Welcome and thank you for joining me on this adventure. For the newbies, you can catch up on previous post first blog post, second blog post here, third blog post here, fourth blog post here and fifth post here.

As already anticipated, this week sort of passed me by amidst teaching (preps) and other commitments. I did manage to somehow find little pockets of time to give some attention to the Vidi proposal. It was more like tortoise steps. The overall idea for the proposal is leading me to an integration of insights from the (sub)discipline of Social Psychology into my ever-expanding interdisciplinary foundations of Cultural Geography, Critical Tourism Studies, Cultural Memory Studies and Critical Heritage Studies. It’s exciting to think with/across/along/against different disciplines.

This week: I made a (final?!) decision on the case study country selection: Netherlands- Germany and Spain-Portugal, plus a potential test case of Poland. I have also pinned down the methodology as a sandwich with the bread at both ends being qualitative method and the filling being quantitative. I will focus on the qualitative bits at the beginning of the project, the two PhD students will carry out the quantitative study and then together we will do a synthesis of the qualitative and quantitative insights. While I jotted down some things in my hardcopy A4 notebook, I didn’t manage to write/type any sentences for the proposal on my laptop. I did attend a Vidi Writing Proposal Workshop organised through the Wageningen University & Research. I missed the first half of that workshop because I was teaching. Given that Iam crossing new disciplinary boundaries into Social Psychology, I also managed to read two review articles from the Annual Review of Psychology for an overview of the state of art research on these topics:

1. The Social Psychology of Justice Repair
2. Moral Emotions and Moral Behavior

At the end of Week 9, I feel ‘someway bi‘ as we would say in Ghana. On one level I feel that I have made some progress in my thinking but on another level I don’t quite know if it’s good enough progress – given the time window left. But it is what it is, and every small step counts. Tortoise steps in the right direction is better than cheetah speed in the wrong direction 😀

Goals for Week 8: Next week is the ‘voorjaar vakantie’ (early year holidays) for my kids so work will largely take the backseat, at least for the first 3 days of the week. I therefore make no promises to myself. I might need some ‘me-time’ chill time for myself. At the least, I hope to get back into a writing rhythm by finalising a co-authored manuscript that has been left sitting for 2 years far too long. The two other co-authors have separately sent ‘friendly’ reminders this week so it’s about time. But I will keep rolling the Vidi ideas in my mind while working on the other manuscript and see where it takes me….

The adventure continues…see you next week Friday for the next instalment of the #NWOVididiaries blog post.