Quasi-academic life coaching

31 Responses to “Quasi-academic life coaching”

1. glen
   April 23rd, 2007 @ 4:36 pm

   good practice within academic professional development would necessarily have to include those elements of academia that are required for ‘academia’ to function beyond those that fulfill the expectations of “research excellence” or whatever the most recent empty buzzword amongst neoliberal business managers masquerading as scholars.

   “wouldn’t it be great if professional development days could be accompanied by actual data on changing work patterns, and historical trends over time on issues like class mobility, family life, & things hardly ever mentioned like domestic divisions of labour”

   this is work the postgrad wiki idea was meant to start accounting for in terms of people I know who have done cultstud postgrad degrees or whatever description and who have managed to survive. who knows what has happened to it, but I need to finish the phd.

   When I think about the very real problem of depression in the context of the “pursuit of excellence” I get very angry. No one seems to give a fuck about postgrads beyond some minimal antiseptic institutional duty of care role. Sure we are adults, we can take care of ourselves, and yet we are plugged into a system that reproduces us as ’students’ with strict divisions of labour and responsibilities.

   It is in the interests of universities to actively promote a culture of care because relying on the narcissistic careerist perspective of ‘hungry’ postgrads (yes, every pun intended) will eventually see posgrads turn around and simply (not) care about the university just about as much as they have (not) been cared for. The function of alumini? Who cares?

2. melgregg
   April 23rd, 2007 @ 4:52 pm

   Elsewhere, Jill shares some insights from her own family ties, noting the importance of having true allies.

3. melgregg
   April 23rd, 2007 @ 4:56 pm

   Meanwhile Glen, you’ll be amazed that this email arrived in my inbox as you were commenting (I particularly like the sound of the second one):

   
   Subject: Reminder - Post Graduate Supervision Series May Courses

   Policy Discussions for Postgraduate Coordinators
   18 May ‘07 1:00pm TEDI Seminar Rm, Bldg #15 40 (1 taken)
   Duration: 1.5 Hours
   Coordinator: Catherine Manathunga
   Presenter: Alan Lawson
   In this interactive series, we will explore and discuss emerging developments in RHD policy at UQ. You will also have the opportunity to contribute to policy discussions about various aspects of RHD policy at UQ.

   This session will provide you with the opportunity to:
   1. find out more about emerging RHD policy at UQ;
   2. contribute to RHD policy discussions;
   3. network with other Postgraduate Coordinators from across the university.

   How to Demonstrate Excellence in PG Supervision
   25 May ‘07 10:00am TEDI Seminar Rm, Bldg #15 30 (13 taken)
   Duration: 1.5 Hours
   Coordinator: Catherine Manathunga
   Presenter: Alan Lawson
   This session will explore how you might demonstrate excellence in postgraduate supervision. In particular, it has been designed for people seeking to document their supervision practices for Career Appraisal, Continuing Appointment and Promotion processes and for RHD Supervision Excellence Award applications.

   This session will provide participants with the opportunity to:
   1. investigate the elements of quality postgraduate supervision;
   2. develop additional strategies to document your supervision practices for career appraisal and promotion purposes;
   3. develop additional strategies to document your supervision practices for RHD supervision award application;
   4. Find out more about the RHD supervision award application process.

   Learning Circle on Postgraduate Supervision
   25 May ‘07 2:00pm TEDI Seminar Rm, Bldg #15 30 (0 taken)
   Duration: 2 Hours
   Coordinator: Catherine Manathunga
   Presenter: Catherine Manathunga
   In March 2002, a number of academic and support staff established a learning circle on postgraduate advising, which is facilitated by Dr Catherine Manathunga. The learning circle is a:
   1. support group for supervisors (especially less experienced supervisors);
   2. practical group that can learn from experienced supervisors about solving real problems in postgraduate supervision;
   3. focus group that would undertake potential action learning projects on postgraduate supervision;
   4. proactive group that will develop tangible outcomes like educational research and joint publications;
   5. interdisciplinary action and research group working on postgraduate supervision

4. Mark Bahnisch
   April 23rd, 2007 @ 5:48 pm

   Excellent post, Mel.

