… it just happens to be one where everyone is silently watching, and judging 👍

To the introvert an academic conference is like being at a party where there is just one person you feel comfortable talking to. Your mission is to work out who they are without interacting with anyone else, and then have a cheery convo with them while avoiding attracting anybody else’s attention. Now we’re doing all our conferences on Zoom, the hour of the introvert has come at last. As a professional introvert this makes me happy. But not too happy, that wouldn’t be very introvert-y and might end up with me engaging in persistent eye contact, wanting to know stuff about the other person, not reviewing every interaction a thousand times over the next month to check if I was embarrassing, and dancing on the stage at nightclubs. Slippery slope.

First steps to understand how to approach the academic conference is to grasp what it is for. A conference is several different events happening at the same time. A conference is: An academic news aggregator and sorter of ‘what everyone should be caring about right now’. A site of several rites of passage, into, through and out of the academic career. A consensus creator and problem former. A place of renewal and crisis management where the institutional health of the discipline is reviewed. A sometimes commercial entity. The place where people talk at other people for 15 minutes without saying anything related to the title they submitted 6 months ago. That disco. You may have noticed some of these are not going to be replaced by an online conference.

For the PhD researcher or early career researcher there are some graspable functions served by it: socialisation, joining a peer culture, starting to take measurable risks with your ideas, getting quick feedback, seeing frenemies and scouting out places you might like to work. I like conferences because they push people together, and at their best create a collective effervescence of ideas and people. At their worst … well, there’s a lot been written about that, alienating professional jousting and such. Generally we’ve got a bit better at limiting the irritating stuff and deliberately creating space for the good stuff. There’s also a lot going on in relation to access around the conference that isn’t acknowledged such as fees, immigration led constraints on attendees’ travel, the medium used for an online conference, and when it is being held (thanks to comments from two super smart students for putting that at the front of my mind). See Craig Lundy, Free the academic conference

Some links to get you started in working the conference:

How important is it to present at conferences early in one’s career? (Part 1)

How to write a killer conference abstract: The first step towards an engaging presentation.

Conference small talk – the definitive guide

What scares me in learning? I might be called upon by the teacher and not have an answer, or not have what is needed to respond. If I do say anything my reply might be so obviously dumb and naive that I should be excluded from higher education forever. I might somehow accidentally advance to a stage I am fundamentally unequipped to cope with and everyone will know, but they won’t say anything because they are too polite. This is common impostor syndrome stuff and saying that does not really help the situation (‘but you see,I really am an impostor so that doesn’t apply to me’). There is another set of trepidations which come before the teaching setting is entered. ‘I might not be able to join or participation will be limited by other things in my life’. ‘I might express my needs and the teacher will be defensive or dismissive.’ ‘I will have some aspect of myself exposed in a way I cannot control’. I am grateful to the many students who have told me about this in various ways.

What scares me in teaching? What students are thinking when there is silence in class. Who is waiting for whom? My tendency to blab. Have I read enough to teach this? Are my memes disco dad level embarrassing? Whether I can put my game face on whatever mental state I am in. The last is a bad one when working from home. There is no entry and exit from the teaching space. Context collapse is unavoidable.

Context collapse is a new one for me but for many colleagues and students with caring roles this is never ending. Context collapse is the inability to separate previously distinct or expected to be distinct roles and audiences. The term is often used in contexts where private and public cannot be separated. Social media invites context collapse. Teaching in the pandemic imposes it. Working from home in the pandemic is not working from home in the pre-lockdown sense. Everyone and everything is there with you. The sounds, feelings, conversations and demands of being at home are all happening at once. The problem of context collapse is the inability to separate the different rhythms of life from each other. Working in the pandemic produces a new form of social time, one that is circular without being rhythmic, and that is elongated without progression.

User interface design is fascinating to me because of what it reveals about what the designer thinks of the user and the kind of work they should do. Good design makes use of our natural abilities to free us from unnecessary mental work (Siracusa, 2003, crucial nuance added by Feldman, 2005). Bad design thrusts decisions onto the user without giving them a context to understand them. For example, one way of implementing a good computer file system is to allow you to interact with virtual objects using spatial memory. I put an object down. I expect it to be where I put it.

