Changing Your PhD Topic with Shanika Ranasinghe

Welcome to Season Five!!    What better way to start than with ABBA?!   This week’s guest Shanika Ranasinghe is a fourth-year part-time ethnomusicology PhD student in the Department of Music – Royal Holloway, University of London.  Her thesis constitutes an ethnographic study of twenty-first century ABBA fandom.     In this episode we discuss how ABBA’s recent reform led Shanika to re-think her PhD topic and how she managed that shift.   We also talk about the media interest that Shanika’s work has attracted - she has recently appeared on Swedish and British national TV, as well as UK, Australian, and New Zealand radio.   You can find The Conversation article that Shanika references in the interview here: https://theconversation.com/abba-who-actually-likes-them-167401 .  As we discuss, The Conversation can be a really useful platform for disseminating research material and often gets picked up by journalists.   Shanika shares top tips about maintaining your integrity as well as the importance of community. Support The PhD Podcast on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/thephdliferaft