   If I had a finished PhD and a full time academic gig, I’d be most reluctant to advise anyone to do a doctorate under current conditions. There’s such a huge dysjunction between the expectations used to lure people in, and the reality. With reference to glen’s point, it’s good to see people engaged in mutual support, but I think the broader point is also important - it’s time for universities and senior academics to come clean about what things are really like, and also to recognise how the climate of unreal expectations and the academic labour market in many ways shape doctoral students’ experience for the worse. I’d also applaud the suggestion that some thinking as to how facilitating the sorts of work we want to do (and actually acting as a “public intellectual” - horrendous phrase though that is rather than a producer of obscure and unread refereed articles) is urgent. I suspect that in an age of insecure work generally figuring out how to find the money to support what we want to do is a better starting point than thinking in terms of a “career”.

   Anyway, much food for thought here.

   It’s well timed, too, as today has brought various emails telling QUT humanities and social science postgrads that the School we study through will be closed and arts disciplines other than those in CI no longer taught at QUT. The implication is that most of our supervisors will get redundancies, but any consideration of what happens to research students (who may not want a PhD offered through education where some of the non-redundant staff are moving - or so it’s rumoured) seems to be an after thought.

5. jean
   April 23rd, 2007 @ 6:40 pm

   Mark - wtf? is this the whole of Carseldine? I had no idea this was afoot at all.

6. Mark Bahnisch
   April 23rd, 2007 @ 7:14 pm

   Human Services will remain, Jean, and possibly some elements of languages will be relocated to Business and/or Education, but QUT is now out of teaching Humanities & Social Science, so sociology, history, pol science, geography, international studies, South Pacific studies all get junked - along with about 20 to 25 academic staff I understand. I’m in touch with the NTEU to get some more info on what’s happening and will post on it when I do get it.

   I imagine that this was always on the cards, and that Coaldrake has been awaiting the moment to strike despite promises previously made in respect of research performance, student numbers and the degree redesign guaranteeing the future of the School (as I recall). Probably waiting til CI was well and truly up and running.

   This is what Coaldrake says:

   LOW entry cut-offs, poor performance and heavy financial losses in traditional arts courses have prompted the proposed closure of the Queensland University of Technology School of Humanities and Human Services.
   QUT vice-chancellor Professor Peter Coaldrake discussed the plans with 60 staff from the school at the university’s Carseldine campus yesterday.

   Professor Coaldrake said the school was losing between $200,000 and $400,000 a year, which was unsustainable. He said the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Human Services had high attrition rates and poorer employment outcomes than other QUT courses.

   Professor Coaldrake said QUT’s strength in humanities was its Creative Industries faculty at Kelvin Grove, which was internationally competitive.

   “For us, that is the new humanities,” he said.

   It’s very bad news for the humanities and critical scholarship at QUT, as well as very bad news for a lot of excellent academics and as I said, the emails I’ve received seem to suggest that postgrads have almost entirely been ignored in the decision making process.

7. Mark Bahnisch
   April 23rd, 2007 @ 7:16 pm

   http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21594681-3102,00.html

   Here’s the link.

   A colleague from QUT emailed me just before to let me know there was something else in the C-M today but it doesn’t appear to be in the web version.

8. jean
   April 23rd, 2007 @ 8:10 pm

   thanks for the info Mark. It’s not pretty is it - very sudden, and very blunt, by the sounds of it.

   And, “Creative Industries the new humanities”? hmmm,I don’t know what our Dean, let alone all the practice-led researchers, let alone all the dancers, painters, musicians, writers, actors, directors, sound designers, computer music programmers, film-makers, statisticians, systems designers, communication designers, political economists, evolutionary economists and sociologists who populate the place would think of that either…I think any of them who have any understanding of the idea of the CI faculty as a multidisciplinary enterprise would hope we’re doing something other than being the new humanities.

