Posted by Bel Townsend on September 20, 2008 at 1:45am
Hey all,I haven't been on here in MONTHS! tut-tut, how lapse of me. Anyhoo, while I catch up on all the gossip for you merry bunch I thought I'd post you all an update.My uni project is developing slowly but surely in that I'm just about to start my second year. It has come round sooooo quickly, it's unnerving. For the past year, I've been reading solidly about Coffee, and Waste and Quality, and coffee shop culture, and the effects of caffeine on the brain, and the economics of globalisation and their effects on small scale organic production efforts, and the history of London's coffee shops and Actor-Network Theory, and old fashioned roasting techniques from ancient Constantinople and so on and so forth...Now, and only now, have I finally begun to do some 'fieldwork' - that is, collect some unique data of my own. So far this has involved interviews with regular customers in my chosen coffee shops, and some focus groups of people telling me what they think "high quality" coffee is. Results are so far... not very useful. But I still have tonnes to do.I am also going to conferences, where I get to mix with academics and industry specialists who all know far more about what they are talking about than I do, and I will sit in the corner feeling completely overwhelmed. In a few weeks, I am off to Ohio, for a conference on "The Moral, Economic and Social Life of Coffee" (clicky for details). It looks really interesting, but I am so nervous of showing off my ignorance there!After that comes the massively exciting part - overseas fieldwork!! I am off to El Porvenir in Nicaragua (a fairtrade, co-operative plantation north of Leon) and Doka Estate in Costa Rica (an enormous commercial plantation in Alejuela), I get two months in each place to find out as much as I can - I'm going in the harvest season, so I'm expecting it all to be quite manic. I got the flight tickets through last week, and consequently my attitude towards the trip has gone from Wild Excitement to Utter Terror to now just Low-Level Anxiety. 6 weeks to go!! Am counting the days....All my coffee-related research appears on my own blog - if you are interested, please check out http://drcoffee.wordpress.comComments and feedback more than welcome!
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Posted by Bel Townsend on April 14, 2008 at 9:49am
Hey everyone,this is a bit of a cop-out blog post, but I thought I'd publicise today's Happy Thought.I HAVE FINISHED MY UPGRADE PAPER!!Wuju!!I am currently registered as an MPhil student at university, and in order to be upgraded to PhD, I had to write an enormous paper, explaining exactly what I want to do in my research, and why I want to do it, and why it's remotely interesting to anybody else. Mine is all about the coffee industry. 4500 words DONE. YAY!A few people on here have expressed an interest in my research before, so if anyone wants to have a look at it, send me a message. It's a bit academic, obviously, and I don't want to publish it on here cos I'd bore everyone to tears, but if anyone wants to have a look, I'll happily email it to you.Off for Wine now (I love coffee but not for celebrations...)
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