Archive for the 'PhD' Category

Going dark with Agent Bauer.

Posted January 11, 2008 * Comments(1)

A very important announcement.

Like my husband Jack Bauer “I’m going dark” i.e. I am taking leave from the “commercial world of work” to write. It’s all agreed and I have a timeline and everything. This means I am going to be holed up in my office, chained to my desk, with only Miumiu cat & various melancholy play-lists for company. No day time TV for me. No sir. Until recently I watched TV through a high def projector and it was fantastic for getting out of the habit of daytime TV. I can’t afford curtains and the light in the south-facing lounge bleached the image on the wall out. The projector went with the long suffering b.f, so I am reduced to ye ordinary olde worlde TV at the mo, but I don’t feel the urge to watch vets in practice on holiday under the hammer. As yet. Plus I have Sky+ one of the greatest innovations of the modern world.

I factored in 2 days of organization/procrastinations and as part of that I went to the library this morning to pick up a copy of Bourdieus’ Distinction.

WTF?

This is a text that was fundamental to my M.A dissertation. This is a text I have read and re-read several times over the last decade in order to be able to complete my own bachelors, and later help undergraduates enjoy his wisdom in their first year of basic media studies.

Seriously? I mean seriously. Distinction is one of, if not the most impenetrable books I have ever tried to read. Good lord, how did Pierre get so famous? Talk about over convoluted, complicated, drawn out phrasing why don’t you. I am wondering if it will do to actually admit this in my own work. Dare I say it? Bourdieu for christsake SPIT IT OUT.

Here’s a snippet from page 101. He says class and social condition “conceals the structure of the symbolic space marked out by whole sets of the structured practices, all the distinct and distinctive lifestyles which are defined objectively and sometime subjectively in and through their mutual relationship”.

I won’t translate because this is a blog post and not a seminar tutorial nor my actual
thesis, which by the way I should be writing instead of this. And I’m gonna in a minute.

Here is a picture of Bourdieu first.

bourdieu_pierre.jpg

I think he has gotten away with it for so long because in the indices of academic attractiveness he is a little bit dishy. ( Note academia differs from outside world, because in academia people look funny)

Back to going dark, which is what I want to talk about. Apologies in advance if I go quiet on here or if the nature of the posts become totally fruit loop loony la la. I was thinking of changing the name of the blog to the unstable ramblings of a troubled mind as I suspect for a short while it is going to be more of a stream of consciousness slash diary of a PhD. I am also well aware of the long historical tradition of thinkers going completely ga-ga when writing up. Marx turned into a total arsehole, Wittgenstien apparently went to live in a cave for 10 years and Althusser murdered his wife.

What of me?

I’m a discourse dancer

Posted January 10, 2008 * Comments(0)

I am so giddy. I have been stirred by conversations at work again about the future of marketing, audiences, and social innovation.
My belief is everything can be understood through critically engaging with discourse. Yes EVERYTHING. Now I know this is not news, people with far more breath taking an intellect than mine such as Foucault, Althusser and “my guy” Marx were saying it a long time ago. But I am saying it now and in plainer English.

Discourse is power, because it is embedded with ideas and beliefs that reinforce institutions of power. Therefore discourse legitimises power.

I have been doing discourse analysis in my research for a couple of years, plus I have taught a series of workshops called Language Media and Power 2 years in a row, so why the renewed enthusiasm? Why am I all in tizz about discourse? We’re doing beyond exciting things with content and media, and social spaces in my team at work. Furthermore we’ve been talking and sharing our ideas A LOT. Not just amongst ourselves, we’ve been knowledge sharing with the rest of the industry, and of course with our clients. But the word discourse seems to be banded about with more and more regularity.

Just yesterday inspired by the recent postings of the Kaiser et al I was talking with one of my colleagues about shifts in marketing discourse, discourse effects and whether as an industry we are already preaching to the converted when it comes to network effects and social spaces, who exactly is “the audience” and do they really care? One of my fave quotes of late comes from another marketing blog, but I’ve read so many in recent weeks it is v. annoying I can’t remember where I saw it, but it was about the over use of the word conversation at the moment and the headline was taken from a consumer who said something like ” I don’t want a conversation with my toothpaste”. It really tickled me. It’s so true.

This is going to sound incredibly arrogant but at some level I think the team where I work are evolving marketing discourse. But the struggle, call it a moral struggle if you will, that I’m personally experiencing is that I feel that sometimes the marketing industry is employing discourse to validate its own existence. See ideology, power it’s all there. So exciting.

