I’m a Ph.D. Candidate. What does that even mean?
Where am I doing it? With who? (Pictures Included)
Dear Black, Indigenous, Person of Color and Queer and Trans Person of Color,
Welcome to my first article after starting the Ph.D. program. Between this year and 2021, I’ll be posting about what it’s like to be on a doctorate path, what questions I’m playing with, how I’m working with people, and how I’m feeling along the way.
Quick Links
The ethics and concrete examples of the work.
🙋🏽 What you can expect by participating.
📚 Free Library — Here are all the articles and book chapters I’m reading.
🤷🏽 Who needs coping objects anyways? — Examples
💆🏽 One of my own Objects — How I scrambled to cope with an incident on the street.
What is a Ph.D.?
I’ve heard it described as a few things. They were really useful for me to learn even after I signed on to do a doctorate. (‘Doctorate’ = ‘Ph.D.’ = Doctor of Philosophy). This is what I learned a just few weeks ago.
Getting one is a driver’s license that proves you know how to do research.
Research is about learning to work with people ethically, being honest about what you find, contributing a small bit to POC feminism, design, or whatever field, and doing it all to academic standards and rigor.
Imagine all the types of ideas in the world are each one house. In your Ph.D., you’re picking a house (where you’re contributing). All you’re asked to do is to contribute one single brick to the house through your years doing your research.
Your Ph.D. is a way to figure out your practice with lots of resources—other people with ideas that can connect you with other ideas and people you would’ve never otherwise come across, grants for your research, a community of people to support you in the inevitable confusion.
Academia and Ph.D. culture has its problems, which I’m sure will surface in my writing here eventually. I’m setting the intention to be super transparent and to stay aware of how it affects my work, how I share with participants of my work, and how I share with other people like you.
Usually, if you do a Ph.D. you’re probably full-time at university somewhere. The full-time job may include administrative stuff (you might be working on your, for instance, engineering department’s two-year plan) and teaching classes to masters or undergraduate students. That’s the job part that lets you earn a living.
In my case, I’m a part-time student, and I’m not on campus. I don’t get paid to do my Ph.D. but once I publish some papers that ‘peers’ in academia have reviewed, it’ll be time to apply for grants to get money to work with people, travel, and compensate people I’m working with for their time and energy.
What is my Ph.D. about?
In short, I’m sitting in my friends’ living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms and sharing how we take up space. Literal space–through the objects and spaces around us. Sitting there and talking and showing each other the stuff in our homes is what gets me pumped about my Ph.D.
Some of the stuff in my apartment and how I set up my space is extremely important to my emotional well-being (though I’ve lived without). One of my favorite things to do is to talk about why and listen to my friends talk about the same thing.
My work is for Black, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer and Trans People of Color. It’s dedicated to the way we cope with and thrive despite everyday marginalization and oppression. These objects and the way we use them are radical, non-institutionalized coping mechanisms. They’re a form of resistance when everything tells you to shrink.
By reading, writing, and talking to friends one on one, I’ll be working out how to have those conversations in a way that makes sense for us–because they’re heavy conversations, I’ll be tending to forming mutual trusting relationships, keep what’s shared safe, and share it back in a way that’s meaningful for individuals involved. I’ll share those things here as the project moves forward.
There are lots of people over hundreds and thousands of years who have the wisdom to know how to do all of this. This doctorate is my way of figuring out my version of doing that.
Where am I doing the Ph.D.?
It’s a bit of a long story, but if I make it to the end, I’ll be graduating from Monash University’s Art Design and Architecture department in Melbourne, Australia. The university is Monash, the department is design, and the program where I sit is called Wonderlab. The other 13 candidates of the program are a mix of people who live and work on their Ph.Ds full time on campus and the other half are all over the place from Sao Paolo, Mumbai, San Francisco, and other places. We all meet once a year in Melbourne. And we all meet again another time in the year somewhere else to fairly balance out the energy and money it takes to get to each other.
The Wonderlab program is directed by Lisa Grocott, a former professor of mine in grad school (The New School, Parsons) and mentor and friend.
What does my day to day look like?
In these early months, doing a Ph.D. means having access to the university’s online library, browsing, picking, printing, reading, and scribbling notes in the margins of essays, articles, films, zines, poems that sing to me (and are related to my research). It also looks like organizing all my notes in a google spreadsheet. For scale, I’ve read about twenty things — from four-pager things to book chapter size things — over two months. After three years, it will be a lot of reading and a lot of notes to put together.
This fall 2018, I’ll transition from doing mostly reading and writing to working with people. It’ll start with more low-key stuff like asking for and giving home tours.
Early next year I’ll start to plan for and facilitate more intensive things in terms of what I’m asking friends who’re participating to do. They’ll look like one to three-hour sit-downs in groups.
By the end I’ll have written a lot: the written dissertation. I’ll have presented my work via speaking and presentation: the presented dissertation. And I’ll have presented my work via an exhibition or event: called, ‘the exhibition.’
Why?
Why a doctorate?
I have the specific project I’m invested in working on, but it could’ve taken lots of different forms. It could’ve been a one-time dinner party with friends, it could’ve been a summer-long Laundrymat Project, an artist’s residency, a pop-up workshop, an art installation in a gallery, a picnic panel with friends, or a doctorate.
End of last summer, I got an email from Lisa that invited me to do a Ph.D with her in her new one-time, pop-up research cohort. At that time I already had a project I knew I wanted to work on. The question was if it’s a right fit. I’ll continue to ask that just like every other candidate does. Right now, it’s been really meaningful to have supervisors, critical friends, and fellow candidates to lean on, get stretched, and feel supported by while I work on this.
Why this publication on medium.com?
It’s important to me to not hold the ‘big gates’ of academia and the Ph.D. world shut to people who aren’t in it. That’s exactly the criticism I have of academia. Your average person on earth doesn’t have access to the ideas people write about and publish–sometimes even ideas and statements about themselves… As I publish articles on here, I’ll also be working out the ways I can (or can’t) do a project about non-institutionalized coping mechanism through a corporate institution.
