The questions we ask

I'm starting to think about the questions my dissertation asks, and the problem I see with the existing scholarship in my field is sometimes not that it answers important questions incorrectly, but that it asks the wrong questions.  Like a cat who likes to sit squished between both a window screen and a couch, the scholarship is awfully comfortable and doesn't want to go anywhere.  (Is that too much metaphor to put on one cat?  Sorry.  Had to work in the cat photo somehow).

I've been going round and round in trying to frame my dissertation, because I do find the way that the current scholarship answers the big questions to be wrong, but I also find the questions wrong in a way I couldn't articulate until recently.  Graduate education, or at least my graduate education, has focused on learning to engage with the terms of debate as they stand in the field.  There's nothing wrong with this; I think it's necessary to know how to engage a discussion as it stands in order to recognize your position in it and the limits of that debate's frame.  What it doesn't teach you is how to reframe the debate.  Some of the best scholarship does that, and while it may be overly ambitious for a dissertation project, at least in my subfield, the terms of debate are so broken and retrograde that I'm beginning to feel they're unusable for what I think my evidence is telling me.

Example:

Summer Goals

Monday was Memorial Day in the US; it's officially for reals summer here (90F helps prove it), so it's time to solidify summer research plans and other things.  On the slate for summer blogging plans:  Me Made June, the Summer Book Club, and Notorious/Another Damned Medivalist's Summer Writing Group.  I think I'm going to loosely tie the book club and the writing group together: my reading list (and book club related posting) is going to be heavy on sci fi/fantasy with a feminist angle, along with some more generalized posts on race, feminism, and material culture provoked by my more heavily theoretical reading for my writing project, a first draft of a dissertation chapter.  (omg)   A lot of what interests me about my dissertation topic is the systemic creation of the consumer culture we engage with now and the personal creation of identity through clothing; I hope the intersection of theoretical issues with consumerism and identity making might interest you as well.

In non-theoretical news, J and I spent the hottest day of the year (so far) biking and picnicing at Snooty U's arboretum.  By my conservative estimate, we biked around a thousand million miles, but J says it was more like ten.  Except for a broken shifter on my bike when we were almost home, it was basically one of the most perfect summer days you could ask for: homemade beer, at an empty park, eating fancy cheeses and warm strawberries with a nice boy.  More picnics are also on the summer to do list.