For the past few months, I’ve been struggling to decide what to do with older material on the blog that refers to a set of research projects with which I am still actively involved, but that for some time now have been formally severed from the rest of my intellectual work. My concern is that these projects involve collaborative work with other academics and professionals who do not share my theoretical interests and, as my work veers ever more strongly in a particular theoretical direction, I am concerned not to burden them with any guilt by association related to anything I might publish here. At the same time, since I have occasionally used materials related to these projects to develop theoretical or methodological points, there is no simple and painless way to remove all project-related material from the blog.
My compromise of the moment is: to shift to “private” status certain posts that went into detail about the structure of the collaborative research process; to edit certain other posts to exclude specific references to other academics or professionals; and to delete certain categories into which project-related posts had been classified. These steps are not ideal: although most of the posts shifted into the “private” category are not substantive, the very first post made to the blog is now no longer publicly accessible, nor is my original thesis proposal. Various announcements relating to papers or talks I have presented are also no longer accessible. At the same time, of course, none of these changes will conceal that the person who maintains this blog is also affiliated with specific research projects - this has always been the price of non-pseudonymous blogging.
My main concern, however, is not to conceal the full range of what I do professionally, but rather to draw a clear line between the work I discuss here - which is “my” work in a strong sense - work that I undertake independently of others, and in which I express my own voice - and any other work that I might do collaboratively with other people, in that second life in which I am valued primarily as an occasional consultant for people seeking to fund, design or organise empirical research projects. These two activities aren’t completely unrelated, but they are sufficiently distinct to warrant some kind of formal separation.
I don’t believe that any of the changes I have made will sever any incoming links or cause undue confusion. However, if anyone has been inconvenienced by these changes, please send me an email and we’ll work from there.
