of nasty hoops. And even though my chances of getting this grant are slim, it has the effect of focusing what has been until now a fairly nebulous research project.

Which, since you ask, is looking at the persistence of the Cold War consensus in the contemporary cultural imaginary in terms of ostensible "crises" in masculinity and the recurrent theme of the end of history.

And anonymous, your thinking mirrors mine exactly ... though I have little doubt that if SSHRC deadlines were in July, we'd probably grouse about it interfering with summer research time (or I would, anyway).

Anonymous said...

Best of luck with your proposal...! And, hopefully I get one to fund my MSc research too.