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Academic musings
Mar. 7th, 2005 12:35 pmAs I was reading through a few cultural studies articles for my interdisciplinary knowledge media design class last week, I slowly became aware of just how much nine years of studying sociology has influenced my thinking. The awareness peaked when I found myself screaming at the screen "But where's the evidence? For the love of God, give me some facts to back up your statements!" while rocking back and forth. Or not. But there was definite frustration with authors who blithely cast off statements like "the putrefaction of industrial spaces" without backing them up. At the time, I attributed it to differences between disciplines over what constitutes scholarship, but now I'm wondering whether it isn't less a difference of opinion in what constitutes scholarship as a difference of opinion over how much weight we should give to polemics, manifestos, anecdotes, and other non-scholarly writings. Or maybe it's a different frame of reference and "the putrefaction of industrial spaces" is a well-established point in cultural studies/postmodern feminism and it just strikes me as questionable because I haven't read the fifteen key articles in which the consensus was reached. My conclusion is that I ought to read more outside of my field in order to get a better sense of how disciplines vary--my ongoing interest in alternate possibilities. Now I just have to find the time...
(And yes, I do realized that facts are also socially constructed and our measures of the world, especially the social world, are imperfect and the results interpreted, and science and scholarship both exist at least as much in our subjective heads as in our intersubjective reality. But I also believe in an obdurate world that pushes back and constrains the range of interpretations we're allowed, and I believe that an imperfect measure, used conscientiously and with acknowledgement of its limitations, is better than no measure at all.)
On a related note, at a panel I recently attended on balancing family and an academic career, one of the panelists said that grad school tends to be hard on relationships because the point of graduate school is to change how you think and so people often come out of it very different from when they entered. I suppose this is one demonstration of that. The question now is how far has it infiltrated the rest of my life?
(The other main point I got from the panel--all relatively young parents who were balancing their kids and their academic careers--was that if you really want children, the end of grad school isn't a bad time to have them: babies are relatively cheap, your schedule is flexible so you have less need of childcare services--the main expense with any kid when you work--and students can often get discounts on childcare when they do need it. This advice was the complete opposite of the advice I've received from older faculty members, all of whom recommended waiting until we got hired before getting pregnant. I suspect this might reflect a general change in attitudes towards faculty and family life, probably as a result of the presence of more female academics and the desire of many male academics to become more involved in their children's lives. One of the assistant professors speaking to us noted that seven of the twelves assistant professors in our department have kids and so the department has been forced to make concessions by doing things like moving the faculty meetings forward an hour so that parents can get out in time to pick their kids up from childcare centres.)
(And yes, I do realized that facts are also socially constructed and our measures of the world, especially the social world, are imperfect and the results interpreted, and science and scholarship both exist at least as much in our subjective heads as in our intersubjective reality. But I also believe in an obdurate world that pushes back and constrains the range of interpretations we're allowed, and I believe that an imperfect measure, used conscientiously and with acknowledgement of its limitations, is better than no measure at all.)
On a related note, at a panel I recently attended on balancing family and an academic career, one of the panelists said that grad school tends to be hard on relationships because the point of graduate school is to change how you think and so people often come out of it very different from when they entered. I suppose this is one demonstration of that. The question now is how far has it infiltrated the rest of my life?
(The other main point I got from the panel--all relatively young parents who were balancing their kids and their academic careers--was that if you really want children, the end of grad school isn't a bad time to have them: babies are relatively cheap, your schedule is flexible so you have less need of childcare services--the main expense with any kid when you work--and students can often get discounts on childcare when they do need it. This advice was the complete opposite of the advice I've received from older faculty members, all of whom recommended waiting until we got hired before getting pregnant. I suspect this might reflect a general change in attitudes towards faculty and family life, probably as a result of the presence of more female academics and the desire of many male academics to become more involved in their children's lives. One of the assistant professors speaking to us noted that seven of the twelves assistant professors in our department have kids and so the department has been forced to make concessions by doing things like moving the faculty meetings forward an hour so that parents can get out in time to pick their kids up from childcare centres.)
