It's been a while. Almost two years in fact. I've taken a bit of a hiatus from blogging after my return to the United States. There were several reasons for this. For one, I needed to channel all of my writing focus into completing a dissertation. I can happily report that after a lot of work, this happened:
Much of the journey that this blog recorded is now being worked into publishable research, and I'm truly pleased about that. It's the end of one chapter of this story.
And this also is another reason for my absence from the blog. After a year of posts from the field, I found myself unsure of what this blog should become in its second phase. With no fieldwork experiences to recount, I needed to redirect the focus of this platform, and decide how I wanted to use it in the future. There was not an apparent direction at the outset, and so, blogging took a backseat for two years. Until now.
Why revive this blog? And why now? These are valid questions. And there are many answers. For one, as I continue to edit, re-write and fine-tune my scholarship, I find this blog to be a good outlet for reconnecting with my experiences in the field. Whenever I return to my entries here, I find that the quality of my written work outside of this webpage increases dramatically. That's something I'm hoping will continue as I update.
However, in a more important sense I've chosen to revive this blog because of the speed of current events. While I decided to take a two year hiatus to turn my fieldwork into scholarship, the world continued to move forward. As I will detail in future entries, the state of ethnic politics in China continues to press forward, and dramatic changes have shaken up the social and political landscape since I last wrote. These events are ones that I can't ignore. And so I won't.
And so, we're back. I'm not sure how regularly I'll post, but I can promise that it will be more frequently than once every two years. There's a lot to catch up. Stay tuned.