Apple Macintosh computers used to be very good at this and now they are, if not very bad, getting noticeably worse. Vital interface elements appear and disappear depending on what you are doing. Objects do not occupy coherent places in virtual space. It is as if a postmodernist philosopher showed up in the Apple offices and offered to design a deconstructed operating system which would continually cause the user to question ontological certainty and object permanence. The system forces its mental model onto the user who has to keep remember, oh yes, if I move the mouse over there, only then does the folder path appear.

In that same sense we can ask how the way we do intellectual work ends up costing us vast cognitive effort by depositing the mental model of the PhD in various places at once, or just letting it exist in our head. The discussion of the Macintosh interface by Siracusa can be summed up as: does it force the user to be aware of complex constructs like file system hierarchies or does it hide unnecessary complexity behind easily graspable, familiar metaphors. Likewise do our software tools allow us to grasp and work on the stuff of our research. Or do they force us to constantly think in abstractions unconnected to the reality described by the data. Just as a caveat: humans are perfectly good at dealing with abstractions but there are better and worse ways to abstract. One worse way is to break the relationship between the abstraction and the object.

Two things:

Does the software you use allow you not to have to think too much about where you put bits of the PhD, and does it allow you to very easily rearrange it or bring in new parts as simply as you would if you were assembling a real world document. Does it do the complex work of remembering where you put stuff. Can you switch bits around, dump currently unused stuff in an easily accessible pile, without having to think very much about how you are doing it. In short, is it Word or is it Scrivener?

One a more reflective point, does the way you write your work do this to the you and the reader. Can you and the reader pick up the mental structure of the argument from what you write? Consider how writing such as that of Judith Butler forces the reader to constantly look elsewhere to understand what she is actually saying. This prevents the reader grasping the essence of what she says. Like the MacOs Finder, the essence constantly changes when you try to pin it down. You can tell this when it comes to how her work is taught. It is instructive that nobody recommends you start understanding Butler by reading Butler. Instead you have to start by reading what someone else wrote about her.

With a writer of the elegance of Erving Goffman you begin with the text. Nobody – and I mean nobody – needs a further explanation to grasp what The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life means. It is immediately graspable. Nor why Asylums is a vital, searing book. I say that not to say you should write like Goffman. But that you should make things easy for yourself by looking at your text as a series of graspable statements about the thing you are examining. Like a file interface, it becomes a lot easier when you can intuitively know where everything is, without necessarily having to explain why they all go in particular places.

Feldman, D (2005) About the Spatial Debate, https://dfeldman.medium.com/about-the-spatial-debate-4ccb8064f1df

Siracusa, J (2003) ‘The Spatial Finder’, Arstechnica, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/3/

‘Use the weapon’ (‘Arrival’, Villeneuve 2016)

What is a PhD? PhDs are defined by their original contribution to knowledge. In order to be awarded a PhD the University of Edinburgh degree regulations state:

‘47. The student must demonstrate by the presentation of a thesis and/or portfolio, and by performance at an oral examination:

• capability of pursuing original research making a significant contribution to knowledge or understanding in the field of study;
• adequate knowledge of the field of study and relevant literature;
• exercise of critical judgement with regard to both the student’s work and that of other scholars in the same general field, relating particular research projects to the general body of knowledge in the field; and
•  the ability to present the results of the research in a critical and scholarly way.
  The thesis must:
•  represent a coherent body of work; and
•  contain a significant amount of material worthy of publication or public presentation.’

http://www.drps.ed.ac.uk/20-21/regulations/PGDRPS2020-21.pdf#page17

So you probably should have something to say there huh?

These are attributes of the candidate and what you do, and of the thesis as a document. Notably the major ones are about what the candidate will do, not what the thesis does. The two requirements specific to the thesis as a document say nothing about originality. They say the thesis must be coherent and publishable or presentable. That tells you that the whole original contribution to knowledge thing is not what you think and won’t be found where you might expect. It’s not only plucking the tastiest bits of your findings and shoving in the examiners’ faces. That is because the entire PhD is already original. It is a unique assembly of literature, theory and typically data as well. The contribution is to knowledge and it is not necessarily to be found in the PhD thesis at all, which is why many PhD students find it tricky to identify.

