My PhD is explore how arts collectives contribute to shaping everyday cultural and spatial production in the context of Malaysia.

But some precision comes first. How do I consider kampung, kota kampung (an ARI terminology), neighbourhood and more to consider each collective’s sites and modes of relationship? What do each of these relationship building look like?

And I finished my proposal presentation and am now a ‘proper’ PhD candidate. My goals:

PhD! Case Studies! data collection and diss writing!
Get part I and part II for Malaysia
Get a part time teaching job lined up
buy a home / settle at a home I like
drive, learn to

Reframing the terminologies

Rebuilding my Methodology

Research Time!

Data collection!

To plan my PhD data collection process.

…and it is still undergoing construction, as to why and how arts collectives. The collective is a tenuous notion. As I pour water into my collective of tea leaves in my gaiwan, some lift, and float with too many air pockets residing in between their dried leaves. Others unfurl quickly, to expanded leaves. The outside world of boiling water, quickly moving in. An end-state waiting to happen form. A sense of place.

<aside> <img src="/icons/swap-horizontally_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/swap-horizontally_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> A space for generative, reflexive moment for my PhD research. This is a space for my annotated bibliography → literature review → research proposal

The digital garden will be migrating to my own personal obsidian very soon. But I will leave some notes here as documentation of the whole PhD Process. But for now - only obsidian!

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Read through the different sections of pondering here:

Annotated Bibliography

Theoretical Constructs and Methods

Comments from Supervisor

What are my own contributions What have am I claiming Novel or exciting Why this gives new opportunities! What will my research enable? Contrast – what is? And what could be. What is the situation now. What change do I need to do?

My PhD Exam: August 18, some time for planning will be done here —>

Planning for PhD Exam

Research Question: How do the presence of arts collectives contribute to the spatial production of neighbourhoods and shape community life in Malaysia?

It is part of cultural infrastructure?

“the essay holds in suspicion the prestige the commons concept has attained in the US and theory-cosmopolitan context, often signifying an ontology that merely needs the world to create infrastructures to catch up to it.” - Lauren Berlant

I am obsessed with writing prose slipped in the crevices of time-space. But what pulled me back is the clarity of Doreen Massey’s work on the politics of space.

First is to understand space as a product of interrelations where relations are embedded practices that are constructed through politic , identity and spatialities. Second, to imagine space as a sphere of possibility for the existence of multiplicity and heterogeneity which means the recognizing the non-inevitability of certain trajectories and universalizations of how the world is, and will be…The third key proposition is that space is always in process, always becoming, it is an open system. Such openness is a requirement for possible futures in which politics can make a difference (2009: 499).

Skelton T (2009) Doreen Massey. In: Kitchen R and Thrift N (eds) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. El Sevier Science, 1st edition.

Things I will be participating in!

Mistakes were Made