Comments on: Quasi-academic life coaching

by: home cooked theory » Blog Archive » FNQ and the promise of Facebook

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 09:09:39 +0000

[…] Townsville is nothing like Hobart where I grew up–the climate, the landscape, the wildlife, the architecture and the serious military presence are just some of the things that set it apart. Still, visiting there on the weekend brought to mind lots of feelings and questions about home, ones that I usually don’t entertain for very long for fear of getting confused and paralysed by increasingly estranged choices. Some of these things are intensely personal: whether or not I will be having kids, whether or not I will have a house of my own in the suburbs one day, whether blood relations are ever likely to be close by me again, and what those things mean given my family’s background. Getting an education may have expanded my knowledge and opportunities, but it hasn’t given me any capacity to navigate such fundamental life questions with any sense of purpose or conviction. This is a bad news for a Libran hopeless at making choices at the best of times! […]

by: Sustaining Cultural Research « blown glass

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 01:15:28 +0000

[…] Postdoctoral fellow from University of Queensland Melissa Gregg will also be speaking, possibly because of her agitation here. […]

by: not the motorcycle diaries » Saudades, ennui, and other words you won’t find on my mother tongue*

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:19:12 +0000

[…] I’m reminded of Mel Gregg’s reflections, from a while back, on contending with this chosen reality when it means that “we will need to move a long way from our family and friends to live according to the values and habits weâ€™ve been taught (are worth losing all this for) in grad school, and to begin to imagine a shared ethics with which we can challenge those whoâ€™ve been part of this privileged world a lot longer than we have.” […]

by: Catherine

Tue, 01 May 2007 14:54:15 +0000

How much do I hate this blog format. Movable Type, is it? I’m not sure I’m “answering” anyone, or that we’re really “talking” at all. But okay, let’s try…

“Doesnâ€™t mean there is no reason to question the power relations of a group of people and a profession defined through analysing such power relations.” Sure. As long as you’re keeping *those* power relations in the context of the others that determine why we want this kind of work rahter than others, or why our students/peers might choose something else. That didn’t seem to me to be happening in the thread as a whole (not responding to you in particular).

Doing a PhD is a personal thing (who else cares so much about your topic?)
I disagree. I mean, some elements are “personal”/individually chosen, but most are not.

by: kiley

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 23:33:14 +0000

Catherine, my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I was making allusions to institutional grandeur.

Yes we are lucky. I don’t think many of us doubt that. A lot of us come from working class families so understand that sitting in an office on your arse all day sure beats taking the skin off a dead cow or pumping sausage blend into synthetic skin. Doesn’t mean there is no reason to question the power relations of a group of people and a profession defined through analysing such power relations.

Doing a PhD is a personal thing (who else cares so much about your topic?) but it doesn’t necessarily have to be an isolating one. In questioning the context of this process, I would hope that we might improve it.

by: M-H

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 07:20:03 +0000

Should add that I’m doing a PhD about the process of doing a PhD and so have found the comments here really interesting: fruitful, sad, thought-provoking, anger-making…

by: M-H

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 07:17:03 +0000

I am in the different situation of doing a PhD towards the end of my working life rather than at the beginning. I think that there are lots of reason to want to do a PhD or to have a PhD (which aren’t exactly the same thing) and it doesn’t need to be related directly to academic employment. Lots of people with PhDs find their niche outside academia, or in support roles in universities. Do it for its own sake; do it because you are passionate about discovering something that no-one else has discovered. Worry about what you’ll do next when you need to face that. If you want to be in academia try and set yourself up for that - if that’s what you enjoy. If you’re not enjoying it why are you doing it? Go and find something to do that you do enjoy. And all that rubbish about it being the worst years of your life etc: tell people who say that to boil their heads and make sure that *you* enjoy the process.

by: Seonaid

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 03:21:25 +0000

Not sure if this is useful to the discussion here. It’s very overview-y and so not as grainy as the posts here and it’s also from a North American perspective:

http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-sp01/pr-sp01feature2.cfm

by: glen

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:46:12 +0000

To counter Danny’s ‘realist’ intervention above, here is a brilliant polemical essay that reframes the debate of the business-model university in terms of the detriment to democracy. In the latter part of the essay it uses a mining metaphor to describe the relationship between neoliberal policies and social capital of businesses and universities and the “crude empiricist utilitarianism” at the heart of Australian culture. Not a fan of neo-Hegelianism, but makes some good points that I think along lines of capacities to affect and be affected (in spinozist sense, not physiological affect sense) of social-focused populations and not just market-focused entrepreneurs. The social is not the market, and social relations are not market relations:

“THE NEO-LIBERAL ASSAULT ON AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY”

http://www.concrescence.org/ajpt_papers/vol07/ajpt_v07-02_gare.pdf

not sure why it is in a whitehead journal, but anyway…

by: Catherine

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 07:40:19 +0000

Wow you people just depress me.

I don’t dispute that it was different twenty years ago, but the issues then were different. When tertiary education is an expectiation of most people then the relation between tertiary education and a career in the insitutions of tertiary education has to be different.

We’re lucky lucky lucky. To have this, to do this, to know this, to want this.

And that’s all.

PS. As for who is the Oxford of the SH - I’m so over situations in which the question is taken seriously that I’m not even prepared to play here.