Postgraduate Research

For the third session of The Seminar, we turned our attention to the role and practice of the ‘literature review’; and more broadly we discussed the practice of reading in academic research and writing. We looked at a couple of examples of literature reviews, published in book and journal article form. Our main focus – in the first half of the session – was the opening chapter of Ranjani Mazumdar’s Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007). This is a book that is written primarily for a film studies audience, but draws upon literatures of Indian political history and also critical theory, particularly the writings of Walter Benjamin. We didn’t really want to get too involved with the ‘content’ of the book, but rather consider its form as a literature review. The chapter doesn’t list a great many books, but it does demonstrate the way key literatures can be handled to draw out the specific intentions and framings of the author’s own research.

A couple of paragraphs in, Muzumdar offers a dense, comprehensive paragraph that can be said to encapsulate the entire ‘project’ of the book:

Bombay Cinema attempts to enter the complex world of popular cinema by bringing together a range of cinematic practices and the urban experience. My purpose is to engage with the dynamism of popular cinema in the country’s sprawling metropolitan life. The city as a concept remained a crucial absence in much of  Indian nationalism’s history. The nationalists instead invested in the imagination of the village as one of the secure sites of citizenship, reflecting the social base of anti-colonial mobilisation. The interesting feature of Bombay cinema is that it has never been at one with the nationalist prioritization of the village. While cinema also looked at rural life, it is the urban experience that has dominated its landscape. The coming together of cinematic practices and the urban experience offers a useful way of transcending the imaginative limits imposed by nationalist narratives on culture. (Muzumdar)

There are a number of concepts and lines of enquiry that are raised by this single paragraph. We might want to challenge what is meant by the suggestion of an ‘urban experience’ and the ‘city as a concept’, but nonetheless, we can recognise a determined project to examine the screen life of Bombay cinema with a political, historical and sociological reading of India. There is a clear sense of an interdisciplinary approach. The author is concerned not only with ‘cinematic practices’, but also key concepts such as nationalism, citizenship, and colonial history. All of these areas of interest will need to be reflected in the literature review. Partly, as a means to define the key terms of reference. It is notable, later in the chapter, the term ‘globalization’ is used, yet it is not explained. We can infer a general understanding of the term, but it is a complex and loaded term, which ideally in a research project needs to be properly contextualised and argued for. Muzumdar does draw reference to a number of key texts, particularly in relation to the cinema and the city, and Indian nationalism. A number of her references to modernist writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin are really crucial to a definition of the urban experience, and its collision with the screen. These references are  well worn, not least in film studies. Muzumdar, however, argues the geographic and cultural context of Bombay cinema lends originality to the research. She uses a very neat phrase to get around the problem that her work is both squarely situated in an established (and much researched) area of film studies, yet equally offers its own individual import:

Bombay Cinema is in many ways both a departure from and an addition to the previous work on cinema and the city, while at the same time bringing a perspective from India (Muzumdar)

I would suggest in writing a thesis, this sort of formulation is worth holding onto. It is a line that is clear, confident and carefully contextualised, helping to navigate the need to situate your work in existing scholarship, yet offer something genuinely original. It is perhaps also worth noting how the use of the book title, Bombay Cinema, gives the author further authority; they are presenting you with a project that is articulated in the writing, but also is bound as a book in your hands. A PhD thesis won’t necessarily be able to play off a title like this, but there are ways of characterising your research beyond the stock phrases of ‘in this research’, ‘in my study’, ‘ this dissertation’ etc. Your research is a ‘project’, it has a life beyond being a technical document.

Of course, by making a close reading of Muzumdar’s chapter – particularly in terms of its form – we did highlight a number of potential problems. Indeed, examining anyone’s writing at ‘sentence level’ will reveal all sorts of complexities and issues. Nonetheless, the chapter helped illustrate a point: while academic writing can appear at times to be dense and intense, there is a clear process of drawing together established concepts and ideas, along with new inflections and directions. Muzumdar’s chapter, for example, develops a complex, layered account of India, Indian cinema, urban experience, nationalism, modernism, and globalisation. It goes without saying one has to concentrate when reading this kind of work. To use a phrase from Philip Davis, who recently published Reading and the Reader (2013), we have to engage in a form of reading that is of ‘immersed attention’. It is a very active process.  (You can hear Philip Davis talk about his book on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week)

The idea of reading as a deliberate and rich process was beautifully developed by Professor Ryan Bishop, who joined us for the second-half of the seminar.  Ryan suggested we think of reading during the PhD (and other research activity) as a means to ‘dwell’; and not least because, as we develop our careers beyond the research degree, we get increasingly get less time to read. We might say, not only should we occupy ourselves with reading, we also need to occupy reading! Yet, Ryan’s point was more nuanced than this, suggesting ‘it is as important to have a text dwell in and with us as it is to dwell in and with a text’; adding that we might at times ‘believe we read the text (and therefore control it), when the converse is also true (texts shape us and we become otherwise)’. Keeping this to mind – and with a brief allusion to slow cooking – Ryan played out a certain ethics of reading, and gave some great tips in maintaining a measured and engaged practice of reading. Here is a brief summary:

