Activism and scholarship
Activism is not scholarship in a PhD and should not be mistaken for it. Some will inevitably, wrongly, bridle at this missive. Tough. They are 100% wrong.
You can be very committed to your subject, and be an activist outside the research and writing of your PhD. You can engage in many extracurricular activities as an activist. There is absolutely no problem with any of this.
You should be connected to your topic and think your scholarship has value. Putting that scholarship in the public domain and engaging with non-specialist audiences is a key part of an academic job.
Being a good scholar, and achieving the right level in a Phd requires diligent research and wide reading, including reading things and being open to conclusions we did not agree with or know about when we started reading. It means being open to things outside our echo chamber. This is different from activism where we have a fairly fixed viewpoint and only read things that reinforce our own views.
A PhD requires you to be in command of all the arguments and material, not just those you sympathise with or think has value because it accords with your pre-set beliefs. On top of this, you must be in command of different schools of thought and theories, because your examiners will ask you why you framed your research questions in this way or that, why you chose one school over another. You need to have a grounded, robust defence of these choices, and that cannot be ‘because I like them, agree with them, they are my supervisor’s people’.
You need to design research that is replicable by someone else, so a good research design will want to triangulate data collection to ensure it is not skewed in some way and has validity and rigour. Your research conclusions follow on from the data you have gathered. You don’t sculpt your data, or its collection, to produce the outcome you agree with already.
I have seen people not understand this difference and it has proved fatal to their progress, because their belief in the cause has made their research surface and shallow. PhDs have been failed. Scholarship is about rigour, quality, analysis. It is not about furthering a cause no matter how noble. If one and the other coincide, that is truly, truly, wonderful. But it is not the place you start from.
Today I will…
Continue to write for 2 hours minimum on my next chapter or pipeline project.