I’ve been working on some ideas for a few months around my role as a content and media analyst to do with digital ethnography and discourse analysis. Trying to marry my background as a social scientist and neo-Marxist scholar, with what I do in marketing. Not easy on an ideological one, on the one hand critiquing consumer society and errr on the other ultimately selling people more stuff, and I am certain orthodox and old skool Marxist alike will have a great deal to say about my appropriation of Marxist theory. But IMHO I think social innovation through marketing and espescially digital marketing is the way forward. I am not sure what to call this ism yet because I haven’t established a discourse. FYI: You don’t have to tell me that establishing a discourse is a substantial ambition.

That’s all I can say at the moment. Lots of thoughts of digital divides, class division, CSR, marketing, disrupting discourse and social change running around in my head….

More to come I hope. And I also hope I can tie this all together somehow in to a more coherant idea. Although when exactly I am not sure, because I am really really going to finsih writing up my thesis in the next few months. So they’ll be less of this and more of that as my mind turns to my own research.

Expect a lot of winging and me going a bit loony over the next few months. I hear this is what happens as one nears the end.

What has this man got to do with doing a PhD?

Posted January 5, 2008 * Comments(0)

images2.jpgI am feelingly slightly moved.

I had taken a few days off from the world of work for total emersion in my PhD and have basically done a 48 hour cram job, breaking only to eat, and watch Pans’ Labyrinth last night with girls ( FYI very good if you like that sort of thing).
“The little printer that could” has huffed and puffed out a 24 page document today, which is the fruits of the last 12 weeks worth of work on the thesis. As I have been working full time, this has been done during the evenings all through the bitter, dark nights, and occasionally at stupid o’clock in the morning when I have woken up dry mouthed with anxiety about lack of progress. Also the odd weekend when I have sacrificed being a fabulous person about town, and renounced some great social event full of beautiful people, to read Foucault and the like. Yup, it’s been emotional.

I have produced a fist draft of my interview analysis, which is 12,000 words. *Sob * none of which, I suspect will make it into the final document, but will probably end up as a type of appendix. It has been an arduous task alright, but necessary in order to inform and make rigorous the actual discussion of ‘discourse’. I must say it was great holding the document in my hand, knowing that mentally, I have passed a bit of a milestone. I have spent the last 3 months carefully reading through and thinking about all my participants’ interviews, and dealing with what they actually said rather than what I wanted or hoped they might say.

Finishing a PhD is tough. I described it to someone the other day as a type of sickness or a heavy bag that you carry on your shoulder everywhere you go. I know it sounds doom and drama, but that’s what it is like sometimes. But far from feeling troubled today, I feel quite the contrary. I feel as if I am ready to bring it home. Personal circumstances and being v.v. poor (which is the plight of the PhD student I know) have made it very problematical, and what with the world of work and the contradictions that entails, I have felt the thesis slipping little by little away from me at the end of 2007. But now I’ve gone all Noel Gallagher “Wonderwall” about it. The word on the street is that the fire in my heart is out. Not me, noooooo. My sense of deep emotional attachment to the thesis is still very much mother and child. I am incredibly protective, and for some reason at the moment it feels as if my back is against the wall and it’s fight or flight.

New Years Resolution or “over tired”

Posted January 2, 2008 * Comments(0)

A little window into your heroines’ personal life…

2nd of Jan and I am feeling most doolally.

I was full of optimism and gusto for the year ahead but have come to the sober realisation today, that yesterday I was still intoxicated. I twittered that I was “half human, half mojito” and to some extent this true, as on the 1st Jan 08 there was more alcohol in my veins than actual blood.

I had been saving some very fine 7 year old rum, which I’d purchased earlier in the year on a trip to Havana for a special occasion. 2007 had many special occasions, but the rum remained wrapped in the dark in the back of a cupboard until the 31st . Anyhow it began its’ fate the way most Cuban rum does, as a mojito, but by 11pm my friends & I were sat drinking it neat & commenting on its’ spicy aroma in the manner of that Jilly (where is she now?) lady who used to go all O.T.T with the wine on the BBC food and Drink show. The rum was almost our downfall as at 11:55 we only just managed to hot foot it down to the Thames to watch the fireworks. Believe me this is not easy in 5inch spiked heels. Although foot/shoe fetishist might argue that my foot looked hot, running was a complex thing.
A pub-lock in, several bottles of champagne, a ridiculous packet of menthol cigarillos thingies later, + some poached eggs on toast, I somehow made it home the following afternoon, albeit dressed as a lunatic. I had a very nice sparkly dress for the occasion of NYE, but for the walk of shame home on the 1st I had gathered some sort of paper mask with a 3rd eye, which made me look like someone from WWF. At what point during the evening I had been given/stolen this I am not sure, but the renegade in me said “Hey keep it on”. I also donned a pair of coral coloured velor track suit bottoms, and ditched the spiked heels for ballet bumps in order to be able to negotiate public transport and steps It’s very liberating dressing as a lunatic by the way, except when other lunatics spot you, and try to make lunatic conversation, which happened to me on the train ride home. Nonetheless I remained in the crazy person get up until a) someone very kind placed carbohydrates in front of me that I could eat without thinking & b) I had to get undressed to get in a bath.

