Other than publishing as much as possible, what kinds of things should you be doing to become an academic after your PhD?

How does having a PhD/ academic ‘success’ change your sense of self?

If you’re pretty sure academia is not the appropriate long term path/ career goal, and you KNOW corporate life is also not quite right for you, where does that leave a postgrad with an MA in Cultural Studies? What other options might there be for a creatively-minded, passionate idealist?

Is it possible to be a ‘partial’ academic? (not just ‘part-time’, but in the academic realm as well as another professional area and still successful)

What are the best institutions (anywhere) for a PhD in the discipline of gender and cultural studies? (other than /as well as Sydney Uni )

How do you know if you’re well-suited to further tertiary study (PhD)? How likely are you to be employed with one?

I want to teach at university, not in high schools or primary schools. But I also want to be able to do research. How can you enter this realm without doing a PhD? (And how the hell do you actually do a PhD?!)

The class was also an attempt to introduce some frank discussion about life in academia, since I worry that a lot of students have little idea as to what the job actually entails. I certainly had no concept as an Honours or PhD student just how much things change on the other side of the fence. So we had a look at some of these clips to see the funny and the serious sides to the situation:

Both of these representations skew to a US audience, of course. I always try to urge the students to contextualise the issues and find out if they are the same in countries like Australia. Next week, I’ll be on a panel at ICA discussing ‘The University in Crisis’ where I imagine some of these problems will be raised. It will be interesting to compare notes with academics in other parts of the world to get some perspective on the activism that is focusing attention here.

One of the challenges in my current teaching context is the diversity of students’ aspirations. On one end, there are those who dream of being an academic (including some who think they already are one!). On the other, there are those who can’t even articulate what kind of career they might want – except to say that being an academic seems completely crazy.

Given some of the statistics I came across in preparation for the discussion last week, you’d have to see the logic of the latter group. In a number of fields the number of PhD graduates relative to jobs is simply untenable. But of course we’ve been through this before – and the situation is subject to change over time.

So rather than offering blanket prescriptions that endorse one path over another, or lose hope in the profession(s) entirely, what seems useful pedagogically is to offer as much advice as possible to students with their own specific tensions and questions facing the future. In the last half an hour I answered questions about research pathways that students submitted anonymously at the start of the class. I also offered to answer questions that they hadn’t found a satisfactory answer for in other classes so far in their degree.

In the following few posts, I’m going to share some of the questions here, in the hope that others might also like to help answering. This way we can create an archive and perhaps also a demonstration of the online communities of support that are available when we feel like we are facing big questions alone.

In each case, care needs to be taken in determining the field of research a given project enters. The first assignment for Arguing the Point was designed with this in mind. Students wrote a 250 word abstract, with 4-5 keywords. The keywords were integral to the task, encouraging the articulation of specific debates and terminology relevant to each topic. Doing this at an early stage in the semester has meant that we can start to think about tactics for refining topics to a manageable size – and I can direct students in their reading.

The class on interdisciplinarity hinged on an analysis of the following readings.

• Catherine Driscoll. “Introduction: The Critical Attitude.” Modernist Cultural Studies. Gainesville: University Press of Florida (2010): 1-18.
• Vicky Mayer, Miranda J. Banks and John T. Calwell. “Introduction. Production Studies: Roots and Routes.” Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. New York: Routledge (2009): 1-12.
• Ruth Barcan. “Fraudulence, Expertise and the Academic Persona in the Contemporary Australian University.” Unpublished paper. Presented at Disciplining Innovation colloquium, Macquarie University, Nov. 2008.

The first two illustrate how to define the terms of a discussion. Driscoll’s introduction is a great example of what to do when when the ‘keywords’ for a project contain an intimidating number of stakeholders. By contrast, Mayer, Banks and Caldwell seek to piece together an embryonic field, one that further research can help to expand.

The final reading (Barcan) is a draft from a conference presentation some years ago now. A moving and honest account of teaching and research in the post-humanities, post-Dawkins university, Ruth’s paper stays on the syllabus in draft form to highlight the stages of writing and thinking that all academics go through.

