ABSTRACT

MARK CARRIGAN: What was the experience of graduate school like? How did it shape you intellectually?

MAGGIE ARCHER: It was a huge disappointment. The whole process, how I ended up with the supervisors, which was a matter of allocation at LSE. I turned down the first one allocated to me. Then it was made perfectly clear that this is an exception; that people could not refuse what was graciously offered to them. I was told I was being given the great honor of having David Glass. This was a sort of cognitive disruption for me. Because the paradox of LSE was that it was so authoritarian about this issuing of supervisors. You didn’t even have the option of naming preferences or anything. Or, you could name an area, but not your topic within the area. The incongruity was between this sort of virtually dictatorial process and the

freedom we’d had on the curriculum. For example, the second year you had almost total freedom. It was the ultimate cafeteria. I spent the entirety of my second year doing lots of philosophy of science, philosophy of social science. Brilliant experience with people like Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos – who obviouslywas a lifelong influence – JohnWisdom, JohnWatkins. It was the last of the really quality star-studded LSE and it was great. I kept that mindset that disciplines with boundaries are totally unimportant.