Working on any large project – whether writing a dissertation, recording an album, or hosting a mega-event – means keeping track of a lot of moving parts. When I was working as a musician, I hung a large whiteboard on the studio wall where I’d draw a project management grid for each album. One axis listed every song and the other showed all the steps needed until completion, from recording individual instrument tracks to mixing and mastering. In my academic research activities, I’ve gotten to take a peek behind the curtain at FIFA headquarters and see how they organize the World Cup. It’s much the same principle as in my small studio, though just a touch upscaled: their “whiteboard” involves hundreds or thousands of people in numerous countries and, of course, ghastly sums of money. Still, the mechanics are similar and, using a computer-based project management process, they’re able to coordinate an extraordinarily complicated and high-stakes event in front of a billion people. Regardless of what you think about the inequalities created and perpetuated by the mega-event process, it’s still pretty impressive to see how the machine functions.

Working on this dissertation is similar, I think, in certain respects. There’s a mechanical similarity, for instance, in that there is an established format that I have to fulfil, and a set procedure that I have to follow. I have to adhere to the conventions of assembling words into sections and sections into chapters (I couldn’t, for instance, dance my dissertation, though some brave and brilliant souls do! …though this still wouldn’t fly at a defense). These chapters must follow a prescribed order, paying fealty to a long-established tradition of how knowledge in our societies is produced, preserved, and distributed. In the first place, I’ve got to engage with existing literature and, while respecting the work produced, I have to identify places where this work is lacking. I do this because I want to contribute to the shared body of knowledge and because my work is supposed to make that advancement. Making an advancement means locating the places previous scholars have perhaps overlooked, or finding situations where their work fails to apply. Once I’ve established my contribution and written the chapters, then comes the process of printing and binding and distributing and waiting and then standing in front of a group of very smart people and defending what I’ve done. After that, I get to be part of a new club.

Looking at the PhD this way makes it seem similar to recording an album or hosting the World Cup. A lot of moving parts but you can still draw a project management grid on the whiteboard and check things off as you progress.

But there’s something else that makes the PhD project particularly challenging, something beyond just keeping track of a load of different tasks.

For me, this is keeping in mind simulatenously:

• my conceptual foundations, their limitations, and my own innovations
• my methodological approaches, their limitations, and my own innovations
• keeping things not just interesting, but relevant

Currently I am struggling with how to balance these elements. Details are in order:

Let’s start with the 2018 World Cup in Russia. I would like to engage with the policy mobilities literature here, though this might be a stretch – still, I think it makes sense and I think I can justify it. Policy mobilities is an offshoot of the mobilities literature (see foundational work by Urry, Cresswell, Sheller, and Adey, among many others). In brief, policy mobilities concerns itself with the creation, mobilization, spread, and mutation of policy models (see Peck and Theodore, and McCann and Ward, among others, for classic work). Now, to start, I have to make the argument that the World Cup is about more than sport, that it’s actually a discrete model for urban and economic development and image enhancement. This is doable. But here’s where it gets tricky. If I were going to take a classic policy mobilities approach, I would trace the movement and changes of this World Cup model over time and space. However, in contrast to other policy mobilities scholars, I’m not looking at the policy model per se, but rather taking a human-level view of what happens on the ground when this traveling policy comes to town. So where Peck and Theodore, for instance, follow their travelling policies by tracing the origin and history of the model, the architects involved in the creation of the model, the nodal site from which it spread, and the global spread and mutations that follow, I’m shifting the focus towards the individual sites where that policy touches down, and the changes that it engenders in the people and places there. Is that still policy mobilities then? I argue that it is, but can I prove it?

Further, I’m looking at World Cup-related developments from an explicitly actor-network perspective. This means that I’m focusing less on discourse and meaning and looking more at process, at action, at how things happen. I’m inspired here particularly by Annemarie Mol and The Body Multiple, where she explores how the term “atherosclerosis” is used as a coordinating mechanism to keep multiple realities hanging together instead of fracturing. These multiplicities are fascinating to me and I think that it makes sense to use “the World Cup” as my coordinating term. Multiplicities seem appropriate to my project and there is something attractive and relevant, I think, about broadening the politics of the World Cup so that the realities of host city residents are put on equal ontological footing with the realities of event organizers and national politicians.  I think multiplicities could accomplish this, but my advisor and committee have cautioned me against using a sexy concept and parachuting it into my project just because. So I have to tread carefully here. The trouble, as I see it currently, is that Mol works in various sites in a single hospital, so she gets one reality per site. On the other hand, I’m dealing with multiple realities in a single site. Maybe this is where I’m getting into trouble? Instead of taking FIFA’s vision of the stadium in Ekaterinburg, for instance, and showing how that’s distinct from the organizing committee’s vision, and how those two are different from a resident’s vision, maybe I should be following Mol more explicitly and looking more at how the World Cup is distributed around the city. Maybe different constituent groups territorialize different areas of the city? But then again, there are always people everywhere. The attractive thing about multiplicities for me is that they are messy and they give us vocabulary for seeing the messy interplay in a single place. They reveal to us that it’s not actually a single place but multiple places at the same time!

So this opens the door for me to engage not just with actor-network thinking and, more specifically, multiplicities… but also key debates in geography about place and space and the city. I’m challenged here to take flat ontologies seriously and to engage with place not as container but as relations. And then I have to do this methodologically as well, engaging the messiness of the world and tracing processes in order to understand how the World Cup comes to be in the cities I’m looking at. But how to acknowledge the literatures on space and place and the urban without losing myself in the debates? As my advisor continually reminds me, “conceptual economy is the key to success”.

My thinking on this is muddled. I’m not sure how to proceed or how my dissertation will shape up. And this is the key moment, I think, that separates writing a dissertation from recording an album. It’s beyond issues of mechanics or technique or creative spirit – which are obviously necessary in both domains. It’s that, in PhD work, you don’t really know what you’re doing or where you’re going. There’s a process of learning, in the dark, in flight, that was absent in my musical recording life. Even if every recording session taught me things, I didn’t, after all, learn guitar or piano while the recording light was on. But here, in the middle of my dissertation, it feels like I’m trying to cross a river by walking on a bridge, while building that bridge at the same time.