Weeks 4 and 5 were umbrella’d by being assigned and coordinating a meeting with my supervisor, who I formally met with at the start of Flexible Learning Week. While it’s certainly strange to be thrown together with a (near) stranger who will be such an influential force on a project that will take up a significant chunk of my time and become a defining period of, at the least, my stay in the UK, I was hopeful going into the meeting and continue to be so now. My supervisor had a number of helpful references for me that explore avenues that I hadn’t considered yet (and also triggered a minor imposter syndrome crisis, because can I really consider myself an academic if I can’t list literary theories and their major contributing researchers off the top of my head?) and I came out of the meeting feeling like she understood what I find exciting about my idea. She was accommodating of my learning style and open about what she couldn’t help me with, but with recommendations of who maybe could. I now have another half dozen books to stack onto my ever-growing research pile, but I’m pleased with how the meeting went and motivated to give this project my all – for myself, of course, but also, now, for other people.

My initial response to the writing prompt for week 4 was that Ethical Data Futures is irrelevant to my final project. Much as I enjoy the class, I won’t work with data in the traditional sense and I’m not going to be utilizing algorithms or AI technology which are built by, with, and for using data. A lot of my learning in the course is extremely relevant for life, but not necessarily for my dissertation.

However, after thinking about it for a little while longer, I’ve decided that EDF is providing me with prime dystopia fodder. Institutionalized prejudice justified by being “fair” and “unbiased” because it came from a machine sounds like it could easily join the ranks of disturbing science fiction a la Stepford Wives. I don’t have a concrete idea yet what to do with this thought, but I’m going to stick a pin in it for later anyway.

In case anyone is wondering how it’s going, I wrote this entire blog post about week 2, six weeks ago, and apparently never hit ‘publish.’ So that’s great.

I very much enjoyed the week 2 World as Story intensive. The readings were excellent and the different sections delivered on the built-up expectations. The politics segment was probably my favourite, but there were points of interests in every part of it, and I’m really happy I get to be here and study this. And the next time someone asks me what the point of my programme is, I can just tell them everything is narrative.

In terms of influencing my thesis, there haven’t been any dramatic discoveries. At this point, as I’ve already been forced/forced myself to commit to so much of my thesis topic, I doubt the individual intensives are going to truly shake the foundations of what I have planned. What I did find an interesting takeaway was the idea that narratives are controlled; perhaps not by an individual, but a system, culture, or society. Obviously, if I write a story, I control what happens in it, but the story I write is also either in concordance with or counter to the stories we tell ourselves in our everyday lives and that we live with or fight against. Alette Willis’ diagrams on stories and storytellers below struck a cord with me: I not only want to tell a story, I have said multiple times that I want my audience to be a part of the experience

For instance, I want to explore the idea of reader choice. That means that as the person holding the strings of the narrative, I have to decide whether to let those choices be “right” or “wrong” – I can deceive readers into choosing a path that may look good on the surface but ends in disaster, or I can give them exactly what I hinted at. I can punish them for trusting me, or reward them for it.

It’s something to think about, and something that makes me curious about the Story Roots intensive, and how my perspective on storytelling will change with it.