ABSTRACT

In which we search for a place to continue to study the limitations of psychology, and encounter the strictly-policed borders between academic disciplines, demarcating those that cleave to science from those that are more suspicious of it. We explore the role of performance in navigating applications for postgraduate research. After a journey around the country, we begin research in a new home. The production of a doctoral thesis is an oft-times lonely and occasionally frantic occupation, and marks the transition from being a student learning about a discipline to being a researcher, from being entirely dependent on the knowledge of others to taking some responsibility for the production of knowledge. The ambiguous nature of this transitional period is marked by the confusing juxtaposition of terms for someone struggling to really get into the discipline of psychology; in the United States they are termed a ‘graduate student’, which is confusing to the Brits who refer to this status as being a ‘postgraduate’. You will see in this part of the book what it takes to absorb and display the cultural conventions of academic knowledge and scientific selfhood, what you need to do to become an academic psychologist. It is difficult to enter this terrain, and more difficult still to obtain funding. I describe how I did it in this chapter. I was lucky.