The Drama of AIDS

By Emily Garside
The moment that you had the idea and decided it was something you wanted to research (your Archimedes moment)

This was actually way before my PhD started. For context, I looked at the two plays I wrote my thesis on (Angels in America by Tony Kushner and Rent by Jonathan Larson) for both my Undergrad dissertation (Rent) and my Masters (Angels in America). So really I pin this moment down to when I discovered the plays…this was in my year abroad in Montreal (I’m British) and we rented the Angels in America mini-series. (On account of long Canadian winters, we were always looking for a new thing to watch.) I remember distinctly my flatmate saying ‘this is supposed to be good, it’s about people with AIDS’. Soon after, as a young musical theatre fan, I discovered ‘Rent’ and bought the cast recording, I don’t remember much else except listening to it on the bus home (on my portable CD player!) and falling in love.

It all began from there, nearly 11 years ago now. Those two moments planted the seed of interest. I fell in love with the plays several times over and in several stories I don’t have space for here! But I wrote one dissertation, then another and when I finished my MA, I realised I wasn’t finished with these plays and this topic yet!

How your background and experience may have led to your choice of PhD topic, no matter how tenuously?

I think my mish-mash of academic background influenced things a lot. I studied History at Undergrad level, and it’s where my academic interests lay. However while on my year abroad I started taking acting classes and studied drama for optional modules at University. What was a casual hobby became more serious and I went on to study at RADA for my MA. But despite ‘learning’ how to do theatre, my approach kept some of the historian’s mindset, always thinking about context and the wider picture not just the ‘text’.

I always say too I’m very influenced by being a working class girl. I’m very practical and don’t suffer pretentious fools. I hate the wishy washy approach of many literary scholars and I hate a worthier than thou attitude of many academics. Something that shaped the approach to my own research (and no doubt ruffled a few feathers along the way).

How your reading and research may have been shaped by things by extra-curricular or non-academic factors:

I think being passionate about theatre in the broader sense really shaped my research. I’ve been a theatre person since about age 15 and have always been both up to date and fairly encylopedic on the current and previous Broadway/West End shows. This was something my supervisors (all English literature specialists) weren’t prepared for and didn’t quite know how to handle. For me though this interest/context was the essence of what I looked at. And if I wasn’t such a theatre fan, and didn’t have all that information at my fingertips I don’t know what it would be!

I also had the advantage of practical training. This helped ansed shaped my work enormously. I was able to look at archival records, including the stage management ‘Bible’ copy of the scripts and understand all the technical elements and so ‘bring to life’ the physical play in a way people without that practical training probably can’t. The practical training also gives me a different perspective on the staging of the plays, the actors roles etc.

Finally  the main non-academic factors I was shaped by was being a self-funded PhD and the amount of extra curricular work this took. I supported myself through a variety of jobs and this certainly influenced the way I worked and my attitude to the PhD.
Emily Garside has completed a PhD in AIDS-related theatre at Cardiff Metropolitan University and is about to take up a position as Research and Development Advisor at University of South Wales, advising for the Creative Industries Research Institute. You can tweet her @Emi_Garside and check out her blogs Fixed Point Time and Mucky Phd.

You don’t look like your profile picture

A serviceman accesses social media channels using a smart phone, outside MOD Main Building in London.

Ainslee H is currently doing her PhD in Anthropology looking at ambiguous identities in online worlds and how these identities present themselves through identity play. Indeed, her post is the first about an Anthropological doctoral research. You can read her blog “Anthropology Musings of an anthro-tragic” and connect to her on Twitter @Ainslee

The moment that you had the idea and decided it was something you wanted to research (your Archimedes moment):

I had my research idea way back in 2010 when I was still actually an undergrad student. I started to see people putting up profile pictures on Facebook which were no longer of themselves, but were of babies, pets etc. This was curious to me as it was meant to be a profile picture of themselves and I wanted to understand why it was that people present themselves the way they do in online worlds.

How your background and experience may have led to your choice of PhD topic, no matter how tenuously?

One of my undergrad subjects spoke about identity. There was one specific lecture which discussed ambiguous identity, looking at scholars such as George Herbert Mead and also Erving Goffman. I loved this idea of how people could present themselves in particular ways depending on the context in which they were presenting themselves.

