Liveblogging the Dissertation Process

Hey, @gradblrchallenge! 

I’m at a tricky point in this chapter where I have just totally lost track of what I’m trying to say. 

Trying to go back and see where I went awry, but it’s all so overwhelming because there’s so much that stands out as bad, or wrong, or otherwise unproductive about what I’ve written. 

I’m cultivating a gentler way of thinking about my process, though. Not bashing myself for being so far along in this program without having written a full chapter. The following quote is from this essay on the writing process, which made me breathe SO many sighs of relief.

I often have conversations with friends who are writers about this question—what does it mean to work on writing, and why do we often feel that we are not working on writing? But I think that there are many ways you can and should work on writing—reading is writing, thinking is writing, researching is writing, walking can be writing, watching a film or seeing a work of art is writing, talking to friends is writing, doubting is writing. Perhaps the churning that needs to be done is not words on a page, but inwards. What are you thinking through? Perhaps you do not know yet, and you won’t know until you use language, and the doubt within that language, to write yourself out of this problem. 

I know that my problem right now is just that my thoughts aren’t clear yet, and the best way I can work through that is by writing more. 

Hey @gradblrchallenge!

Last week, I was on vacation, and as usual, the last thing I wanted to do was work. 

By which, of course, I mean writing. 

You know, that skill I’ve been cultivating my whole life, the one people tend to point to when they say I’m good at something? 

As it turns out, being told you’re good at something—being rewarded for it, even, with, say, a year-long fellowship—can freeze you right up. 

I’m doing it right now, even. Looking through what I’ve already written and thinking, wow, nothing about this is eye-catching, stand-out, good writing. 

And I’m starting to realize that that’s, well, totally fine. 

In wishing for my academic writing to align with poetry in the smoothness and pleasure of its cadence, and with the best of critique in lucidity and nuance, I was really just setting myself up to write and delete and write and delete and ultimately just end up with nothing but blankness. 

So, I stopped writing my dissertation entirely. 

The other day, while still on vacation, I found an article called “Learning to Work” (Virginia Valian, 1977). The paragraph below resonated with me immediately. 

I spend so much time doing nothing, in a vague yet all-consuming freeze state, a wasp in amber. My guilt at doing nothing just leads to me doing more of absolutely nothing, and then I feel even worse. 

The author here articulates her struggle to do even five minutes of work every day, eventually building up to a sustainable pace that lead to her finishing her dissertation. 

I almost cried with relief and the feeling that someone understood my experience, even from the removed temporal context of 1977. Sometimes, five minutes really is too much! Sometimes, I feel like I might literally collapse from the stress and misery of trying to write, and, by extension, not writing! 

But I started with 25 minutes, the recommended length for the pomodoro method, which has worked for me before. 

While on vacation, I worked for 25 minutes every day. Yesterday I worked for two poms, or just under an hour. 

I ended up with over a thousand words total from last Monday to this one. 

I’m still struggling with writing every day, and what I recognize is shame from being a PhD candidate going into my sixth year without even a single completed chapter to show for it, but I really hope that this challenge will help me learn to love writing again! Or, have a less antagonistic relationship with it, at the very least. 

name or nickname: Ryn 

location:  Brooklyn 

area of study: Cultural Studies

level of study: PhD candidate, going into year six

a word on your thesis/dissertation: Honestly, the longer I’ve been working on it, the more difficult it is to describe in just a few sentences. Basically, it’s an investigation into queer relationality through the lens of detection—including but not limited to detective fiction and other hermeneutic (interpretive) lenses, particularly those centering on embodiment and materiality. Ultimately, I argue that detection/problem solving is a speculative enterprise, related to the Fantastic. My objects of analysis range from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and NBC’s Hannibal to the lesbian neo-noir Bound. 

what has been your experience with graduate school/university thus far: Oh, lord. I had a golden first few years of coursework. Our department was completely shut down by the graduate school soon after I reached candidacy, out of nowhere—citing funding issues. This has led to both faculty and student attrition, generalized anxiety among the candidates, and a seriously bad taste in my mouth. 

what do you hope to accomplish with this challenge: I really need to start writing regularly again. I’ve been a candidate since fall of 2016 but have yet to finish my first chapter....yikes. I can blame it on a lot of things going on in my life and the larger world, but the fact is, I’ve been having serious trouble with imposter syndrome and can barely write a few hundred words a week. I really want to tap into a supportive environment and get back on track to finish within two years. 

is this your first #gradblrchallenge: nope, I think it’s my third!

favorite film: This is such an unfair question to ask someone working in film studies...but I really, really love Chicago. 

favorite tv series: Also difficult! I really enjoyed Killing Eve this season, though. Might be able to work it into one of my later chapters. 

places you wish to visit in the near future: my wife and I are going to the UK for the winter holidays! 

where do you see yourself in five years: I actually have very few concrete ideas. I don’t see myself on the tenure track, and I don’t want to adjunct, either. I might become a writer/artist/public intellectual hybrid, I suppose. 

meaning behind your url: relatively self-explanatory 

a random fact about you: I was an actor/singer/dancer for most of my childhood through post-college, and am thinking about getting back onstage in the future.