• We are ‘reading’ all the time, whether it is a book, a space, a person, a situation, and that all these instances will provide different readings depending on your point of view, the context, the time etc.
• Read first kindly, then re-read with a critical eye. In other words, first seek to understand a ‘text’ according to its own terms, before then challenging those terms. This allows you to make sense of a text and its context, which can, for example, aid writing up a literature review where it is useful to show the progression of ideas, even where those ideas are at odds with your own (or those of the texts you are more aligned with).
• What you don’t read is as important as what you do read! We have to make choices about the books and texts we read and don’t read. It is useful to develop different modes of reading, fast and slow. You can skim a range of texts to understand a broader context, or indeed to satisfy yourself that certain references are not necessary for your work. Conversely you have to commit yourself to reading key materials at a slower pace.
• Keep track. Reading needs to be an active process, and that includes keeping some records of what you’ve looked at. As your research develops you build an impressive bibliography, which will function both as a simple, technical list of materials, but also as an ‘archive’ of your research.
• Write your way to thinking… A key line from Ryan’s is that we can all be readers should we wish, but ‘it is impossible to write (at all, not to even write well) without reading. It is through reading at all that we can even start to write’.

The seminar began by examining the literature review as a distinct element of one’s research, but perhaps more importantly what it reminds us of is the intricacy of both reading and writing. Read/Write: Together they form a virtual ‘space’ that opens up thinking. We can know what we want to write and put pen to paper, but our thoughts will be informed by a practice of reading. We can also surprise ourselves in our own thoughts as we write. Again, however, this writing is a product of distilling reading and engaging in an ongoing practice of writing. If you find you can’t get started with  writing, try reading first. And if the reading starts to then feel like it is slowing you down, it might be time to try writing again. And so it goes on…

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“He read for two hours straight without any training”

For the second session of The Seminar, we discussed two texts. Firstly, the opening chapter of Jonthan Culler’s neat little book Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Routledge, 2000). Secondly, a chapter by Nicholas Davey called ‘Art and theoria’ from Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research (Routledge, 2006). This volume, edited by Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge, brings together a wide range of voices to consider what we mean and think we mean by ‘practice-based research’.  Perhaps a little unfairly, I suggested at the start of the seminar the book is an example of what happens when a (seemingly) new concept comes into vogue (as for example with past terms like the cyborg, or visual culture). In that period when no one quite knows what to say about the new terms of reference, what better than to edit a book to draw out some answers? More often than not, however, the result is a further set questions and ambiguities.  Thinking Through Art results in something like this, not least with the concluding chapter by James Elkins’ taking a highly skeptical line about practice being in any way a form of research (you can read Elkins on this topic in more detail from the book Artists with PhDs, much of which is online; a second-edition of the print version is due out soon).

One member of the seminar group suggested that the piece by Jonathan Culler played the role of a guide to the reading by Nicholas Davey, whose chapter draws upon the more unwieldy vocabulary of Kant and Gadamer. We began with Culler then, whose chapter, albeit pointing towards literature, presents a neat, and at times funny account of the term ‘theory’.

In literary and cultural studies these days there is a lot of talk about theory – not theory of literature, mind you: just plain ‘theory’. To anyone outside the field, this usage must seem very odd. ‘Theory of what?’ you want to ask. It’s surprisingly hard to say. It is not the theory of anything in particular, nor a comprehensive theory of things in general. Sometimes theory seems less an account of anything than an activity – something you do or don’t do. You can be involved with theory; you can teach or study theory; you can hate theory or be afraid of it. None of this, though, helps much to understand what theory is. ( Jonathan Culler, p.1)

I think perhaps we went through all these possibilities, discussing the importance of theory in our own research, considering whether we were involved in theory development or applying theory to gain new insights. We also discussed the idea that maybe theory sometimes uses three words when it could just use the one – in other words that theory is unnecessarily opaque. However, for Culler, theory needs to be difficult. Theory signals ‘speculation’ he suggests, yet it is no mere guess-work:

…to count as a theory, not only must an explanation not be obvious; it should involved a certain complexity […] A theory must be more than a hypothesis: it can’t be obvious; it involves complex relations of a systematic kind among a number of factors;  and it is not easily confirmed or disproved. (Jonathan Culler, p.2-3)

If you were asked to make a  sketch of your research interests what would you draw?

In the opening session of The Seminar, we began by first hearing each other’s research interests. We are all at different stages of our research, and inevitably there is a wide range of research projects. Interests span from material narratives (of Stöffweschel [stuff exchange]), the Arab-Muslim doll, interface designs, mapping remains, game designs, the geo-cultural mapping of cultural producers, units of description, the motif of the monster vis-a-vis incidents of terror and war, creative communities, display of traditional clothing, the changing face of masculinity, and much more besides… (it is quite a list!)