9. jean
   April 23rd, 2007 @ 8:15 pm

   actually, it’s a bit misleading to say ‘all the sociologists’. there aren’t really that many proper sociologists in CI, unless me using Howard Becker and/or various people using ANT counts

   Lets put an anthropologist or three in that slot instead. We have a few of those.

10. danny
    April 23rd, 2007 @ 8:37 pm

    I know a bunch of you who read this blog are engaged in just this kind of crucial, community-based activity, and yet why is it that getting published in journals (that no one has time to read) and books (that no one can afford to buy) is seen as a rational expenditure of time?

    Because as an academic one gets paid much more than what one’s work is worth on the open market, and who pays the piper calls the tune etc. As you know, there are a whole lot of people out there who do intellectual work, get paid much less, and make a lot of things happen.

    Universities are important, but I think you forget at your peril that they have always been funded as finishing schools for the middle-upper classes, or at the vocational side (the QUTs) as instrumentalist labour production. I agree that a bit more realism about the job market would be useful in the professional development schemes, but at the end of the day I think that if you want to shift the academic system in favour of more holistic, community-oriented production, you have to start with the recognition that this is not what Unis are designed for, so everything you do will be a hack. And there have been some beautiful hacks, but they haven’t changed the basic business model of the academy.

    Most people outside of academia don’t expect their careers to be endlessly rewarding and stimulating; and they don’t suffer the same levels of day-to-day anxiety and disappointment that somehow it’s not working. They are just trying to make a living. And most would look at your questions as luxury problems.

    I’m open to the idea that “precarious” academic labour is somehow emblematic of broader economic shifts and provides critical information on the changing state of the world, but mostly I think we in the academic world are just trained for self-aggrandisement. We’d make more positive change by just doing our jobs well enough to get access to the positions where we can make structural change. You can’t really do that as a post-doc or assistant professor (or, as I found out, a programme manager!) no matter how much you care about it, so I think taking a break from the reflexive structural analysis (blogging) is probably a good idea if you really want to preserve your sanity

11. Mark Bahnisch
    April 23rd, 2007 @ 11:07 pm

    actually, it’s a bit misleading to say ‘all the sociologists’.

    Barbara Adkins is the only one I can think of!

    Anyway, I’ve put up a post on this at LP, since I think it’s worthwhile doing so, and while it’s related to this post, probably discussion of the specifics is straying a bit off topic.

    http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/04/23/qut-farewells-the-old-humanities/

12. Too many topics, too little time. » Quasi-academic life coaching
    April 24th, 2007 @ 12:05 am

    [...] Quasi-academic life coaching: I wonder whether what we need is less advice that normalises unrealistic expectations that will only ever apply to an overcommitted few, and instead begin to expand (or rather, demand) the range of examples and meaningful outcomes that a graduate education in humanities in Australia can lead to. I know a bunch of you who read this blog are engaged in just this kind of crucial, community-based activity, and yet why is it that getting published in journals (that no one has time to read) and books (that no one can afford to buy) is seen as a rational expenditure of time? Particularly when universities and governments, under the sway of Big Science’s Big Bucks, don’t even want to acknowledge what’s regarded as a valuable contribution to humanities knowledge (including that most traditional of outcomes, publishing a book that is highly esteemed amongst your colleagues, as the RQF planning discussions seem to be suggesting). —- [...]

13. Jason W
    April 24th, 2007 @ 1:52 am

    “Most people outside of academia don’t expect their careers to be endlessly rewarding and stimulating; and they don’t suffer the same levels of day-to-day anxiety and disappointment that somehow it’s not working. They are just trying to make a living. And most would look at your questions as luxury problems.”

