What was the best compliment you’ve received?
i was in the middle of my doctorate program – working on my master’s paper. by this time, I had been professionally socialized and was successfully learning the ropes of being a proper psychological scientist – the insider language, the argument structures, the theories and methods to draw and build form, and more importantly, the ones to not.
But one important thing to know about socialization, it doesn’t fully capture our minds. it cant. our existence exceeds the bounds imposed by external forces, and while they may successfully bind us for a while, we eventually burst through. If you haven’t been exposed to some of the political economy of the university and its disciplines, it may seem strange to frame academic professionalization as a constricting or limiting force. In some important ways it enabled the opposite for me. but constraint was the implicit message that was continuously rehearsed around me:
- “to publish in top psychology journals, you gotta talk like one”
- “it’s crucial to just keep publishing, get those papers out”
- “you need to learn the rules of the game to get a professor job”
this advice isn’t technically wrong or misguided, it’s just that its effectiveness comes precisely from it operating as boundary work: the operating rules/norms that define what counts as legitimate participation in a discipline vs. practices classified as deviant, ineffective, or un-worthwhile – the kind that steer you off the correct pathway to disciplinary success.
This was the well-meaning spirit from which the feedback in the screenshot above was given- an attempt to steer my writing back to the non-deviant path for success in the field of social cognition. the message was clear: If I was to have a future in this discipline, I had to stay away from writing like postmodern scholars. rehearsing a social scientific aversion to humanities scholarship/prose.
BUT that is exactly what made this such a compliment. Around this time, I was writing publicly about how the same constraining dynamics surrounded me most of my life as an illegalized immigrant – I constantly cleaved away at myself to fit a mold, to win deservingness, a chance to remain in this country. What was happening in my personal life was mirroring my academic one: I was starting to question what I had been learning or molding myself into within my discipline. I was reading beyond the field, trying to connect separate knowledges that rarely touched and trying to incorporate them into my research. this was a process of developing MY own voice, and I needed to hone it regardless of whether it was perceived as valuable or deviant.
Being warned that I was trespassing disciplinary borders was a signal that I was forging a scholarly independence, becoming otherwise. Also true-to-me, I didn’t listen to the advice. I kept on my path and became even more deviant. but becoming otherwise also meant becoming less legible to my field and colleagues: my academic path got more difficult & frictioned (story for another day).
their advice was probably right in its institutional context, but at the end of the day, no regrets. I did academia my way, created some amazing field-shifting shit, & no one can ever take that away 👽