Five steps to success: how to write a thesis when all you want is a beer in the park (by Michaela Salmon)

While most days I wish I could be driving out to spend the day at a lake, or having picnics in parks and reading novels, I’m actually spending all of the summer working on my thesis. As somebody who has rarely had a full time job, and when I have it has been mostly tied to semester dates (thereby keeping my summers relatively free), this is incredibly difficult for me. Worse still, nobody is actually paying me a living wage to, you know… achieve higher education. Apparently it’s all about the self-motivation. Working on a thesis is rewarding, challenging, mind-opening, lonely, and worthwhile. But it’s not easy.

As a result of my struggles, I have compiled my five top tips for surviving thesis writing during the summer:

Who gets to be an expat? Power, privilege, and belonging (by Dr. Alison Crump & April Passi)

This week, we have our first guest blogger, April Passi (MA, Second Language Education), co-blogging with BILD member, Dr. Alison Crump.  

On Multilingual Research Spaces and Digital Dissemination (by Casey Burkholder)

I have been all over the place lately. I have been just about everywhere but home in Montreal. From January – June of this year, I was living and working in Hong Kong while I completed the fieldwork for my doctoral project, Looking Back and Looking Around: Cellphilming and Revisiting with Ethnic Minority Youth in Hong Kong. The project has taken up a lot of my thinking, and has inspired a few of my previous BILD posts. It continues to inspire my thinking as I move from being in the field with my research participants, to working with them across digital spaces.

It’s all about Hope: An evening of art and friendship in Kahnawà:ke (by Heather Phipps)

Hope is being able to see light despite all the darkness.- Desmond Tutu

On July 2^nd, I had the pleasure of spending an evening with friends in Kahnawà:ke, attending the opening night of an art exhibit Lodges, Dams, and Longhouses featuring works by first nations artist Marian Snow. The exhibit is being held at the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center.