Alien Epistems

It has taken me a few days to get over the disaster that was my PhD progression viva and the bitter taste it has left in my mouth hasn't gone away. The trouble with not having anything else in your life apart from your work is that you become too emotionally invested in it. Professional setbacks feel like personal setbacks. I thought I was okay with social isolation but I felt an intense feeling of intellectual isolation after the last viva, which was more difficult to come to terms with. The way I saw it there were two possibilities i) Either my work was poor or ii) what I thought would be a sympathetic audience turned out to be close-minded and canonical. Neither possibility is pleasant. But it is what it is and definitely not the end of the world. Poor work can be improved and close-minded people can be kept at a safe distance.

It helped to be away on a holiday with family. But, it was all the work of time. I didn't learn any profound lessons about research or life except that it is really simple to criticize someone else's work, especially if they come from a different epistemology. In other words, if the way they view and make sense of the world is different from yours. It is difficult to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Much simpler to dismiss their ideas or find holes in them, especially if you are in the privileged position of the audience. I have been guilty of this in the recent past, and I have promised to myself to be more conscious in the future. Yes, maybe what they are saying sounds like bullshit to me, but what do I know? Constructive criticism is serious work. How does one critically engage with someone's work without destroying their self-esteem?

I have always looked at myself as a critically-minded scholar, but I don't see that as an amazing attribute any more. Some people are personally more inclined towards critique and deconstruction but that doesn't necessarily make them better academics. Academia needs all sorts and there is nothing to say that one sort is better than the other. Critically-minded people tend to be loners who instinctively feel out of place in groups and their work can make them even more socially excluded. This can encourage a superiority complex in that they feel that they are marginalized because they are just too smart compared to the people around them. And when the world repeatedly fails to acknowledge their superiority, they fall to pieces.

In the end, it all comes down to the stories about ourselves that we tell ourselves in response to the events in our lives. It is a human coping mechanism that is very hard to abstain from. "X happened, which means I am Y and my destiny is Z". So, instead of forcing myself not to spin stories, I am trying to accept my human habit of story-spinning and see the stories as just purely that. When the going is good, we spin a particular kind of stories, when the going is bad, we spin another type of stories, but they are all just stories.