It's Emotional Work

One of my supervisors gave me a copy of 'Dancing and Wrestling with Scholarship' by Professor Les Back the other day. She kindly gave me a pile of around 20 to hand out around the office, but as they were headed with a personal message that read:

 'This was really useful for me when I was doing my PhD, I thought it would come in handy for you'

 I knew the other 19 copies were there to make me feel a little less like I was being bureaucratically flagged as 'on the edge'. Which was appreciated. 

This article really got me thinking about the emotion work behind doing a PhD. Those further ahead of me may laugh at this point. Of course I'm only in first year, I know I have barely dipped my toe into the incessant pool of desperation, exhaustion and disillusionment that awaits me, but like all first years, I have just been thrown in to a completely new way of working, and I'm doing my best to make sense of it all.

'When your PhD is going well it is a good dancing partner. When it is going badly it feels like you are being thrown around some intellectual equivalent of a wrestling match'.

How true is this? 

I don't know whether I should be worried at this stage that I am a little too invested in my PhD (is this even possible?), but, 7 months in, I have already experienced great intellectual highs that make you feel like you could in fact change the world (!) and the crashing lows that, on the flip side, make you to feel as though you might as well set fire to your year's work and get down the queue at the nearest job centre.   

It's like nothing I have experienced before. I have had jobs were I have worked independently, I have always cared about whatever job I have been in, but there is something I find far more personal about handing over your ideas and aspirations for review in a supervisor meeting. 

My feedback is always productive and I trust my supervisors unequivocally, but there is always that pinch: 

'A moment of 'pinch' between what one does feel and what one wants to feel (or what one thinks they ought to feel). In response, the individual may try to eliminate the pinch by working on feeling' (Arlie Hochschild 1979).

I really feel like there is a significant amount of emotional labour that has to go into being a PhD student. We have to continuously perform a series of personal management acts for self preservation, to allow us to cope with the pressures and strains, the unforeseen circumstances and the knocks to our confidence.  

I haven't mastered the techniques for successful emotion work yet, but I'm told that eventually, I'll develop a thick skin. 

Kath

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