December 17, 2014, by Bernie Divall

Christmas Musings

For my first blog post, I’m feeling a little reflective.  2014 has been quite a year: I began a postdoctoral fellowship (permanent post.  I know!!) in January, submitted my thesis in February, retrieved a lot of information to support various midwifery funding applications, gained two teeny tiny pots of money for our work towards establishing a maternity service user reference panel, moved from QMC to the Tower of Doom (favourite haunt of visiting dementors…), became an actual Doctor, and made lots of new friends.

In case you didn’t believe me about the dementors, here they are, trying to disguise themselves as window cleaners:

I know!  Scary, right?

Anyway, enough of that nonsense… For much of this year, I’ve been wrestling with questions of identity.  No surprise really, since my entire PhD thesis concerned narratives of identity and how wider discourses influence individuals’ identity construction.  For myself, identity has loomed large throughout the PhD life – in fact, I may have blogged about it elsewhere!  Our recent move to the Tower of Doom meant that the entire academic midwifery division (researchers, educators, administrators) has come together.  I love it – I have a shiny new office, and I get to chat with midwifery colleagues on a daily basis.  The problem is, we know we’re sometimes not considered ‘proper’ midwives by some of our clinical colleagues – we’ve moved to an ‘ivory tower’ or even ‘the dark side’.  My challenge is to get my PhD work out into the world, because this is exactly the kind of problem it addresses – and that’s where I find myself at the end of this huge year: writing papers from my doctoral research.  I think I may be blogging about that a fair bit in the next few weeks and months… But for now, I’m ridiculously excited about the prospect of time off at Christmas.  11 days, to be precise – the last time I had 11 days off was about 2007.  See you on the other side!

Posted in Bernie DivallDementorsidentityMidwifery