If this project were a movie, this would be the part where the main character slogs through the endless desert – I’m thinking Gobi, but feel free to fill in whatever wasteland you wish. Parched, exhausted, merciless sun beating down, shirt wrapped over the head, stumbling down a dune. You know the drill.

I have expanded my outline to encompass 9 chapters instead of the 8 that it was previously. Right now the title is “For the world, for our country, or for us?”: The motivations and meanings of the 2018 men’s football World Cup in Russia. I’m not quite happy with that, though, but it’ll do for now.

The four empirical chapters are now split 2 – 2 between engagements with Brenner and state rescaling and Nye and soft power. In empirical 1A, I present the ways in which the World Cup confirms the established ways of seeing mega-event hosting as the vanguard of global neoliberalization. Empirical 1B, in contrast, augments the literature by showing how the articulation of the Russian World Cup isn’t so easily understood, and in fact exhibits many seemingly paradoxical features that complicate our understanding of the processes of rescaling.

Similarly, empirical 2A shows how mega-events are used to broadcast messages of soft power to certain audiences, but unlike many studies I concern myself not just with the creation of soft power narratives, but also with their reception. Instead of looking at mega-event hosting as a foreign policy tool, I examine it as a domestic project and, in empirical 2B, I investigate the micro scale of the individual and the everyday to make sense of these global processes.

I’m excited about this contribution and I think it’s worthwhile.

The problem is that it takes so much work to get it into shape! I met my advisor in a coffeeshop in Bern and we had what was, probably, the best meeting in our years together. It was daunting, going there and not sure how he would react to my revision plans and this specific direction. That’s one of the toughest things about being a PhD student, I think: I can feel solid in my work and then, to my shock and horror, find that I’ve gone in a foolish direction. Very often, what I thought was great work turned out, on further reflection, to be mostly trash. It’s hard to trust yourself because you’re not quite sure of your abilities yet.

So it’s always a little nerve-wracking before a meeting because I don’t trust myself yet!

This meeting was fantastic, though, and I returned to my writing charged up and ready to tackle the final phase: knocking everything into shape and making sure it all serves the argument.

So spirits are high, even though the desert stretches out ahead and I can’t seem to see the end. I know it’s there, though, and so I’m putting one foot in front of the other. Resting by day and traveling through the desert by night, which is actually not that far from the truth, considering how many late nights I’ve spent writing!