Luxuriating

The liminality I discussed on Tuesday comes with one small silver lining—along with a transition of task comes a transition in schedule. Although I will have a ten-week internship this summer that requires me to work regular business hours Monday-Thursday, it will be the exception for the next three years. While dissertating, I can set my own schedule. Unless I am teaching, I do not have to go to campus. I can work when I want, where I want, with whomever I want.

I do get a significant amount of work done in my office, but it’s a depressing space. All of the grads are housed in one large room that’s divided into four rows of cubicles. There are no windows and thus no natural light. The fluorescent lighting has a yellow cast that makes everyone in there look like they’re experiencing liver failure. It’s a decent place to spend a few hours writing during the winter, when you know that everywhere else is just as depressing and possibly not as warm. When the weather is nice, I much prefer to work at a well-lit coffee shop—my favorite spot even has an outdoor patio! I find that I write best when I move locations day-to-day. It’s nice to have new scenery.

These days, I’m really enjoying the process of waking up slowly, walking to a coffeeshop slowly, and drinking a latte really slowly. Easing into the day is such a luxury. I have nothing urgent to do, and since I work for myself I set my own goals and deadlines. And right now, I’ve decided that everything can be done slowly. I trust myself, and I am confident that everything will get done.

Liminality

From Wikipedia:

“In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word limen, meaning ‘a threshold’) is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete.”

Liminality will define my summer. After successfully defending my prospectus last week, I have a new task ahead of me and must master a new set of skills. I have to read an immense volume of historical records, find a story to tell, synthesize a lot of context, and then effectively communicate it to an academic audience. I have practiced these skills at earlier points in my short research career, but never to this extent. The scope of the dissertation is overwhelmingly large.

In truth, I’m quite exhausted by liminality and feel that I’ve spent more than sufficient time in this state over the past year. I finished my coursework last May, and began the ritual of preparing for my doctoral exams. I had no idea what I was doing. I knew that I had to read the 150 books and articles on my lists, and to figure out how they were all in dialogue with each other. I knew that my exams would pose a question for me to answer, using the readings as support. I had no sense of what these questions would be, however, and it made me very insecure about whether I understood the arguments in these texts or whether I was taking notes “correctly.” It was only after two and a half months that I woke up one day and realized that the disorientation had lifted and that I truly understood what the heck I was doing.

Immediately after finishing exams, the liminality set in once more. In early February I wrote this in my journal:

“The transition from exams to prospectus has been rough. Just as I got used to reading everyday and nailed the historiography, I have to get back into the swing of writing.”

I worked really hard to develop a daily ritual of dedicated, focused writing—with your help, dear readers—and again the liminality ebbed as the process of prospectus writing became routine. I lived with the prospectus for four months, and now it’s done. There’s nothing to do, no tweaks or revisions to make. My job is now to go and start the research, to fulfill the ceremony of writing a dissertation. Three transitions in one year is quite a lot, and I’m tired of the insecurity that arrives with the “ambiguity and disorientation.” That’s why I’m relieved that it’s also summer, that I can take a break without getting too behind, and to focus on other activities for a little while.

Victory Strut

I greet you this week as a newly minted Doctoral Candidate! Until you begin writing your dissertation, you are merely a doctoral student. Once your dissertation prospectus is approved, you’re finally considered a candidate for the Ph.D. degree.

My defense was truly a pleasure. I have such a supportive committee of advisors, and although they spent quite a bit of the hour-long defense critiquing my work and pushing me to consider the weaknesses of the project, they also expressed optimism that the dissertation will make a significant contribution to the historical literature. The unanimous critique made by my three advisors was that the scope of the project—particularly the chronology—is too large. They encouraged me to focus on the 1960s and 1970s, and to pack the 1940s and 1950s into an initial, introductory chapter. I see their point. I tend to think very concretely, and in chronological order, and it’s reflected in my chapter outline. I begin at the end of WWII and slowly scaffold the narrative into the ‘60s and ‘70s. My committee pointed out that this scaffolding is not necessary, that much of the earlier story can be folded into the later narrative as historical context. So the defense was very productive and I feel better prepared to begin my archival research.

My plan for the rest of the summer, however, is to focus on reading rather than researching. I have several important texts to read that will help me contextualize my case studies. The additional benefit of reading and not researching/writing is that I will sneak a little break from the stress of constantly producing deep thoughts. I’m looking forward to a refreshing summer.

Almost ABD

If I succeed in keeping my foot out of my mouth, by this time tomorrow I will be ABD (All But Dissertation). After countless revisions--I estimate about 10 rounds, eight based on faculty feedback and two resulting from my own attempts at "tightening" the argument--my committee finalized the prospectus on Monday morning and gave me the thumbs-up to defend. In my department, the defense is a formality. No doubt it is a useful exercise, giving you a chance to explain your research and practice answering questions. No one in institutional memory has failed the defense, though, and I doubt I will be the first. I'm anxious about saying something stupid, but I think my committee has decided that I'm ready to move on to the dissertation.

For those who have never attended the defense of a dissertation prospectus, it's a pretty standard format across humanities and social science doctoral programs. The student presents their project, and then your committee takes turns asking tough, penetrating questions. Sometimes these questions address shortcomings in the proposal, other times they attempt to ascertain the feasibility of the research (for example: how will you find records that convey the thoughts of the actors/subjects you will research?). After the committee is satisfied, they allow the grad students in the audience to ask questions. Finally, the committee dismisses the student and the audience and confers. If they agree that you successfully defended, they sign a form stating that you have been advanced to candidacy for the degree of Ph.D. and are now ABD!

Wish me luck!

Abstracted

Yesterday, while waiting to receive back comments from my committee on the finalized prospectus draft, I finally wrote my abstract. The dissertation abstract distills the project down to one page, emphasizing the major questions, arguments, interventions, and case studies that underpin the study.  I dreaded this task for weeks. My study is SO BIG! I intervene into three historiographies using three case studies, which gives the study a national scope yet focuses on three very local examples. I examine the issues I'm interested in from both a top-down and bottom-up perspective, reading the reports and records of leaders and organizations and gleaning the "lived experience" and agency of grassroots actors. How the heck can you summarize a project like that in one page!?

Well, the truth is, you can't. I managed to draw out the most salient points and arguments I plan to make, but the abstract feels very flat to me. That's the whole point, and in fact it's what makes an abstract useful. It's oversimplified and easy for a non-expert reader to digest. I struggle with it, however, because it feels somehow untruthful. It's an obfuscation,  by definition, of all the complexity and nuance that really explain why events in the past happened the way they did. The best arguments manage to hint at this messiness while delivering clarity, but this project is still so new that my argument has yet to develop this sophistication.

The good news is that the abstract may evolve along with the dissertation, and I'll have more than ample opportunities to revise and rewrite it. I'm sure that by this time next year I'll be on my tenth version, and I'll still hate the abstract--but by then, I hope it will just be because I'm sick of re-doing it!