Can’t help but feel that siphoning off aspects of your PhD research into distinct units publishable as peer-reviewed journal articles before completion is a) a skill that takes considerable time & effort to acquire b) not always the best intellectual use of the material.
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And crucially, in the UK context at least, it’s a priority expectation that has crept in without according adjustments to the amount of funded time for doctoral research.
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I published 1 article during the second year of my PhD & the task took me 3 months - a significant chunk of time away from my main research that I had to add on at the end in an unfunded writing-up year.
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I’m not suggesting that doctoral researchers don’t publish during their PhD. But I haven’t yet seen conversation around this as a relatively new expectation. And one that creates considerable financial & emotional pressures under the current conditions of PhD study.
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As doctoral & postdoctoral researchers, it’s difficult to place our experiences in long-view & not internalise the absurd shifting expectations around productivity & success bred by the insidious shifting of goalposts in the neoliberal academy.
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Like, how have we reached a place where we can genuinely feel that the reason we can’t get a permanent academic job is because we haven’t managed to publish our monograph by the time we have completed our PhDs? This is ABSURD.
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And if we look at our field and recognise that job stability only comes with a book contract/monograph published, what argument is there for publishing an article or two during your PhD? Publishing during PhD now a passport to precarious work.
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I get the Kudos stats for readership of the peer-reviewed journal article I published during 2nd yr of PhD & no-one reads it. It functions simply as an early token of my capacity to get something published in a peer-reviewed publication. That capacity wasn’t just intellectual:
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I also had a financial safety net that enabled me to take a full 3 months away from main thesis to write the thing, knowing I’d be supported in practical terms for the knock-on delay in my unfunded writing-up year. These are not the structures of a truly meritocratic PhD system.
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So if you’re a doctoral researcher worried about publishing (and who isn’t), know that this difficulty isn’t inevitable or necessary, and that it’s a huge additional hoop for you to jump through that didn’t exist for most academics until very recently.
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I’ll be saying all this and more tomorrow in a live-streamed talk I’ll be giving with
@legomarie on “PhD Study and Mental Ill-Health”, as part of@MindyourheadYrk Mental Illness Awareness Weekhttps://twitter.com/legomarie/status/963158016488038400 …Näytä tämä ketju
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