The trouble with doctoral aspiration now

Abstract

This article attends to the affective-political dimensions of doctoral aspiration. It considers why doctoral students continue to hope for an ‘academic good life’ in spite of the depressed and precarious features of the academic present. The article emerges from 2013 research with ten doctoral students in the Arts and Social Sciences, at a research-intensive university in Aotearoa New Zealand, and accomplishes two primary objectives. Firstly, it contributes to scholarship that considers how visual methodologies might inform accounts of contemporary doctoral education. And secondly, it extends queer theorizing of affect in higher education studies, with the goal of understanding how doctoral aspiration might be reimagined through an engagement with Lauren Berlant’s ‘Cruel Optimism’ (2011). I propose that Berlant’s analytic framework helps to explain why students retain attachments to even problematic objects, like PhDs. I conclude the article by tarrying with the question of what to do about doctoral aspiration now.

Keywords:

• Aspiration
• cruel optimism
• doctoral writing
• queer
• visual methodologies
• writing retreats

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the ten participants who participated in this study for their energy, enthusiasm and insights, as well as the anonymous reviewers of the article for their helpful suggestions. He is also immensely grateful to Barbara Grant and Louisa Allen for their support throughout the wider study this article emerges from.

Notes

1. I am wary of overstating the gloominess of this picture. For many, the university does remain a dynamic workplace where the ‘pleasures and privileges of academic life continue, even if they are rather more precarious than was once the case and are unevenly distributed across the academic workforce’ (Barcan, 2013, p. 5).

2. In the Global South there are reports of high demand for doctoral graduates http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20150603160027984.

3. http://phdcomics.com/comics.php.

4. While these projections certainly circulate in institutional branding and marketing, which associate the university with the ‘good life’ (Gottschall & Saltmarsh, 2016), they are seldom uttered as promises by higher education institutions explicitly.

5. Gill and Pratt (2008) describe this as a neologism that ‘brings together the meanings of precariousness and proletariat to signify both an experience of exploitation and a (potential) new political subjectivity’ (p. 3).

6. PBRF is the name given to the research performance management exercise in New Zealand.

7. While Berlant does not herself specify what makes this work queer, I view it as such because it seeks to problematise ‘passionate or irrational attachments to … normative worlds’ (p. 183), and to trace the challenge of ‘detaching from the normal’ (p. 21).