    Wow. Really? The idea that anxiety and disappointment about careers, fulfilment, the futility of aspects of our work, and the difficulties of ‘making a living’ are confined to academics or even the professional and middle classes is possibly premised on experiences I haven’t had. My own uncomfortably recent (2005) six month stint in minimum-wage ‘information’ work in the UK meant I was surrounded by people who were constantly worried about their positions, their choices, their futures, their hours, how to cement the gains they had made, where to draw the line in their commitment to their jobs, whether aspects of their jobs were pointless and wasteful, and how to make all of this fit with the other parts of their lives. Sounds familiar, but it was all for the sake of £5-8/hour.

    ‘Day-to-day anxiety’ and ‘disappointment’, not least with the way ‘making a living’ goes now, and the difficulty of making space for other things beside the expansion of their working lives, are precisely what I hear from family and friends, whether they are at the sharp end of a casualising childcare industry, waiting tables, making kitchens, teaching school, or in underpaid office jobs where they take the lap-top home on the weekend. People outside academia don’t simply have an instrumental view of their work as a ‘labour exchange’ in my experience, and for the most part they do routinely expect certain kinds of fulfilment that they feel is at risk from other things they are being asked to do.

    I actually think this post is speaking to a wider problem than the concerns of privileged academics, or am I reading this bit incorrectly?

    “wouldn’t it be great to have some honest discussion about what a sustainable working life, in or outside academia, might look like in an always-on, technology-dependent culture.”

    The fact that Universities aggressively recruit postgrads in the humanities (etc.) well beyond the capacity of the academic employment market means that, inevitably, most of them will wind up working in places other than Academia: i.e. ‘permanent full time employment in our area of training isn’t a rational expectation’. This was certainly true of the majority of the folks I studied with at Griffith. Given this, and also that the range of employment leaving postgrads might end up in may not coincide with ‘professional’ careers, a much wider set of ’structural changes’ than how a university department happens to be run could start with having this conversation about sustainable work practices with people who are still studying and thinking about what they might do with what their smarts, skills and energy. Isn’t that the nub of what’s being suggested here?

    Starting that conversation might require a foothold in a University, but no more than any postdoc or lecturer or supervisor has, it seems to me. These are certainly the kinds of conversations I try to have now and again with my coursework MA students, for example. I’m not sure if this qualifies as a ‘hack’, since it seems so eminently achievable. Perhaps I’m missing something.

14. danny
    April 24th, 2007 @ 7:31 am

    The post from Donna is genius.

    Jason, I take your point and disagree with little about your experience of low-wage information work (except to say that class is the elephant in the room in any academic/information factory analogies), and the value of teaching.

    To clarify what might have provoked that unnecessarily rantish response (sorry Mel! but you have had enough of these from me to know that they’re about my own issues - unfortunately you just provide a hospitable forum).

    Mel says that that doing research that gets “published in journals (that no one has time to read) and books (that no one can afford to buy)” is somehow not a rational expenditure of time, and (in my view) morally opposes it to “community-based activity.”

    I strenuously disagree with this point, for a number of reasons, but the main one is simply that universities are designed for teaching and research, and not doing research is akin to being a graphic designer in an ad agency and saying “I’m not going to put client logos on any ads.” One may choose not to work in advertising and have a greater array of options for visual practice, but such an approach will hardly lead to a “sustainable” career within the agency environment.

    Similarly, not doing academic research is not going to solve the problem, because the kinds of “community-based activities” one wants to do will either be avoided by the institution due to risk, or (worse) be appropriated by the institution and then the community becomes subject to the audit logic of the academy. This is not an argument against us doing the “community-based activities” of course - I don’t know if I’d call them crucial, but they play an important role. But it *is* an argument against saying “this is what academics should be doing”, when that expectation is a large contributor to the anxiety Mel is articulating.

    There is a kind of “academic activism” that collects a pay check from the academy most can’t dream of, and treats protest against the business model of the academy as the struggle. I’m not necessarily putting your post in this camp Mel, because I know you don’t think about it so simplistically, but I do think that a little more realism about your organisational context would not only support your professional and activist aspirations, but would reduce the cognitive dissonance that comes from believing the academy is going to change the world.

