MACS report

Posted on | October 7, 2004 |

here’s a report on what happened at MACS on friday - yes, i’ve been given a webpage for it at the CCCS, it’s the small victories…

October Monthly MACS report

Last Friday afternoon the Monthly MACS meeting at the CCCS (for background see ) focused on the transitions involved in PhD research. The idea was to talk about some of the challenges that can arise when undertaking research in a new field. For instance, media and cultural studies PhDs often have a background that is different from the discipline they were trained in or the kinds of work they have been used to. The journey from that background to the completion of the PhD can be a difficult one, and often students think that they are the only ones who undertake it. Yet there’s hardly a typical model for approaching or completing a PhD, and some of our discussion tried to assess whether undergraduate training in cultural studies prepares students for the requirements of this longer project. Interdisciplinarity brings particular challenges in that it’s hard to be certain when a chosen methodology is the right one.

Introducing the theme and the speakers, I sought to raise for discussion some of the many factors that can affect the growing expectation of completion within 3 years, ranging from personal issues (the considerations of a partner, family illness or childcare for instance) to practical considerations like the availability of employment or changing motivations for the PhD itself over the number of years it takes to write. I also drew attention to examples of the incidental shifts that can happen during candidature and that can be impossible to predict, eg. trends in popular culture like reality TV or celebrity chefs (which had consequences for one of our speakers), or wider political developments like the current ‘war on terror’ which may have changed dominant ideas about the political landscape in a short space of time; but also theoretical fashions - will Deleuze or Agamben or Certeau be in vogue three years after I submit? So at the same time as there are periods of personal transition involved in research it’s also important to think about the wider shifts in intellectual culture of which a thesis can be symptomatic.

John Gunders, PhD student at UQ, made the point that during candidature ‘we all write a number of theses’, and that the final form it takes often has to respond to work being produced by others who might be seen as ‘muscling in’ on your turf. John also suggested that even those decisions taken during candidature that seem the most pragmatic - for instance, re-training to fill in an area of knowledge to which you ‘came late’ - can still eventually prove unhelpful. This raised an interesting point about the difficulty of firstly knowing about, and then gaining access to a history of debates over a topic proposed for study.

Stuart Glover, who works at QUT and is enrolled as a PhD candidate at UQ, began with a hybridised rendition of a Neil Murray song, ie. ‘my disciplinary home is waiting for me…’ Stuart’s talk described the motivations for his research in relation to the history of policy debates in Australian cultural studies - debates that tended to overlook literary culture and policy. He also outlined the different competencies involved in his extensive experience in industry and the problem of translating these knowledges to the thesis genre. Stuart maintained that his disciplinary infidelity has been productive in the sense that it has given him a perspective on cultural studies as a set of tools that are useful to employ depending on context. He also speculated whether the expediences of the Creative Industries environment where he works gives a different view on debates about disciplinarity.

Rea Turner, who works and studies at Griffith Uni, spoke about some of the negotiations involved in gaining employment when moving to a new country, as well as the different temporalities of working in a commercial context. Tight turnarounds in an employment situation rely on skills that differ from the protracted bouts of research involved in a PhD. This led to a discussion as to whether there is too much or too little time for PhD research at the moment, and how this might affect the standard of work produced. Rea also pointed out that the significant difference between working in the commercial sector is the degree of control allowed: academic work allows you to develop your own questions to investigate, whereas in commercial contexts, input is encouraged but it’s not often possible to change the investigation itself.

This month’s attendance was greatly boosted by participants from Southern Cross as well as more new faces from the three Brisbane universities. It was also great that grad students from disciplines across the humanities - in particular sociology and history - also came along. Please feel free to contribute further to any of these points of discussion. We’d particularly like to hear other researchers’ reflections on how prior knowledge and background can benefit or hinder current work.

The next MACS will be on November 19. Leading up to the Perth CSAA conference, we will talk about academic associations and networks and their usefulness for early career researchers.

Category: Academia

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