Please note that this is a sideblog—I follow, like posts, and interact from my main blog, @moriarteaparty.

Those of us in Code Societies were on the guest list for this day-long conference, which swirled around the intersections of art and technology. I consider myself more a writer than an artist—while I study media theory, my creative work up until this point has largely been focused on plaintext and content delivery over form. For me, art production is edgy territory; while my mom is a professional mixed media artist, I’ve always had doubts about my own abilities, doubts that have been reinforced by negative feedback from art teachers and professors over the years. 

And yet, this is an area where I’d like to learn and grow from my failures. Some of my research interests might benefit from artistic approaches that complement my more traditional scholarship. 

I arrived at Pioneer Works in time for Morehshin Allahyari’s talk Rethinking 3D Printing for the Other-Futures. The talk, which centered on Allahyari’s neologism “Additivism” (additive + activism), presented Middle Eastern-focused images and concepts of utopia and dystopia both, often blended together. Her 3D Additivist Cookbook, co-edited with Daniel Rourke, utilizes the frame of the recipe as an opening into creative possibility, in a similar vein as did William Powell’s bomb-building resource The Anarchist Cookbook—though in her talk, Allahyari emphasized the need for nonviolent political practice. Working with the materiality of oil, Allahyari’s 3D printed sculptures address the liminal female/queer monstrous figures of djinn as blurring boundaries and borders. 

Morehshin Allahyari - She Who Sees the Unknown: Huma

Addressing the power of monstrosity to build alternative futures, Allahyari referred to her method as “poetic-speculative storytelling.” 

As a creative writer who draws inspiration from the vast traditions of Jewish demonology, anti-Zionism, and diasporic imaginaries, I found Allahyari’s talk inspiring and invigorating. I found myself leaning into my curiosity around expanding my creative writing projects into multi-media modes. 

Allahyari concluded by saying, “I don’t want to live in the future of Elon Musk.” 

The second talk I attended was Anticipatory AI: Making Space for the Under/Over-Counted in Artificial Intelligence, by Stephanie Dinkins. An art professor at Stony Brook University—where I’m getting my PhD—she was kind enough to speak with me briefly afterwards regarding her work and our shared acquaintances. 

Dinkins spoke about Bina48, one of the world’s most advanced AIs, who happens to be modeled on a black woman. Inquiring as to whether a friendship could develop between herself and Bina48, Dinkins addressed transhumanism, racialized and gendered labor, and the possibilities of oral history as communicated and explored through artificial intelligence. She also focused on the ways in which data analysis and systems can be productive vehicles of expression for communities of color. I was especially drawn to the poetic juncture of oral history with AI—what questions does that juxtaposition raise? 

The last talk I saw was by SFPC’s own Taeyoon Choi, on The Distributed Web of Care. Interrogating our contemporary nostalgia for the freedom of dial-up and the early World Wide Web, Choi critiqued the libertarian frontier mindset that underlies those early days, and the whiteness pervading that mindset. 

After screening The Matrix for my Gender in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Film course last semester, I asked my students if any of them had heard of popular meninist forum r/TheRedPill. A few nodded in recognition. 

Then, I asked how a reference from a film critiquing capitalist fetishization, by two filmmakers who would later come out as trans women, had become the entry point to an alt-right breeding ground. 

No one could answer, and the truth was, I couldn’t either. 

After danah boyd’s lecture last night, I’m starting to see it as a problem of dueling epistemological lenses. 

In the world of theory, it is widely understood that one cannot escape the complex nexus of ideology and power. Epistemology, to some extent, depends on ideological systems—ideology determines the boundaries of what can and cannot be thought within a certain episteme. For danah, media literacy should be critiqued as an individual, potentially neoliberal solution to a large-scale problem: just teach your students to identify bias, and everything will be fine! 

Any potential solution has to be networked. 

That’s the societies in Code Societies—it’s also the code. 

Relationality. 

I’ve been casually studying platforms like twitter and tumblr for a few years now, particularly with regard to queer fandom spaces, but it was super interesting to hear danah’s take on the Attention Economy from a more social-science, data-based perspective since that’s an area in which I have little training as a humanities scholar who deals primarily with text and image-based analysis. 

Donna Haraway’s essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” kept coming to mind during the lecture. Haraway’s proposal, in response to feminist concerns regarding the patriarchal implications of objectivist doctrines—don’t professions of scientific neutrality serve the dominant group, after all?—is a move towards recognizing local knowledges and, particularly, the identity of the knowing subject as inextricable from the knowledge base of that subject. 

This almost deconstructionist impulse can lead to the breaking down of binaries and borders between self and other, subject and object, etc. 

But, of course, the big question of the evening—how do we countermessage? 