It was wonderful to hear everyone speak about their own research and subsequently to share in a debate around the nature of the PhD, and the different kinds of engagement and approaches we each reveal.  I was particularly interested to foreground the word ‘philosophy’ in the title PhD, i.e. a doctorate in philosophy. What is this ‘philosophy’ that we will all end up sharing in obtaining the PhD? It is not that we are studying the subject of philosophy (though some of us will dabble with this domain), but technically, we are all engaged in a form of philosophy, as in a mode of enquiry, investigation and contemplation.

I talked briefly about the origins of the Western philosophical tradition, which arguably still underpins institutional rhetoric today. Philosophy is the ‘love of wisdom’, and Socrates and Plato, for example, took it to be an underlying enquiry into what it is to lead a ‘good’ life. I wanted to suppose this remains a integral part of what we do when undertaking doctoral research. We’re not just interested in a singular problem (i.e. our research topic/subject matter), but a wider set of connections and relationships. We are placing our research in a communal intellectual space. It might not always feel like that when we are working alone on our writing, reading, making, thinking; indeed the PhD can be lonely at times and/or require good doses of solitude. Nonetheless, there is a continuum of intellectual practice that we are part of, which is the ‘philosophy’ named in our PhD.

Ancient Greek philosophy was interested in objects, those that remain the same (plants, animals, seasons, stars etc), and those that vary (language, customs, laws, politics). Today of course, much of what we once thought ‘remains the same’, have proved highly changeable, and we have created the means to change such objects through our investigations (for good or ill!). The physis (nature, that which is fixed) has proved just as complex and changeable as nomos (culture), but we could never have known these things without some kind of investigation and experimentation. Aristotle adopts the terms theoria (theory, contemplation) and praxis (practice) to evoke the idea: (1) of the intellects ability to ‘take hold of’ and categorise the world around us, and to articulate ideas about it; and (2) voluntary human activity, whereby we choose to alter what can be changed. Today, we can all too often hear of a divide between theory and practice, yet this would hardly seem to pertain to the curiosity and inventiveness of those early days of philosophy.

The reading I gave for this first session was the introductory chapter of Woodhouse’s ‘A Preface to Philosophy’, which is a slim ‘textbook’ for someone taking a philosophy degree. It struck me this prompted some useful debate. On the opening page, Woodhouse asks the question, ‘What is it that makes a certain question or claim philosophical?’. As he adds, this is not an easy question to answer. I think, however, it is a useful question to have in your research toolkit. What is it that makes your work ‘philosophical’? By which I mean, what is it that makes your work questioning, critical and reflective? Woodhouse offers his own definition: ‘Philosophical problems involve questions about the meaning, truth, and logical connections of fundamental ideas that resist solution by the empirical sciences’. This was inevitably – and rightly – met with quite a bit of challenge among those in the room.  I think we are all attuned to countering the very notion of fundamental ideas. But what are the galvanising Ideas that we rest our work upon? What happens if we seek to challenge these ideas?  Perhaps your work needs to be sustained by certain key – if not fundamental – ideas. For example, what do we each take to mean as ‘society’ and the ‘individual’, or the notion of ‘experience’? Psychoanalysis pertains to specific notions of the individual in a way that is very different to Marxism. When these combine, particularly in the work of the Frankfurt School (in the early twentieth century), we get further configurations and complexities. Perhaps you might be working between such terms. You need to think about what this might mean and where it takes you in your thinking; equally we need to consider how we can suitably present our ideas to account for such collisions and reconfigurations. Of course, it might be in challenging certain ‘fundamental ideas’ in our own research that we find things become unstable, unworkable even! …this can be disconcerting, yet it can also be the opening towards a whole new depth and breadth to the work.

A further problem arising from Woodhouse’s definition was the positioning against ’empirical science’. I think there is something attractive for the areas of art and design that philosophy is somehow seeking to go beyond the immediate, the visible, the uniformly testable. But, I think we were in danger at times in our conversation to allow an unnecessary division between art and science. We did discuss this directly, which helped us keep on track, but it raises an important point about the way in which ‘knowledge’ has been turned into specific discourses of knowledge. The chapter by Woodhouse might feel to many of us as too prescriptive, too logical. Yet, I hope it served to keep alive certain ways of understanding how we approach ‘philosophical’, or research problems. It is useful to define how different ideas, elements, and engagements do or do not bear equivalence. Woodhouse talks in terms of ‘assumptions’ and ‘consequences’, for example. How might we understand the logical or ‘argued for’ distinctions between various assumptions and consequences in our own field of study? At the end of the chapter, Woodhouse provides a little ‘shopping list’ of the divisions of philosophy, which include: logic, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, politics, religion, science and history. These are rather ‘big’ terms, and I’m sure we’ll touch upon many of them in subsequent seminars, but for now it is perhaps worth keeping some of these terms to mind, to ask ourselves, not only what our research is about (and/or what it hopes to be about), but what kind of philosophy we bring to it, claim for it, and take from it…