Troubling talk: assembling the PhD candidate

Abstract

When PhD students complain it is assumed there are problems and that troubles talk is evidence of a ‘sick’ research candidature or culture. This paper argues that such a one-dimensional reading fails to attend closely to the academic identity work that is done when students talk together. Identity work has become a useful way of thinking about the nature of PhD study in the production of thesis texts, the development of PhD students as scholars and in the practices of everyday doctoral life. This paper extends this work by analysing various instances of PhD student ‘troubles talk’ in everyday interactions between peers and in online spaces where PhD students congregate. Attention to troubles talk allows us to explore how doctoral students might do academic identity work in the ‘hinterlands’ where academic subjectivity and other forms of subjectivity (wife, husband, parent, son, daughter etc.) start to blur into each other.

Keywords:

• actor network theory
• research education
• performativity
• interaction
• doctoral candidates

Notes

1. Australian Concise Oxford English Dictionary (1997).

2. The closest equivalent in the UK might be ‘to have a bit of a moan’.

3. With thanks to Colleen Boyle for suggesting this term.

4. Reproduced with his permission, using a pseudonym.

5. Google analytics for the first three months of 2010 show the site had 14,300,978 page views and over seven million unique visitors. The attached forums had over 708,486 articles posted and over 6484 registered users.

6. Although not as popular as ‘PhD comics’, at the time of writing, ‘The thesis whisperer’ was attracting around 300 hits a day, increasing to 900 if the topic was of broad interest. At the time of writing, the blog had been active for just over eight months and had attracted around 30,000 hits; this viewing activity had generated around 400 comments across 60-odd posts.

7. The collaborators were not deliberately recruited; readers were encouraged to submit posts on various topics by a set of editorial guidelines posted on the ‘about’ page (http://thethesiswhisperer.wordpress.com/about/).

8. www.facebook.com is a semi-public social network that enables users to ‘friend’ each other and post status updates, photos and links as well as play games.

9. www.twitter.com is a public social network where users can ‘follow’ each other to participate in conversations.

10. I edit every post for grammar, including this one. I use the style guidelines adopted by the university on the editing of theses so as not to affect the content of the posts I edit.