In my last blog post, a reflection on postgraduate life, I expressed surprise at the pain involved in intellectual work. It is indeed difficult, arduous, and uncertain. I found it hard to accept this truth, because I had been seeing the act of reading and writing as liberating – as mental escapes from the demanding pace of activism. I was wrong. Intellectual work is hard work (particularly as a neo-classical sociologist in an age of technology after the cultural and linguistic turn).
There is a ’switch’ that is required for any activist – any person, really – in resuming postgraduate research. This is particularly acute for ‘mature’ students working on Phd theses. If we aren’t aware of this, we spend a lot of time feeling lost, lonely and inept. To understand the need for this ’switch’, we need to examine the nature of the main tasks a postgraduate student undertakes so that we know how to find our way.
Firstly, postgraduate students study. This is where they begin on their journey as seekers of knowledge, and this is a task that has no end. Studying is an act of reaching for the infinite. You can keep on studying and there will always be more books to read, more debates to hear, more ideas to digest, and more arguments to examine. Studying is not as constrained as actions in the ‘real world’; they are not as limited by time, people, decisions and rules of appropriate behaviour. You can always keep reading; you can always keep restructuring your work.
Secondly, postgraduate students work with ideas. These are not just the ideas of their contemporaries or of the teachers they have met face-to-face – they deal with ideas from the past, from people they don’t know, places they have never been, and translated from languages they don’t understand. There are some limits to the circulation of ideas (the state for example, may ban books, or teachers may tell you that certain ideas are a waste of time) but postgraduate students, particularly the resourceful ones, are able to transgress these limits.
Postgraduate life, therefore, often feels like free-falling in slow motion. It feels like diving in a deep ocean without a reef wall by your side or the sandy bed below you. You know you are going downwards, but you don’t know how fast and how long the journey will take. You lose a sense of perspective. You can’t measure your depth, height, or physical orientation. You panic, looking for signs of the sunlit surface where you once were. You glance around desperately for your (hopefully more experienced) ‘buddy’, wanting to be reassured and guided back to normalcy.
It is in these times that we are most vulnerable. We are anxious and uncertain of ourselves, wondering if we know anything at all. Our confidence crashes when we receive criticism. Our faith in our selves vanish. The slightest intellectual criticism makes us feel like idiots. Some of us cling to our supervisors, hoping for answers. Some of us cling to theorists, hoping for inspiration. We follow paths set down by these authorities, rather than trusting our own instincts; we surrender to their advice, trusting their intellectual judgments, not our own. Some of us just escape – most of us momentarily, through fantasy, fiction, or continued procrastination, but some of us forever, giving up on our Phds altogether.
How do we find our way?
First, I believe that all of us have our own ’secret questions’. In order to navigate ourselves out of confusion, we need to find out (or rediscover) what these ’secret questions’ are. I call them ’secret’ because they often lurk in our subconscious, just below our awareness. We may once have been able to articulate them specifically, but they are now hidden to us – forgotten, buried, or discarded as our work evolved.
In order to find these secret questions, we need to search our hearts, minds and souls. We may have to bring ourselves back to the first time we took a step in the direction of our postgraduate research. We may have to sift through our memories to remember what problems troubled us, what theories quickened our hearts, what findings blew our minds. This personal excavation is necessary because many of us have forgotten the original reasons why we embarked on this long journey; why we chose this particular topic for research. Many of us have been side-tracked along the way – sometimes by (well-meaning) supervisors and colleagues who told us to follow other paths rather than the ones we set out initially. These ’secret questions’ become the invisible ropes that guide our research; they produce a restlessness in us that keeps us drawn to particular themes. Swerving away from them, or cutting them out of our work, makes us lose our motivation.
Secondly, we need to recognise that research, by definition, is exploratory. Some of us may have the supernatural ability to predict all possible outcomes, but most of us are likely to stumble and fall. We will take wrong turns, which we need to correct; we will face stumbling blocks, which we need to overcome. We will walk down alleys only to find dead-ends; we will try new paths that lead nowhere. There will be visas we can’t get, supervisors we can’t win over, and difficulties in getting good data. This is a fact in postgraduate life. Therefore, we need to build in extra time and resources for our work – to give ourselves time for being lost. We need to learn how to manage our anxiety and to pace ourselves. We need to learn how to bounce back from setbacks and develop realistic perspectives. We need to learn how to wait and how to relax. We need to let ourselves be ordinary human beings exploring new territory rather than expecting ourselves to be seasoned superheroes.
Thirdly, we need to listen to our own instincts and, with humility, keep an open mind. It is arrogant to think we are right all the time, and that we know everything there is to know. Rather than getting flummoxed by unexpected data, we need to make sure that our mental frameworks are flexible so that we can incorporate new information. We can only produce meaningful research if we are intellectually humble and willing to learn from anyone. This is particularly important for social scientists who work with marginalised, disempowered, or vulnerable people. If we discount their views, if we don’t take time to listen, we only reinscribe existing power-relations uncritically.
As time goes on, as we continue to read and learn, we realise that the terrain becomes more familiar. We start to see major landmarks; we begin to recognise themes and patterns. We start separating ‘normal’ facts from extraordinary ones. We learn skills in interpretation – in recognising significance and meaning. It often takes substantial ‘investment’ before we see payoffs in understanding.
A member of my faculty once told me that it isn’t intelligence or brilliance that is crucial for completing a Phd – it is sheer doggedness and hard work. We will face challenges, we will get confused, we will lose our way. But we also find inspiration; and on good days, we run lithe and smooth, like athletes.
If we persevere, we will find our way.