How your reading and research may have been shaped by things by extra-curricular or non-academic factors?

I am a bit of a geek/nerd and have spent a lot of time on the internet, using Internet Relay Chat (IRC). I have known people who I know both offline and online and their personas are sometimes different offline than they are online. This has always intrigued me as to why this is.

Sorry for the absence…

Dear follower,

Thank you for signing up to receive updates about this blog, “From Tweet to Thesis”. I unfortunately have not kept up my side of the bargain and provided anything to be updated about. The last two years exactly have been my most stressful ever, with PhD thesis submission, viva and effectively rewriting with a view to resubmission. Now that I have resubmitted my thesis, and am awaiting oral examination, I am in a position to resume this blog again.

If you are a PhD student, please feel free to submit a post about the inspiration behind their research question, via the “Contribute” page. If you know a PhD student, please encourage someone else to contribute.  I am also interested in the origin of ideas in general.

If you are not actually a follower but a random reader who has stumbled upon this site serendipitously, then I hope you find something to make it worthwhile to stick around. 🙂

Kind regards,

Pravin Jeya

PhD as self-discovery

I decided to do a PhD because I had a question about law I wanted to answer. So the goal of the PhD has been to make that “original contribution to knowledge”. But as I progressed, I have found that my research has been plastic, in the Hegelian sense. On the one hand, I have shaped my research not only in deciding what to do but also in how my background has shaped my paradigm. In realising the latter, I started to learn things about myself. Doing the PhD became a process of self-discovery. In a sense, at some point, the boundary between my research topic and myself became porous.

As PhD student Kirsty Warren said in the video below, I didn’t start to discover myself by attempting to discover myself; I did it by getting on with life and focusing on something beyond myself. In a sense, as Hegel said, only by recognising that there was something outside me worth recognising did I recognise myself. I became a posthuman researcher.

Emily Warren, discovering herself

In the beginning was the word…

This might sound egotistical but I have realised recently that the title of this blog, ‘From Tweet to Thesis’, points to the PhD as an image of divine creation (in the same way than humans are made in the image,of God). As I have probably said so many times before, a PhD thesis starts with a tweet in the imagination – a phrase that could be written in a limited number, say 140, of characters. In my case, that tweet would have been ‘How does law change behaviour, if nagging doesn’t work?’ The answer is physically embodied in my thesis, which is also a collection of words. One is words in my mind, the other is words on a page. But the whole point of this blog is that the tweet of the imagination is not the real beginning of the thesis, because it itself is the result of a process. The tweet can be broken down into smaller collections of words, and words themselves, and each word is themselves the result. As Hegel argues in his preface to The Phenomenology of Mind, my tweet of the imagination is merely a proposition. Trafford argues from his research into the nature of doctorateness that my submitted thesis will be a proposition too.

There had to therefore be a first word, from which all words came. And if there was a first word, there had to be a first speaker and thinker. According to the Gospel according to John, in the beginning was the Word. He used the Greek word, logos, which translates as ‘word’ in English but was used by Ancient Greeks to describe an underlying rationality. But John continued: the Word was with God and the Word was God. The first word was God and it was also with, that is, in the mind of, God. In other words, God is the first word and the underlying rationality of that word. In autopoietic fashion, God beget God. As alpha, he is at the beginning of the first word and, as omega, he is at the end of the word; that is, God will last for as long as God exists.  And when God spoke, as per Genesis, the word became embodied. For Christians, the word is Jesus Christ and the thesis or embodiment of him is The Bible. Therefore, there is a dialectic or conversation between God and everything he speaks into being; he speaks, it exists, and he then sits back and sees that it is good, before speaking again. Given the experiential beginnings of PhD theses, it could be argued that they – like everything else – are part of the continuing creative work of God. However, he does create things to have a mind of its own and they can choose how to act, so even though as he is writing his thesis, as any PhD student knows, the thesis often resists being shaped. In many ways, though, writing a PhD is like creating one’s own world, where one’s thesis is the prevailing value. (Just to be clear though, the PhD student is most definitely not God.)