I’m lucky that I was able to get this kind of help from my supervisor – there are few people better than she is at writing zippy prose on demand. But it seems odd that we don’t think more about these things in our teaching. Writing an abstract is the first thing most scholars do when they are being considered for something crucial to their work – presenting a conference paper, writing a book chapter or publishing an article. So how do we learn how to write them?

The first assignment for Arguing the Point is to write a thesis abstract. I realise this is tough starting out: it’s early in semester and most students feel very unsure about their topic. But the task is designed to allow them to explain their thesis idea, give an outline of their influences and methods, and get some feedback on the scope of the topic. This actually helps to get big ideas moving towards a more defined set of interests and problems.

It isn’t the only abstract students will write this year. It will be revised and adjusted as the research develops, and this is to be encouraged. Abstracts adapt to the stages of a process that is forever in progress. It is a mistake to think that an abstract is a final synopsis, that it spells the end of your thinking on a topic. In its context, the art of writing a good abstract is to simultaneously open up a reader’s curiosity at the same time as you close down a bunch of potentially critical and unhelpful questions. In this, it is much like the art of flirtation.

Writing an abstract at this stage of the year is intended to help students get in the habit of crafting their thinking to suit a task, a genre and an audience. I also want them to learn the value of brevity. Writing to a word limit is a vital skill that higher education teaches. It is a form of discipline that so many jobs require in an age of information.

I continue to be surprised by students who don’t see the purpose behind word counts for essays and theses, or students who think they can include a running set of speculations and imagined conversations in their footnotes, for example (as if such flights of fancy don’t count in the final consideration of words submitted… you know who you are ).

They do. Writing a thesis, every word matters. You should never allow your reader to wonder whether something is relevant.

An abstract has the function and the benefit of letting you begin a discussion having set the terms in your favour. It is what Stuart Hall might have called a “conjunctural intervention”: a statement that holds certain truths together, for a time, under particular conditions, in order to make sense of the world for a moment.

But that’s my take. What characterises a good abstract in your eyes?

(PS: if any of the people to whom I currently owe abstracts happen to be reading this, please ignore/forgive… clearly I take this task seriously!)

• Robert Dessaix. “Showing your Colours.” (and so forth). Sydney: Pan Macmillan/Picador (1998): 121-133.
• Ann Game & Andrew Metcalfe. “Managing.” Passionate Sociology. London: Sage Publications (1996): 26-42.
• Elspeth Probyn. “Writing Shame” [extract]. Blush: Faces of Shame. Sydney: University of New South Wales (2005): 129-43. (There is also a version of this chapter in The Affect Theory Reader!)

These readings were set when I inherited the course – although I am bringing them in a little earlier this year. They illustrate some issues in the research process that are worth highlighting from the outset, whether it is the terror of getting started, the pressure of living up to your research topic, or finding ways to stay motivated (especially when the profession can throw some tough breaks). Resilience is an asset that research students do well to acquire.

These articles also discuss anxieties about writing and the challenge of finding your “voice”. This is an issue that will come up again, I think, when we talk about writing and arguing in Week 5.

But there is an important subtitle I’ve added to the week’s outline for all of this discussion: “Habits, strategies and responsibilities.” It can be very confusing for students starting out in higher degrees to find a rhythm for their writing. Not only in terms of making their project seem important enough that they will dedicate significant amounts of time to it from Day One, but also learning to contextualise the project and not make it so all-consuming that it is the only thing in life.

Getting that balance right long term is really hard – maybe impossible! But one thing that helps is to recognise that the degree is an experience offered by an institution and that it has certain functions. The more you can learn about that institution, the easier time you will have recognising your own place in it – and the wider scheme of things.

What also helps in the writing process is to have an imagined reader. As a scholar, it is always wise to assume that it will not be a sympathetic one! But as was pointed out in class today, one of the most empowering reasons to write is in order to summon “a people to come”, if I am paraphrasing Deleuze correctly. So this is a matter of living with the tension of optimism versus cynicism and their variously mobilising qualities.

For my students, especially for the time being, their principal reader will be their supervisor – so it’s worth thinking carefully about the characteristics of this unique relationship, and how best to navigate it. This also relates to the previous point, because it is important for students to recognise the institutional pressures that working academics face if they are to get valuable and timely feedback.

