Interdisciplinary Studies & You
Part 4: What it means to be readable in academia
In part 3 I talked about the Gender Studies class that really let me get my first taste of interdisciplinary methods.
Goin’ to grad school
Fall 2016 I took Love & Sex, KSU’s most introductory level gender studies class. I also took Queer Theory, in addition to a communication and a journalism class. I read Stone Butch Blues for Love & Sex, but academically it was a rather sleepy semester as I tried to finish my undergraduate degree. Finally, then, was Spring 2017. I had one class left for my major, a capstone class. To round out my schedule I took Studies in Grammar & Linguistics, Feminist Theories, and a Disability Studies class.
By this point I wasn’t doing any regular journalistic writing outside of class. I’d felt ostracized from most, though not all, of my journalism peers. I had fundamental disagreements with journalists I’d met at a Society of Professional Journalists conference in Atlanta, I had issues with the Associated Press style guide that were shrugged at by professors in classes, and yet none of these were the reasons that I ultimately pivoted away from journalism. In fact, I think my decisions had more to do with the positive embrace of gender and interdisciplinary studies than it did with any negative or lukewarm reception from fellow journalists and journalists-to-be.
The professors I had in gender studies classes were encouraging. Even when I thought that I was being over relied on there was a sense of empowerment and participation in my education that I didn’t get from journalism. Journalism was about preparing for a career, gender studies, even with the proseminar half of the methods class, was about allowing me to speak and write what was on my mind, what I knew to be true. Yes, it had to meet academic rigor, and yes that frustrated me at times, but it was encouraging. And if I could continue to do that, why would I pass on that? Staring graduation in the face and not really loving the prospects of the journalism job market, I started applying to grad programs! I’m sure that I considered some communication and journalism programs, but I ultimately applied to gender studies and feminist philosophy programs. At first. I applied to programs like the Gender & Women’s Studies program at the University of Arizona and the Feminist Studies program at the University of Minnesota. And let me tell you, I did not get into those programs! It’s recommended that you apply to 10 graduate programs. I applied to 3, maybe 4. Applying to grad programs is not only expensive, but overwhelming. When I didn’t get into any of the grad programs that I applied to, I started to panic! I considered all my options, including whether or not I could afford to take another semester of undergrad to buy myself some time. That was a non-starter. Eventually a solution landed in my lap. It wasn’t an entry level position with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it wasn’t an offer to write for a New Noise Magazine, nor was it, say, an opportunity to work with LGBTQ youth, something that is still a long-term goal of mine. Instead, it was a graduate program with a summer deadline for their fall admission. And it was right at home, as it were, at KSU. It was the program in American Studies.
If you’ve read this far, you might have a sense that I never set out to get my masters in American Studies. If you’ve read this far you may find some sense of joy. We’ve reached grad school and an interdisciplinary degree program! Did a budding interdisciplinarian pick American Studies to do interdisciplinary work, or did an interdisciplinary program shape the budding scholar to be interdisciplinary? A little bit of both! We’ve come back to getting into things for the wrong reasons! I started my MA program because I didn’t see any path forward. I didn’t get into any gender studies programs and I was convinced that American Studies would offer me the opportunity to do the gender studies work that I wanted to do. This turned out to be true! Though it wasn’t always a clear or simple process. I was frustrated through my masters program that I still was only learning about gender and sexuality in one or two modules per class. There had been, a peer who helped influence my decision to join the program, at one point a queer theory class offered. I’d already had queer theory, but I was interested in taking it again at the grad level, like I would eventually do with transnational feminism. In my two years in the program I had no such luck. Still, I’m thankful for some of the classes that I was able to take during my time in the program: a prison studies class, a history of South America class, a Muslims in America class, a film class that focused on Hitchcock and Sirk, and of course the transnational feminisms class, not to mention two semester of a practicum working on research on arguments around transgender rights, not just pro, but anti- and agnostic as well.
