Week 59: Love's Labour's Lost

Hmm what to say...  I suppose I've learned a lot.
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To be brief here's a delicate trace of where I'm at post-what-happened-last-year in regard to my research:

• I feel really frustrated with the word "research"
• I am committed to drawing upon my ancestor's philosophy and cosmology
• I will not do an ethnography except for fragments of auto-ethnography
• I am committed to finishing this project 
• I am committed to the practice of "being a passionate turtle" or in other words to KEEP GOING regardless of the pace
• I am committed to engaging with indigenous scholars and indigenous scholarship
• I am committed to grounding this project in a black feminist/womanist foundation

Goals / Achievements / Accomplishments:

• I finished one language exam and have just one more to go
• I completed my degree requirements to receive my masters and should receive my diploma by November
• I had an artist residency with Skeleton Architecture in July at ICA in Boston
• I facilitated several Sound Baths including one at Naturopathica Spa in Chelsea
• I provided sound for several movement based pieces with several movement artists and choreographers such as Tess Dworman and Meghan Byrne

UPDATE ON THE DISS:
As for what this project is called... I'm still struggling with a title but it will come.

As for what this project is about here's what I've got as of right now:

"My dissertation project is about listening and healing in the practice of Sound Baths."
"This projects defines what a Sound Bath is and how it relates to the practice of Sound Meditation. The three major sections of this dissertation put New Age thought on music and sound, academic writing on listening, and a question of ethics in regard to the act of healing into conversation with each other.

The first section traces the development of New Age thought as it relates to sound, vibration, and modernist history of science.
The second section offers a literature review on academic discourse on listening, deep listening, and the theorization of the concepts of corporeal listening and incorporeal listening.
The third section investigates the ethics of healing and investigates a series of questions. These questions are:  What does it mean to heal? What does it mean to hold space for healing? How should one engage with indigenous spiritualities? Does healing matter?

Binding these three sections together is a narrative of the history and current practice of the sound bath based in archival documents and auto-ethnography."

My goal is to be ABD by December 2017. Looking forward to the next leg of this journey. In my next post I'll talk about some of my plans for the next couple of months...
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I'm still here. <3