I particularly welcome any anecdotes or relevant reading about the supervision relationship (or ‘advisor’ as it’s called in the US) from those following the discussion here.

This week’s topic is: What is a thesis? Why write one?
The readings are:
• Bob Hodge. “Monstrous Knowledge: Doing PhDs in the New Humanities.” Australian Universities Review 2 (1995): 35-39. Thanks to Bob for hosting this online – very fitting.
• Les Back (2002) “Dancing and Wrestling with Scholarship: Things to do and things to avoid in a PhD Career” Sociological Research Online, vol. 7, no. 4. Another online publication which is welcome given the genre of collegial advice.
• Joan Bolker. “Getting Started Writing.” in Writing Your Dissertation In Fifteen Minutes A Day: A Guide To Starting, Revising, And Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis. New York: Henry Holt (1998): 32-48. I don’t have a link to this, but there is a website for the book.

Please feel free to read these and make comments below. Or offer your own relevant readings and thoughts on the topic. We will all be grateful.

From my own perspective, I’m wondering what to make of Hodge’s article now – 15 years after its publication. I was finishing Year 12 when this piece came out, and went on to do my BA, Honours year and PhD in the years after. The postmodern landscape has been the established territory for my experience of university study – even though I recognise and often support the qualities of modernist evaluation Hodge describes. So, what happened? To what extent did Hodge accurately anticipate the impact of the New Humanities?

For Back’s piece, which I adore – it seems to carry his ‘voice’ in spite of the unforgiving layout of the online journal – I was thinking about the different listening context for this piece when it is set both for the Australian students I teach and the international students who come to study in our Masters program.

One thing that seems to have developed significantly since both of these articles were written is the amount of postgraduate coursework offerings in humanities disciplines. Masters students write shorter theses, in countries that aren’t necessarily familiar, and often not for the purpose of academic careers. What can these articles offer them?

Every time I go home to Tasmania I tend to become very introspective about where I’m at in life. Taking holidays in Hobart and on Bruny Island – where I spent a lot of my childhood – inevitably involves trying to make sense of the physical and metaphorical distance that separates me from many of the people and principles I was brought up with. It is something I find extremely difficult to reconcile, and it often means I don’t feel particularly relaxed on holiday. But I do think it is vital to go through this experience regularly and to keep close to my (growing!) family.

Among the old friends I caught up with this year were E, an ex-banker who hadn’t visited since being convicted as a rogue trader; T, a registered nurse who has moved to Hobart after living for years as a tattoo artist on Venice Beach and the Cayman Islands; and B, probably my oldest friend, a superstar commerce graduate in town for just a few days.

For the past ten years B has been working all over the world for a major investment bank she joined at the same time that I started my Phd. Like me, lately she’s been wondering if she might be better off doing something else with her life, having worked so hard all through her twenties. Christmas morning had us comparing notes about the rhetorical strategies of cultish workplaces faced with employees thinking of leaving: “But you’re working with the best!” “What else would you do?” “This is as good as it gets!” And the classic: “But you’re so good at your job!”

These thirty-something dilemmas and the usual feelings of uprootedness were even more complicated this year, after six months of commuting between Sydney and Canberra. William & I have been in a long distance relationship of one kind or another for years now, and we should be used to it. But for some reason, being away from home this time round made me newly susceptible to asking what, precisely, it’s all for.

Evidence suggests I have always been the kind of child people describe as “bookish”. My dad was a farmer, my mum a teacher. Almost all of the women in my family have been teachers – but more on this later. Bruny isn’t the kind of place that can provide much support at the early stages of a writing career. The main industries are farming, fishing, logging and tourism (the latter to a much greater exent these days).

Now, when acquaintances from “the mainland” visit Bruny on a gastronomical adventure, I often feel a deep sense of melancholy. I have no right to do so, having left home 11 years ago this week. I suppose it’s an accentuation of what feels like my own personal conflict of cultures. Sensitivity to the process of class mobility – occasioned by the fact that I was sent away from home to “get an education” – plays out when I witness the leisure tastes of peers. It is perhaps a classic case of nostalgia: mourning for a home that has irrevocably gone; one that I felt the need to leave anyway.