The contribution is in where you plan to take it and how you relate it to what is already known.  It is in whether your findings mean we have to change our approach to some activity, or rethink some concept everyone is happily using without really thinking about it in the way you will demand they do.

For example, with my great colleagues I am planning a paper on altruistic drug supply. It shows a specific altruistic and ideologically driven form of drug supply that makes its appearance in a community of psychedelic drug users. That’s the paper’s finding. The contribution to knowledge is not that. It is that we’ve previously decided that drug supply is either social supply or commercial distribution. Here is an instance that does not fit either. It means we have to have another look at the social and the commercial in each category. The contribution to knowledge is a demand that scholars rethink their focus and retool their classification. We have to revise the distinction we make between social and commercial supply and question what that means. There are implications for considering distribution as a rational action category. Rationality may turn out to not very easily explain a range of activity that it appears to. Essentially: what is the significance of this research paper to people who do not care about that specific study. Like your mum for instance.

Therefore the originality of the thesis should be creative and outward looking. It means you identify tensions within your work and frictions between your work and the theories of others’. It lies in how you use the tool you have crafted. In the words of the aliens in ‘Arrival’, use the weapon. In their case, language. In your case, your PhD. The question of originality is how you can use it to make sense of some aspect of the social world beyond the specific instances in your findings.

Like most good things in life I owe this blog post to a conversation with my lovely student and colleague.

There has always been a theatrical, stagey element to lecturing. That is sometimes literally apparent. We teach in lecture theatres. In the gone before I regularly lectured from a stage. Teaching is a role and a performance. Those facts are rarely made use of explicitly. Some time ago I had the great pleasure of working with a theatre company who made use of academic research to improvise short pieces. The academic would speak for 5 minutes on their work and then the company would create short character driven sketches based around it. Mine was on ‘drugs and thugs’ and the company made some hilarious and astute observations about the online drug market and the combination of geekery and a would-be gangster stance that some of its players attempted. What they produced was quite predictive of the future direction of digital drug markets which shifted from the libertarian or anarchic geekery of the early days – often a pose in any case – to a commodity driven, big money model.

What I saw in the performance was how the members of the company supported each other. They began with a backstage ritual where they psych themselves into their roles, they continue throughout with subtle cues and interjections that give each other the material and inspiration to continue. Afterwards they debrief and discuss. Those rituals prep them but they also prep the audience as to what to expect and how to appreciate and enjoy it. Lecturing works best when this is done. Students and lecturer are sometimes dropped in cold and given little sense of how the lecture is to work as a social encounter rather than tuning into a broadcast from planet elbow patch. That is why lecturers often spend some time at the start explaining why they are saying what what they are saying, before saying it.  Some courses have done this very effectively, particularly those informed by feminism which takes it as read that teachers and students are part of a common enterprise. To help myself I developed my own pre-teaching rituals – stretching, breathing, reciting my purpose in giving this class in particular. I should tell students also to do this.

The challenge with teaching and learning during the pandemic is the lack of a backstage. There is nowhere to en-role and de-role after. Whatever else is encumbering you, emotionally, practically, there is nowhere to leave it before joining the screen encounter. That has always been the case for many of us. Having a caring role often means that there is no separation, or it can only be achieved at emotional and practical cost. Few of us if any are really unencumbered in how we approach the learning space. So from now one I’m going to give students pre-flight tasks to begin with before the camera is switched on.

… structured, rigorous curiosity

Also guess who’s convening the Research Design course come the semester start.

