not the motorcycle diaries

Transferring from Sociology & Social Policy to Gender Studies has proven to be worse than resigning from a job. Whenever I’ve resigned from a job I’ve always been either going to another job on a completely different site or returning to full time study, meaning it is a clean break made for clean break reasons that are not necessarily construed as a snub to the organisation. However this is a more subtle shift where it seems I can’t help but cause some sort of offence.

I’ve been particularly anxious to communicate that my supervision has not been problematic, that it is the discipline of sociology that I want to shift my relationship to (read: I am not wanting to communicate that I think it is all bollocks, in fact moving departments will probably enhance/restore my respect for sociology). In fact, I want the supervisor I have had in sociology to remain as an Associate Supervisor. He’s supportive, and interesting, and provides a rigour that my work really needs. He is into the idea of being my AS, but I will have to be mindful of not making him the ‘bad cop’. I guess efforts to bring ideas and people together can have as much of a compartmentalising effect as an expansive effect, and I guess that’s what is meant by ‘disciplinism’. I haven’t had much exposure to the animosity that sometimes exists within universities about whose ideas and methods are the best for getting to the truth. And no doubt there is an historical antagonism between cultural studies and the ‘old’ disciplines of sociology and anthropology? I suppose this is also part of why the growing competitiveness of the current funding framework is such a problem - it has a ‘divide and conquer’ tactic which plays into existing personal and institutional insecurities (item: there is a transfer of money with a transfer of departments). Disciplines are, of course, made up of people …

The worst part is that I feel somewhat unable to properly explain why it is that I am transferring. Still, I like the challenge of this - it’s been a while since I’ve had to state my position on something in clear terms. I think it’s the personal nature of it that makes it so hard to articulate? It seems a bit inadequate to say that “I just have a feeling”…

Basically, the discipline of sociology is bounded by particular notions of empiricism and science, and I want to question these two notions in my thesis beyond the space that is allowed within the discipline (this has always been a problem for me. The external examiner of my Honours thesis was very concerned about my ‘pessimism’ towards sociology and my use of discourse analysis as a sociological methodology). I feel that these notions are inadequate for looking at the activist subject position, which is what my research comes down to, particularly after the experience I had with the MST in Brazil. I have been able to confront this sort of resistance within the discipline (e.g. in my Hons examiners meeting, at departmental seminars and conferences), but I find it quite wearying now. Cultural studies, at least in some of its forms, does not demand this kind of justification and in fact encourages questioning disciplines and disciplinism. I’m not suggesting that cultural studies is some kind of utopia or that none of this questioning is possible or desired in sociology, just that it currently provides a field more useful to my line of inquiry for the time being.

Perhaps I am opting for the radical chic easy street fence sitting deconstructionist path … but really … I don’t think I care. I don’t know if I want a career in academia, I only know that I want to use the space offered by a candidature and a scholarship to ask some philosophical questions that emerged for me in activist social policy work. And cultural studies seems to have a better fit. Gosh, it’s hard to hold onto your personal convictions sometimes!