22 - When seasons change: dealing with a change in my situation while studying for a PhD

Summary

My first supervisory team was made up of two academics, both seemingly ‘expert’ in assisted death. However, my thesis was not just about assisted death – assisted death was merely the Trojan horse. In fact, my PhD could have used any other of the top ten bioethical issues; however, it was the core of my thesis that most interested me. I had opted to utilise the work of Michel Foucault to look at assisted death in a new way. To break what I perceived to be a rhetorical circularity that had resulted in superficial gestures of progress rather than significant shifts in thinking. I did not think that what I was doing, importing the work of Foucault. was actually that radical. For anyone who is interested in power or the intersection of political theory and the body, Foucault seems an obvious choice. Unless, of course, you have never actually studied him.

My first year looking back was pretty traumatic – the intellectual violence that I was subjected to had a serious and profound effect on me. I was tasked, in the first six months of my PhD, with having to justify the value of Michel Foucault to someone who had never read him; and to apologise for Michel Foucault to someone who regarded him as an obscurantist and who had never, it came to be understood, had a tangential understanding of his oeuvre. The feedback I got on my work was harsh, overly critical, unsupportive and demoralising. When I compared my work to my colleagues, no one could actually see any difference in the quality – it was just as good or just as poor as everyone else's and yet, for some reason, I felt singled out. It did not matter how many times I rewrote my papers or pivoted, it was never enough. By the end of my first year, I had a word bank of almost 100,000 – which was about 90,000 more words than my colleagues in the first year had written. It felt like no one wanted to see me thrive. My two supervisors had made their minds up about me and about my PhD. Eventually, however, I got a third supervisor who came on board who had a much broader understanding of my theoretical framework.