ABSTRACT
In which we learn how to piece together many different ideas from outside psychology into something that will look like a doctoral dissertation, and then defend it in an examination, this time in the unusual closed small space of the viva. And, along the way, as we complete postgraduate research, we must attend conferences and give papers, and negotiate different political conflicts that also enter into the academic world. If the writing of a PhD is a mysterious and stressful process, then the viva voce examination is even more cloaked in secrecy and anxiety. I step back in this chapter to look at how the pressure of thesis work is, towards the end of postgraduate research, intensified by the requirement that the student attend conferences where they engage in ghastly self-promotion, networking in order to be able to continue working in the discipline. This kind of career progression is a little more complicated when scholarly debates become tangled up in the broader social questions that psychology usually tries to avoid. Psychology claims to tell you why people behave and think as they do but, as you will see, the discipline is framed by forces that take on a brute reality well beyond what a simple focus on the individual can disclose.
