Date:         Tue, 09 Dec 97 21:38:12 EST
From: Alan Davidson <DAVIDSON@UCONNVM.UCONN.EDU>
Subject:      time limits
To: socgrad@CSF.COLORADO.EDU
Message-Id:   <971209.214835.EST.DAVIDSON@UConnVM.UConn.Edu>
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I don't know -- up until year 5 or so, I had "my act together" -- making
it very public knowledge what it was I wished to do my dissertation on --
my original idea was a neat little empirical study of how clergymembers
balanced definitions of the religious and secular environments they were
in in terms of dealing with deviant folks -- primarily folks with AIDS.
The problem was at least one of the supposed qualitative/Sociology of AIDS
folks around here (not to give the person away) somehow didn't understand
the possibility that social structures are as much defined as they are
objective constraints -- and one of the two religion folks on my committee
was deadset against any sort of research which would actually assume
clergy, or religion had any real authority in society.  When that failed,
I proposed to do a documentary analysis of how religious professionals
defined the religious and the secular (versus assuming it to be objective
fact) -- I even won a national paper award for SSSR for that one -- that
also failed.  So, I fired my committee, burned out, and in order to get
out I am doing ever so fun number crunching which proves to me what is
obvious -- people's definitions of society matter in what they do
religiously -- I guess because it was quantitative (even though
outside of the world according to mid-70's at best Socio-ontology)
it got approved -- and it looks like I will finish 3 years past
proposal -- not the greatest, but by no means absurdly slow either.