In the end I wrote a thesis on the transgender community with citations from myriad fields including media studies, phenomenology, transgender communication studies, consumer research, gender studies, psychology, law, sexology, fiction, internet studies, philosophy, sexuality studies, transgender studies, technology studies, and more. When I started my literature review process in the summer of 2018, I didn’t set out to pull from all of those fields. I probably knew that I was going to pull from transgender studies and gender studies, even philosophy I probably could’ve predicted because I adore Sara Ahmed, but consumer research? Media studies? It was a surprise to me. And there are those still who might argue that such a scattershot weakened the final product, conceiving of the thesis as the final product. I reframe the situation. My committee chair reminded me every time we spoke the year, I was doing my literature review and writing my thesis: A good thesis is a finished thesis. So, the final product then, that I argue was strengthened by my scattershot literature review wasn’t necessarily my thesis. Instead, it was me. As a person, as a scholar, as a writer, as a researcher, and as an activist, my scattershot literature review made me a better person. Having to, at one point, first cut my bibliography in half, and then later cut my thesis in half made me a better academic writer and editor, but the literature review process itself was as much for me after I finished that thesis as it was for the process of finishing the thesis.
Now we get to today, sort of. After my MA in American Studies I applied to Sociology programs at Cornell, the University of Arizona, and Georgia State University. I applied to one philosophy program, at Penn State, due to the influence of philosophy and a philosophy professor, on my time in my MA and on my thesis. As with my MA I was accepted to exactly one program: GSU’s sociology program. I still don’t know what I’m going to do my dissertation on yet. Possibly by the time you read this I will have a better idea. What I do know is that my time in this Sociology program would be much emptier were it not for my being accepted into the gender studies graduate certificate program. In Fall 2020 I’m going to take feminist theories and I’m excited for the opportunity to add to my sociological and American Studies theoretical knowledge.
What’s next?
“What can you do with a degree in American Studies?” “What can you do with a degree in Sociology?” If you’re reading this and you’re thinking about grad school and/or a life in higher education, let me tell you what I think I know, and what my plans and ideas are, because I get these questions all of the time.
Firstly, and this is true in any aspect of your life: “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer. Resist the push to know your next move at every turn. Resist the push to have your whole life planned out. Resist the five- and ten-year plan if and especially if it doesn’t feel right for you.
Remember, when I started college, I thought I was going to be a journalist, and I still “just” want to be a writer (hello from this 6000+ word essay)! I stumbled into LGBTQ-facing staff work because it meant working at a desk and working with people I knew, and now I develop and give trainings to faculty and staff as an expert on LGBTQ topics! I stumbled into grad school, but I got my MA and I go to conferences and I give papers, and I got accepted into a PhD program.
What will I do with it? Well, my broad idea of what my career could look like kind of makes sense when thinking about interdisciplinary work. I want to stay in rural and/or southern areas and teach at a community college. This will probably mean teaching sociology mostly, but I refuse to imagine that it will mean I won’t have the opportunity to teach American Studies or Gender Studies. I envision myself going somewhere and starting American Studies and/or Gender Studies programs there. Community college students deserve these classes as much as anyone else!
“Well, what if you don’t get a teaching job?” It’s true, I don’t have a lot of teaching experience yet, what if I don’t get a teaching job? In that case, I still think I could stay in higher education. I could help found an office of diversity and inclusion at a community college or become a Chief Diversity Officer at such an office. I could be the director of an LGBTQ center. I don’t want to paint too cheery of a picture of a flexible academy, but I do want to say that if one finds themselves in higher education and doesn’t readily wish to leave, they should feel free to find ways to make it work for them.
In a way that’s what interdisciplinary scholarship allows me to do — make academia work for me. In academia there’s this idea about legibility. How do others read you, how do they make sense of you? By getting my PhD in Sociology, I’m supposed to be learning how to write and speak in a way that sociologists predominantly can read and make sense of. I don’t want to just be read and made sense of by sociologists, nor just by academics, but by everyone! Because of this I take not only from many different academic fields, but I take what I know from writing poetry, and fiction, and doing journalistic writing, and communication writing, from talking to my family and my friends, from having conversations over dinners and over drinks and in cars and yes, even on social media. We’re living in a time right now where what it takes to make legible writing is changing. I’m not talking about the ways that languages always change and how there’s a specific way that digital language operates. I’m talking about how we as a society talk about current events and how we receive our news and what we believe and don’t believe and why. This, coincidentally, will be what I write about in my next essay when I talk about media literacy. The rules that I’ve learned even since 2012 don’t always apply and aren’t always effective anymore! Still, pursuing interdisciplinary understandings of the world and staying true to my desire to pursue many different types of writing has helped me to have an edge, and I hope that edge has helped me to introduce you to the idea of interdisciplinarity here!
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