In retrospect this has to be one of the reasons I was attracted to the writings of cultural studies pioneers like Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams in the first few years I was away from home. It is certainly no accident that, as a “scholarship girl”, I chose to dwell on their feelings of loss and mourning for the cultures of their upbringing. In those years I was not only feeling an extreme sense of culture shock. I was also grieving my mother, who died the year after I moved to Sydney. These comings and goings are always likely to be tied.

Tasmania has an extensive community of ex-pats. Bruny I’m less sure about. Taking the famous adventure cruise this past New Years Day, the boat was captained by F, the daughter of one of our nearest neighbours on Cloudy Bay Road. (There “neighbour” means someone who is only a 10 minute drive away). F is a mad surfer and it made me so happy to see her taking command of the vessel, showing her home to the world with such pride.

It was different for me. Like a lot of Bruny kids, I was sent to school in the city at a certain age. I would have been about 7 when it started. On Sunday afternoons Mum drove my brother and I up to “town” (Hobart) and we would stay with my grandparents during the week. Mum taught at the same school we went to. When I wasn’t avoiding her I was spending interminably long afternoons in the car waiting for her to finish work.

By the time I reached high school my parents were able to buy a home in the city, with some help from Nanna, I think. These were the days of record interest rates and the wool stockpile. Dad was reminding us just the other day: oversupply in the livestock industry was so bad that the federal government was subsidising farmers for shooting sheep.

My dad is from a farming family. Some of my favourite photos are those that seem to glamorise the glory days of Tasmanian country life in the middle of last century. Football and horse-racing were major sources of investment, pride and fulfilment; social occasions hovered around religious and farming festivals, such as the Apple Queen.

On my mum’s side, Grandpa worked on the docks, for a fish shop and in the jam factory. The old IXL building is now a 5 star hotel on the waterfront – little wonder I feel conflicted about the tourism business! Before moving to Warrane on a housing commission scheme, mum’s family lived in a tiny place in Salamanca, almost next door to Knopwoods. I would make jokes about this in my twenties when mum dropped me off at the pub: “I’m communing with my roots”, etc.

Having been raised somewhere isolated, maybe it’s inevitable that I would be attracted by city lights. It’s not really that simple though. My brother has never wanted to leave Hobart, for instance. And I’ve never loved Sydney the way some people are prone to. I do like that it gives me options – like any big city. But a) options come with price tags and b) options aren’t so great for a Libran anyway.

For the past year I have been struggling with the idea of Sydney, with the role of teacher; exacerbated, no doubt, by the fact that I was a student in the very same corridors I now work. Given my family history, and the personal connection I’ve been forced to have with schools throughout my life, teaching seems an unimaginative endpoint – an intimate, almost masochistic discipline I continue to subject myself to. What others call a “vocation” full of autonomy and freedom feels to me at times like a prison or a conveyor-belt. I’ve never had any significant period away from school; I never left or took time off from the semester cycle. That said, marking lambs, herding cattle, pumping petrol and weeding baronia probably gives me a more diverse CV than most. And I wouldn’t do any of those things again by choice.

Of course the machinic imagery of the factory also describes the tendencies of an industry that seems determined to set a commercially profitable pace for writing, learning and thinking. And that’s probably enough motivation for me to stick around: it would be good to make sure some decent space continues to exist for “bookish” kids, whether it’s here or another city. A benefit of working at a big university is that it allows me to help a few of those without a foot in the door, just as it gives me a chance to offer some perspective to those who aren’t quite aware of their privilege.

While she worked at the Bruny school, my mum was a home economics teacher. Another of her roles was to teach “social skills” to girls who would hardly have thought to catch the ferry to town to have dinner in a nice restaurant for fun. I’m grateful that she took me with her to explore the world of education. But I wonder what she thinks of me now, teaching the latest forms of etiquette to the white collar apprentices vying to enter a new global elite.

I can’t ever be sure it’s what she had in mind.

Me & baby nephew, Noah. Christmas Day 2010.