15. melgregg
    April 24th, 2007 @ 8:54 am

    Yes, I’ve deleted Donna’s contribution

    But Danny, I’m puzzled about why you think I’m not doing academic research when I write on my blog about things I am paid to write about? I still publish in journals and I write books too (often about academic blogging, which is how the post began, but also on workplace culture), so even if I thought a moral juxtapositon was the way to convince anyone of an argument or my politics, I wouldn’t oppose those things to other kinds of work.

    I also don’t know how you can interpret my suggesting innovations that would take place precisely within the organisational context I work in - UQ and the CRN - as evidence that I’m under some kind of delusion about who pays for me to do my job. I’m hoping that your earlier comment, that these issues are more yours than mine, is the spirit in which I should take your selective reading. I don’t think I’ve ever suggested that academia can change the world - let alone a blog post.

16. Neddy
    April 24th, 2007 @ 8:56 am

    Mel, I love it that you have Saturn Returns as a tag for your blog (if I was blogging today mine would be Chez Virgo). One year into my PhD, the professional development classes and required coursework have so far definitely told me much much more about Endnote and special Word styles than about methodology, thesis writing or how to actually think about work beyond these three years. We have constantly heard that there are no jobs, it is impossible to get published and that these will be the worst few years of our lives. My favourite moment was when the only RHD student I know that is a mother was told that her thesis will only ever be a hobby unless she can find the 80-85 hours a week required to make it anything more. I am all for a good work ethic but I think we are all too smart to spend 85 hours a week on something that if we are fortunate enough to have a scholarship pays about $350/week and as far as we are told, won’t get us a job in the end anyway. I would think that it would be in the University’s best interest for us all to want to finish rather than making us nurture fantasies of real jobs and tending to gardens and children in the European countryside … which I hope all of us lady doctors can all do together one day anyway. xx

17. kiley
    April 24th, 2007 @ 9:29 am

    I’m blushing. I love that I’m the case study for you and Ned! My planned expatriotism isn’t just because of the appalling cynicism in my field however, its the general cynicism of this country at the moment. Knowing you are toiling away and missing your children growing up and have close to zero job prospects at the end is a little disheartening though. The assumption that everyone wants to then serve a contract apprenticeship, marking papers and tutoring for three years, seems to equate to the touring endlessly in shit hotel venues until you ‘deserve’ your success in the music industry. The whole paying your dues thing in academia becomes almost a form of bullying, especially when in the hands of a bunch of socially challenged middle-aged academics!
    I did ask at the publication roundtable how, in a glut ‘market’ such as cultural studies, could we as postgrads hope to have an article published in a tier one journal. This was after being told two days previously that you will never get a postdoc without at least 2-3 journal publications. I was told to put the work in and wait. Sometimes it takes four years but its worth it just to get it published. My god! I’ve got more hope of winning Australia’s Got Talent than getting anywhere in this hyper-competitive environment. I just feel like lying down and rolling onto my back like a scared puppy when I hear this kind of threatening paternalism, especially when it comes from the mouths of academics who have had tenure in the same school for over thirty years. What can they really know about the pressure I feel that I am under (financial, parental, academic, etc)?

    Anyway, when I’m ensconced in my little sustainable house in the french countryside and picking zelig up from her little village school after making music all day, I know that all those years of toil were somehow worth it. x

18. Graham
    April 24th, 2007 @ 11:39 am

    maybe it’s me or Melbourne Uni, but there appears to be much less of an emphasis here in Australia on conscious professionalization, at least in comparison with my time at the University of Toronto where such instruction ruled (and not in the positive sense of the word). Part of this is probably that the UofT competes (in terms of students and faculty) on the same circuit as universities like Chicago, Cornell, Harvard, Yale, etc. while MU is “the Oxford of the Southern Hemisphere.” Also, there is a frightening lack of emphasis on what you’re actually getting yourself into here, and it seems as if students are left to figure it out themselves or from each other. Another factor, probably the primary factor, is the lack of comprehensive exams and coursework for PhDs — plunging directly into a dissertation still doesn’t make much sense to me in terms of learning about academe.

