March has been a very intense month, both in highs and lows. Quite a few good things happened (most strikingly I won a prize and was interviewed by two national newspapers) but I felt like I didn’t really have the time to enjoy any of it, because things have been very busy. This is of course completely my own fault because I am so excited about the research, and I find it terribly hard to say no when interesting opportunities come up. And so at some point, namely right now, I find myself running around as, like the Dutch say, “a chicken with no head”. I feel guilty for not being able to give the attention to my family and friends that they deserve, for not taking care of the household, for not doing my work up to standard because of no time…So I started making a plan for 2018, and now I feel back on top of my game (and I will start saying no!).
Also: coming month I will be applying for a position that has come up at the Maastricht University Law Faculty, namely the position of empirical legal researcher. If I do get this job, this might mean that the financial situation of the project changes. Ideally, in that case, I would get the university to pay for the last part of the PhD, and I would be able to use the money still in the fund to create many new research projects on children’s rights. More on this next month…
Ups
- Spent a week in the field, doing research on the child’s right to a nationality (Ambra stayed the whole month)
- Good news: I am selected to be one of the new KNAW Faces of science!
- Was interviewed by national newspaper Trouw twice; one time about homeschooling in the Netherlands (my first casestudy), which is on the rise, and once about what is necessary for education in the Central African Republic, and where donor money goes (my second case study)
- Have been selected to speak at the Conference on Law & Development at Leiden University
- So far the proposal for a Maastricht Platform for Community-Engaged Research, of a working group that I am leading, is getting support from almost all deans of Maastricht University. Will send it to the university board next week…fingers crossed!
Downs
- My draft article on CAR’s legal orders was rejected by a peer-reviewed journal. The reviewer wrote, among other things, that it seemed like possibly my sampling of respondents was flawed and that s/he ‘at times could not help feeling that the results had been retrofitted to the author’s prior conclusions’. A terrible insult! Of course I had no prior conclusion before going into the CAR (if anything, my hypothesis was that there would be many different legal orders influencing the child’s right to education – which didn’t turn out to be the case)… But the reviewer’s remark might tell me something about how I wrote it all down. Perhaps not clear enough. For now, I have sent the paper in to another peer-reviewed journal, let’s see what they say…
- Together with Dorris Devocht I am trying to understand how Dutch judges decide whether to try young defendants (age 16-23) according to juvenile or adult criminal law. I totally underestimated how messy this is both in law, in theory and in practice, and consequently how much time and energy analysis takes. See screenshot for only one of many excel sheets…