A challenge in teaching or being taught research design is talking directly about what research design is as a general topic. We can point to specific design types (experiment, ethnography, etc) but it is harder to talk about design as a generalised practice. Which is funny because everyone does it, everyone generates design. Discussions often default to talk of method or research paradigms. Both are part of design but are not it. That is a bit of a failure as we live in a research design world so it would be good to know about it. Digital platforms are massive ongoing experiments on their users using a/b testing. Cambridge analytica was reported as ‘data harvesting’ firm but it’s really a research design business model which categorises voters by how they can be influenced.

Here’s my go: The research design is the concrete, tangible form of your theory/hypotheses. It plots the relationship between the empirical and conceptual elements – the construct and the underlying, tangible reality. It anticipates and storyboards your research plan. Research design is organised around a set of principles which produce enquiry. It informs the research work plan. It organises the resources you need. It sets out success/failure conditions. It tells you whether failure is catastrophic or recoverable.

You know you need a research design when you answer any question about how you are doing your research with an answer about quals or quants. ‘Qualitative’ is not an answer to a question about the kind of research you do. Lots of researchers think that saying ‘they are using qualitative methods’ is a way of answering or rather bypassing tricky questions of ontology, epistemology, hypothesis generation, design, validity and. Qualitative isn’t a methodology, and in any case does not supply an answer to any of these questions. Neither does ‘investigatory’, ‘exploratory’ or ‘study’ anything. Scrub these lazy, meaningless words from your vocabulary. Physicists don’t say they are ‘scienceing’ some topic. Blaikie and Priest (2019) set out the different logics that drive different research designs. Reading them again was very useful for in distinguishing the research logic (the type of inquiry) from the research paradigm (the stuff about positivism, standpoint, intersectionality etc) and how these interrelate. They nest logic, then ontology, epistemology and paradgim. Frequently researchers play it with paradigm, then epistemology, logic and finally ontology.

People often start with the paradigm before they’ve thought out the logic – not their fault, it’s a result of the fealty made by some of us to a paradigm. That is a logical error.  There can be every reason to take a feminist approach to a topic but there is no logical reason why that would define one’s research programme. It turns out that way just because we tend to examine lots of the same kind of stuff. The reverse holds true and that opens up interesting possibilities for researchers selecting paradigms they would not normally consider while formulating their research aims.

Ontology and epistemology are two dimensions of research that are easily despatched in a sentence yet which give every research a lifetime of heartache. Ontology is the theory of the nature of reality, and epistemology of the acquisition and evaluation of knowledge about it. Both are facets of understanding. It is the most opaque and the most all encompassing topic which represents a special challenge. Everything, every question of life and the universe, can be divided into questions of ontology or epistemology (fight me). All the tricky questions of research flow from these first principles so it does help to get them in focus if not finalised early on (no pressure). They should help you as a researcher but it is easy to get caught up in unhelpfully broad statements about the social construction of this and that which do not help very much. They often do not connect to the nuts and bolts of being there in the field.

Like learning a language, it’s best to get stuck into real usage and then work back from that. It takes you straight to the point when these questions are really going to start to matter. Say you wish to study theft. What is it? Who is doing it? What kind of data is there about it? You want to move from a common sense understanding where everyone ‘just knows what it is’ to a critical understanding of what we don’t know and refuse to acknowledge about it. Let’s say it is the acquisition of a good or service without the owner’s knowledge, consent or process. The 1968 Theft Act for England and Wales defines it as ‘dishonestly appropriat[ing] property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and “thief” and “steal” shall be construed accordingly.’ The Act states ‘It is immaterial whether the appropriation is made with a view to gain, or is made for the thief’s own benefit.’ In doing so it established intent as critical and excludes consideration of purpose. Altruistic taking is still theft. The Act has a lot more to say on these themes.

The first step is to self critique and lay out what this definition excludes and the effects that has. My ‘or process’ handily categorises compulsory purchase orders, taxation, governments taking jewellery from asylum seekers, fees for access to industrial tribunals and courts and many other charges as not theft. If those other acts are wrong, they are wrong in a different way to theft. Another gap in the definition is that it does not say who or what the taking is from, and what control over the item stolen is necessary to establish theft.

