When I work with students on thesis proposals, one of the recommendations I make is that they work out a rationale that connects the narrow focus of their thesis with some overarching intellectual project. The theory is that this can help students keep track of why the thesis is meaningful, even during difficult moments in the research or writing process when it can be very easy to lose track of why you’re doing this kind of work. The theory is also that it can help students learn to “chunk” very large intellectual projects down into manageable sections that each contribute something specific to a life project. This strategy isn’t helpful to students who have no overarching intellectual project – who are, for example, pursuing a research degree because one is required for a specific type of professional work, or who have a very specific intellectual interest that can be pursued fairly comprehensively through their thesis. It seems, though, to help students who are interested in larger questions, and can become frustrated with the narrow scope of a thesis.

For whatever reason, I’ve always conceptualised my work in this way – from well before I began formal academic work. My work still revolves around a set of problems that began to interest me when I was quite young – the original provocation was the experience of suddenly moving to a still-segregated community, which, combined with some personal experiences that had sensitised me to certain aspects of this broader historical context, shook what had until that point been a fairly strong confidence in science and technological progress – my own personal crisis of modernism, which prompted me to go back and look at historical and philosophical material in some detail, trying to understand why our society can be so simultaneously productive of both promise and barbarity… Ultimately, these questions are what put me on a path, from a rather unlikely background, to university study…

Although I understand and express those problems in a slightly different way now than, say, when I was nine (one would hope… ;-P), I’ve always had a sense that the scope of my interests would require a series of small projects to cast light on different aspects of the overarching project. I didn’t anticipate adequately the way that academic disciplinary boundaries might get in the way of some of the miniature projects I had intended to do – and am therefore a bit relieved that such disciplinary constraints are not enforced so rigidly in Australia, as they were in the US… But the basic principle that single research projects would never be able to address most aspects of a significant intellectual puzzle, has always figured in how I conceptualise my research.

As an undergraduate, when no one cared what I was doing and I was therefore left alone to pursue research interests on my own terms, I was able to design and carry out a set of reasonably well-integrated studies that were essentially intended to begin to clarify the differences between markets and capitalism, as well as to begin to develop a very basic theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between the emergence of new social and intellectual movements, and the emergence of new forms of everyday social practice. I did a series of closely-related studies of medieval European religious movements, combined with much more superificial work on isolated historical transitions in classical antiquity. I had originally intended to follow all of this with a more significant postgraduate project that would revisit aspects of Weber’s Protestant Ethic, a project for which my undergraduate work had been designed to prepare, and which I viewed as the next logical step in an overarching project.

Postgraduate students, however, attract much more attention than undergraduates, and I was no longer regarded as unimportant enough to be allowed to organise work according to my own idiosyncratic sense of what I should study… (It didn’t help that I hadn’t fully realised that postgraduate training is not intended as an extension of undergraduate study – I had naively viewed the pursuit of a higher degree as… well… an opportunity for further study; it took me some time to understand that, by contrast, my university regarded my degree as professional training to enable my certification in a specific academic field, and therefore had the responsibility to ensure that I produced work that fell clearly within that field… Observing disciplinary boundaries has never been my strength…) The project was vetoed on disciplinary grounds (with some side observations that it might be somewhat arrogant for me to think that I could work in Weber’s shadow…). Since this point, I’ve done a series of postgraduate research projects – including my current PhD – that sit substantially outside what I regard as “my” project, grabbing bits and pieces of useful conceptual and empirical fragments out of research projects that are much better designed from a professional certification standpoint, but are fairly tangential from the standpoint of my overarching intellectual interests.

As time passes, I wonder how much of the original project I’ll be able to get back to. The Weber project, for example, is actually conceptually fairly important as a means of drawing out issues relating to ascetic movements in the modern era, as well as a means to begin exploring some theoretical concepts relating to psychology. I’d also originally intended to undertake a side study to investigate why some parallel philosophical concepts arose in classical Greek antiquity and the modern era, and another side study on the intellectual history of the secular concept of “matter”, etc., etc… Yet when these projects were originally conceptualised, I simply didn’t understand the nature of academic work – the improbability that any scholar would be allowed to range across history to work on such issues. There are a number of projects on much more contemporary issues, of course, that I also regard as important, and that I probably would be regarded as qualified to do in an academic sense. Ironically, I’m the one who most doubts my qualifications for this more contemporary work, as the historical studies were intended to ground concepts sufficiently to provide confidence in claims that I’d like to make about the distinctiveness of certain aspects of contemporary history… My hope is that, in this period when I’ve been distracted with the requirements of professional certification and unable to read as widely as I once regularly did, some similarly-minded specialists have tackled some of the problems I would once have hoped to investigate myself… And that there will actually be a period, once the PhD is complete, when I will again be unimportant enough for people to stop protecting me from the unprofessional character of my research designs…