See, who ever said that academics do not know how to have fun?

But back to doolallyness. It is quite possible that I am feeling restless due to the binge smoking on the 31st ergo I am suffering a massive nicotine withdrawal as a now ‘non smoker’. The 2nd theory that I have come up with is that OneNote which I use at work, destroys brain cells. But deep down, I think it is the resolution I made yesterday that in 2008, “ I will finish the thesis, oh yes, I will finish the thesis” and the pressing feeling that I really, really, must get on with it now. It’s a little incongruous that blogging about it, is a keeping me from writing the real thing don’t you think?

The national average to complete a PhD FT is 4 years and April 08 will mark 3 years for me. 2.5 of which have been done FT. I was ahead of the game but it is dawning on me that the final writing up will require complete focus.

Woe & misery. Good bye fantabulous lifestyle, hello keyboard.

I am feeling less than focused at the mo – perhaps I am just over tired.

The eight types of graduate student

Posted May 16, 2007 * Comments(0)

Not my words but an article from The Guardian that I thought was pretty good. Like the author I think I am also probably no 6 with a touch of 2.

Why are we postgrads here? Well, for lots of reasons, says Patrick Tomlin

Tuesday May 15, 2007
The Guardian

When I started this column, I promised myself I wouldn’t let it become a
monthly whinge about how poor I am. Partly because that would be as boring
as if I stood in your garden and recited excerpts from my thesis, and partly
because, as graduate students go, I’m not too badly off.

But I have had to make financial sacrifices to pursue my studies. Given that
everyone else has presumably had to do so too, I initially figured that we
must all be there because of a pure thirst for knowledge. I’ve since
realised, however, that the impulses that draw someone to academic study
beyond graduation are a lot more varied than that.

While I’ve only been at it a short while, I am sufficiently aware of the
unwritten columnists’ code to know one is expected to make wild
generalisations, shun nuance, and present categories in a list format. So,
without further ado, I present the eight types of graduate student:

1. The Wannabe Undergraduate

They had such fun as undergraduates that they cannot bear it to end. They
prop up the bar, talking to undergrads about their thesis, rather than
actually writing it. They judge success by notches on the bedpost and
hangovers accrued instead of marks, grades and the intellectual respect of
their peers.

2. The Student Who Tried Employment

Some postgraduates have been out into the real world and had a real job,
with a desk and a computer and a pay cheque and a lunch break and a pension
and appraisals and meetings and everything. And, for whatever reason, they
have found it wanting.

3. The Couldn’t-Survive-Anywhere-but-at-University

The group most likely to be cultivating eccentricities – keeping a mouse in
their pocket or wearing socks with Marxist slogans sewn into them – while
still too young to shave.

4. The CV-Filler

Their primary focus is not what they study, but what it will look like on
their CV. They believe this qualification will give them “that extra edge”.
Most likely to end up as accountants or lawyers, never employing the
knowledge gained.

5. The Prestigious Scholarship Recipient

Rather than worrying about what the subject they study will look like on
their CV, their primary focus is who is paying for it. In a reversal of the
usual relationship between funding and studying, in which the former is a
means to the latter, the funding is regarded as an end in itself and the
studying something that has to be endured to be able to call themselves a
[insert name of dead white man] scholar for the rest of their lives.

6. The One Who Just Needs Answers

They really are motivated purely by the desire to find answers about their
specific area of interest.

7. The Eternal Student

They are not bothered whether their academic career shows linear progress,
they’re just collecting qualifications and trying to get every letter of the
alphabet after their name.

8. The Polymath

These geniuses could have studied anything, anywhere. They will probably go
on to great things across several disciplines, and already understand your
thesis better than you do. An unfortunate subset are also charming, witty
and good-looking, and therefore hated by everyone.

And which am I? I’d like to think No 6, but I suspect there’s more than a
touch of No 2 about me, too.

· Patrick Tomlin is researching a doctorate in political theory at Oxford
University. His column appears monthly

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