The world has gone mad I tell thee!

At the moment I’m about half way through my Open University Ethnography course and throughout the study material they always use the possessive adjective, ‘her or his’ instead of ‘his or her’, which incidentally should be replaced by ‘their’ in order to avoid any suggestion of sexism – which is fine by me. Now my spelling and grammar is distinctively average, so I’m not preaching about being grammatically correct. But when political correctness starts making the English language sound ugly I get annoyed. Try reading or writing a sentence using ‘her or his’ in it. It just sounds and feels weird.

"A student studying for their first degree". Sounds normal to me
"A student studying for his or her first degree". Sounds a bit too formal
"A student studying for her or his first degree". Sounds like a man hating, bra burning women wants to make a point.

I’m all for moving away from sexist or discriminative language, but please get a grip.

Ethnography

I’ve probably just made another educational mistake. After all my marketing communications degree from Bournemouth University obviously wasn’t that appealing when I was looking for my first job in planning. Marketing communications is so cliché apparently. Perhaps Universities should start adding ‘interesting’ units to their courses with the aim of proving how interesting a student is. Things like Zoology, French History and Biochemistry being my favourites.

Anywhooo. The controversial words are; Open University and Ethnography. I start my course next month and I’ve been racking my brains trying to come up with an idea for my practical work. So far I have only come up with a couple of ideas.

The creative development process. I’m interested in how the dynamics of groups solve problems.

Something on fandom. My work is full of Southampton fans and they must be the most pessimistic bunch in the world. I’d like to know why.

Over at the Plannersphere I’ve also been given a couple more ideas. One from John Grant relating to how the planning community manage social and professional identities and another from Michael Johnston on moving research in web 2.0.