Again, it seems to be about building vibrant and resilient community networks. I really recommend the book Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown as food-for-thought regarding this question. The book, which is primarily geared towards organizers and movement workers for justice, maps relationality onto nature (think mycelial webs, murmurations, dandelion spores, fungi), taking an Afrofuturist and delightfully speculative approach focused on creating broader cultural imaginaries. (amb’s podcast, “How to Survive the End of the World,” which she co-hosts with her sister Autumn, is also fantastic, check out especially the episode with Alexis Pauline Gumbs!)

And, of course, I’m thinking about my dissertation and detection, again. In full, the project is called Queer Detection: Mediation and the Nature of the Speculative, and one of my goals is to really trouble the question of what it actually means to solve a crime. What kind of cultural work does that entail, and what forces are involved? Are we doing a disservice to the narrative by understanding criminal and detective as binary opposites? Just as the critic is understood as inseparable from their object, is the detective inseparable from the crime? What might that mean, and what’s at stake? 

(Photo from SFPC GitHub repository)

On the first day of Code Societies, a three week program that explores the intersections of software and culture, surveillance and poetics, and more, we were asked to imagine the phrase “code societies” as an injunction. In what ways are these terms codetermining, and inextricably intertwined? What is meant by code, and what by societies? 

To me, both concepts center on interrelation. As my dissertation focuses on queer relationality through the lens of detection, I’m very interested in both the prohibitions and possibilities that can open up through issues of intersubjectivity. 

We spent some time thinking about codes/technologies that shape society, and then imagining combinations thereupon in groups of two or three. I was thinking about fingerprinting as a disciplinary practice from the late 19th century onward that focused on capturing materiality. I then worked with Maria and Bailey to create a rolling art installation that functioned as “friendly surveillance” to interpolate passing people on the street, who would then enter the chamber using their fingerprint and relax on a giant bean bag. This installation combined my thoughts about fingerprinting with Bailey’s on the ways in which habitat design functions to create differently affective spaces, and Maria’s on the feedback loop of interpolation. The space would be a commentary on both public spaces and the subtle machinations of surveillance. 

He thinks he’s helping....

I didn’t have eclipse glasses, but I saw the action yesterday at the park on my journal! 

Today I finished my prospectus, @gradblrchallenge. Now I just need to send it off to my advisor and see if he has any comments or edits. Also finalized my syllabus and sent it off to my TA. 

I’m still here @gradblrchallenge​, I just keep forgetting to post because I haven’t been online all that much. 

My constant companion oversaw my work today on the historical origin of "the fantastic" in post-gothic lit around the industrial revolution. Part of my dissertation argues that crime/detective fiction possesses inherent similarities to sci-fi/fantasy/horror, despite being seemingly all about logical truth-claims on the surface. So I'm trying to find a connection right now between the fantastic and what some have pointed to as the origins of crime fiction with Edgar Allan Poe, who--surprise!--wrote both crime and horror.

One week until classes start again, which means I have to finalize my syllabus. 

I know I’ve been pretty quiet here the past few days @gradblrchallenge! I’ve been working on finishing my prospectus and finalizing my syllabus for the upcoming semester. 

And today, I applied for a job. A non-academic, editing job. 

If I get it, I’ll consider leaving academia. That’s been the endpoint goal for some time now, anyway, though I figured I would probably finish my PhD first. But this job looked like the perfect fit for me, so we’ll see! 

Photos from when I was still in Cali because I haven’t taken any nice photos for a few days now :)

Flew back to NYC last night, and watched Westworld most of the way. Slept most of today, but made an--extremely unrealistic--list of everything I’d like to do in the next ten days, before school starts again @gradblrchallenge

- finish editing prospectus (my advisor was kind enough to let me start writing my diss before officially reviewing my prospectus, but I really must get it approved early this semester)

- write a rec letter for a student

- finish drafting syllabus and track down films, email to TA

I’m currently at a small airport in Oregon--with free wifi that’s actually fast!--waiting for the first of two planes back to NYC to board. Currently reading Amy Villarejo’s Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire in hopes that it’ll inform my second chapter, which is on the figure of the lesbian detective. 

For the @gradblrchallenge!

name or nickname: Ryn (main blog is moriarteaparty, which is where I like/reply/follow from)

location: New York 

area of study: Cultural Studies

level of study: PhD Candidate

a word on your thesis/dissertation: my dissertation aims to produce a queer analysis of the concept of detection, from hermeneutic analysis to detective fiction. I also propose that detective fiction is a speculative genre, much like science fiction, fantasy, and horror. 

what you hope to accomplish with this challenge: I desperately need to get back on track after having done mostly non-scholarly activities this summer. By the end of the challenge, I hope to have a zero draft of my third chapter. 

is this your first #gradblrchallenge: nope, I’ve done at least two before!

favourite film: Persona, Inglourious Basterds

favourite tv series: Brooklyn 99, Mushishi

*places you wish to visit in a near future: Venice, with my wife (Honeymoon, maybe in a couple years!)

*meaning behind your url: well, you see, I am me, and someday I may just get a PhD, 

*when you are not working on your studies, you are…: working on the first draft of a sci-fi/fantasy detective novel, or, more realistically, spending too much time reading transformers comics (yes, really)

*a random fact about you: I have an extremely cute, old cat named Moose.