19. kiley
    April 24th, 2007 @ 12:12 pm

    Is Melbourne the Oxford? I thought UQ was. Maybe we are the Birmingham TAFE.

    Graham we have to do coursework here, albeit often in disciplines within the school that have nothing to do with our interest areas at all. I’m trapped in a literature advanced study option at the moment because it was the only one on offer in the school and I need to do two before I finish mid 2008. Mostly this class involves people talking about characters from AS Byatt and Pat Barker novels like they are guys they have met online and hope to date some day. It hurts my soul. Everything I have learnt to be critical of is virtuous in that class.

    We are also left to our own devices, often with the premise of comfort from the cold, hard shoulder of a long-tenured academic who chides you for stealing their research time for an hour once a month. If that isn’t inspiration to achieve, I don’t know what is!

    It is a little hard to coalesce the touchy-feely sentiment of a cultural studies sensibility with the cynical and isolating environment of postgrad life in the school. I find that irritatingly upbeat conversations and irresistible invititations often alleviate some of the lack of scholarly community and support in my school. Sometimes it even works.

20. Jason W
    April 24th, 2007 @ 9:57 pm

    For Kiley and Neddy: don’t let anyone tell you it’s impossible to publish! I’m not really Mr. Cultural Studies, so I can’t speak for the journals in that field, but having worked for a ‘nu meedja’ journal for the last couple of years, I can tell you that anything that’s well-pitched, well-written, doesn’t bear the obvious hallmarks of the converted thesis chapter, and does something to develop the field will be well-received. Doesn’t matter if its from a PhD candidate if its good copy!

    Stuff usually gets rejected here and in other journals (us editorial assistants hang out) because (1) it doesn’t meet the journal’s remit; (2) it’s not very well-written/structured; (3) it doesn’t take proper account of, or develop the specific debate it’s joining (context!); (4) It doesn’t make a strong central argument; (5) it’s boring i.e. not engaging for a combination of the reasons above; (6) a peer reviewer takes exception to it for reasons of their own. There’s nothing much you can do about the last one; if you avoid the first 5 pitfalls you leave them little choice but to at least send it out for peer review.

    Thing is I think you’ve got to make it a special project. It’s not a good idea to ‘turn a chapter into a paper’, I don’t think: better to develop an idea from the thesis into a piece of short-form writing. This means time out from writing the thesis, which needs long consideration, but it can be a good piece of half-way-through-the-thesis gratification.

    My tuppence.

21. glen
    April 25th, 2007 @ 3:20 pm

    is there any other trajectory besides education/training -> job market?

    (this is in part a trick question, because education/training is already a structural location of a source of cheap labour that transcends traditional socio-economic class divisions. the ‘pool’ of labour is more like a swamp with shfting terrain of pools and land and everything in between. it cuts across traditional socio-economic divides but uses cultural/libidinal structurations as wedges to divert the potentialities of labour between lifestyles groups.)

22. Catherine
    April 25th, 2007 @ 5:40 pm

    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.

23. glen
    April 26th, 2007 @ 10:46 am

    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…

24. Seonaid
    April 26th, 2007 @ 1:21 pm

    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

25. M-H
    April 26th, 2007 @ 5:17 pm

    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.

26. M-H
    April 26th, 2007 @ 5:20 pm

    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…

27. kiley
    April 27th, 2007 @ 9:33 am

    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.

28. Catherine
    May 2nd, 2007 @ 12:54 am

    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…

    “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.” 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.

29. not the motorcycle diaries » Saudades, ennui, and other words you won’t find on my mother tongue*
    July 13th, 2007 @ 8:19 pm

    [...] 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 we’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 who’ve been part of this privileged world a lot longer than we have.” [...]

30. Sustaining Cultural Research « blown glass
    August 7th, 2007 @ 11:15 am

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

31. home cooked theory » Blog Archive » FNQ and the promise of Facebook
    August 14th, 2007 @ 7:09 pm

    [...] 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! [...]

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