The process lays out what aspects of the taxonomy are contingent and which are necessary, and which are socially constructed and which are naturally occurring. Some questions that will lead you in this direction. What needs to exist for this phenomenon to exist? Private property is one. People and organisations who steal stuff are great fans of private property, they just think yours would work much better if it were theirs. Just in case anyone thinks stealing is some radical anti capitalist activity, most looting is carried out by established institutions. Theft is built into many business models and practices, not least theft of people’s time. The time a worker spends pursuing his or her employer for unpaid wages is a kind of theft. What we understand then is that the definition implies claim about human nature and society.

It naturalises private property rights and de-historicises them. For example, let’s say I find that my ancestors once had rights to pick up fallen timber on formerly common land and spend my time going a pickin’ up wood for my stove. The land was subject to enclosure as part of the great land enclosures that happened in England from the 13th Century on and the great loss of common rights that happened mainly during the 18th Century. EP Thomson and other historians have documented this mass theft. Well I cannot pray in aid the fact that these rights were taken from my ancestor and therefore from me without any recognisably just process. The status quo is what matters. What I am doing is theft, m’lud.

That examples gives us an opportunity to create difference, another critical act in the ontology thinking process. Creating difference means laying out what looks like our object of study but is not it. Scavenging, salvaging, beachcombing, dumpster diving and other acts are a bit like theft (taking without consent or knowledge of the owner) but are not. Some are legal in some circumstances, some are governed by other statutes, and some are in that intriguing grey area of ‘not legal or illegal because we didn’t think anyone would bother doing it.’ The law is a great study of process ontology because the legal system has to address these fundamental problems all the time. That also explains our fascination with medicine which has to make similar calls. So with ontology think in a similar way to a barrister. Every judgement is contingent but should refer to past decisions and anticipate future ones.

The kind of reading you do matters a lot to the kind of scholarship you are doing. The classic image of the scholar is someone poring carefully over a text, parsing each phrase and glossing every paragraph. A scholar isolated from the world around, unburdened by cares. I expect few academics can or do much of this close reading, though it can bear fruit. An intense reading of a text everyone refers to but everyone read so long ago that they have forgotten what is in it can be fruitful. What did Marx really say about the labour theory of value? Did he say it differently somewhere else? Did Foucault ever define what a clinic is? Questioning established common sense is a good habit and effective when you go back to the source. Be not cowed by what everyone knows.

There are many helpful guides to going about a literature review. I’m taking another approach here. These questions are a survey of reading habits and attitudes.  They are to allow you to reflect on the kind of reading you do. This is as much about who you are as a scholar as it is about the kind of research you are doing.

1. Do you enjoy academic reading? What aspects do you like and what do you like less?
2. Do you ever find the meaning or significance of a reading to be elusive? Is reading ever tiring or ever gives you a funny kind of distanced feeling in your brain? Is it time for a nap?
3. Do you ever rely on someone else having read something and explained it? Do you sometimes still not ‘get it’ even after that?
4. Do you ever feel guilty about reading? About what?
5. What do you write when you are reading? Where do you keep your notes?
6. Do you ever avoid primary texts and rely on secondary explanations, but pretend you have fully read and absorbed the primary text?
7. What voice do you hear in your head when reading, if you hear one at all?
8. Do you look at the bibliography of the text you are reading? Do you check their references?
9. How often do you pause during reading? Do your reading aims grow faster than your reading capacity?
10. Do you exclude readings based on titles or abstracts?
11. What characteristics of a text do you find particularly appealing, and in contrast, are there any that are alienating? Be honest, we all hate something about the text and skip over it and hope that it wasn’t that significant or that the authors weren’t hoping you skate over it as well.
12. Footnotes: yes or no?
13. What’s the proportion of texts you cite to texts you have genuinely read?
14. Do you ever run out of time to read? What do you do then? Do you ever spend too much time reading the first few pages and then have to rattle through the rest and hope it doesn’t contain any nasty surprises?

For further questions you can ask about your reading, this is a really good reflective tool which inspired my thinking for this blog post: Navigating the page. An academic guide to effective reading  http://edshare.soton.ac.uk/4064/1/navigating_the_page.pdf