Research students keep being referred to me to discuss their “theory chapter”. My reaction to these referrals is complex. First, it continues to amuse me that I’m coming to be regarded as a “theory expert” – I’m not personally sure what such a creature would be, and I seriously doubt the kind of theoretical work that I do even vaguely resembles what people have in mind, when they make such referrals.

What I end up doing, generally, is asking someone what their question is, then asking them how they’re trying to cast light on that question, and then telling them to forget about “theory” in any formal sense, and just write what we’ve just discussed, as this is really the “theory” underlying their work… Having done this, they can then step back and see whether they’re actually comfortable with the theory they’re using: does their question, and their means of answering that question, reflect how they really think about the world? about how we come to learn about the world? If not, then they may have some serious thinking to do, about whether their theory-in-practice – their theory as manifest in what they are actually doing – or their theory-in-thought – the collection of beliefs they hold about the world and our knowledge of it – might need to give way. And having done this to their (preliminary) satisfaction, they then need to ask themselves, based on what they’ve read in the literature, how they think other researchers might respond to similar questions. With this in mind, they then need to have another think about the adequacy of their theory-in-practice. Rinse and repeat…

Although all of this is important, it’s nothing so profound, complicated or specialised as I think it’s often perceived to be – and when giving this kind of advice, I’m certainly not drawing on the subject matters in which I might have some claim to substantive expertise: any supervisor could give comparable advice, without the auratic experience of sending a student off for some kind of mystically potent consultation with a “theory expert”…

So my approach to this whole process is rather informal and pragmatic – and it violates what I suspect is the expectation that someone can refer a student my way, and they’ll leave the office propounding on poststructuralism or logical positivism or whatever other intellectual tradition might be most relevant to their work. I almost never discuss formal intellectual traditions, unless a student makes clear that they are already familiar with such things by introducing the issue into the conversation of their own accord. Otherwise, I can’t actually see how a sprinkling of polysyllabic labels can serve anything other than a talismanic purpose… The labels are a convenient shorthand for the concepts – but the concepts themselves can’t be shorthanded, and I can’t teach them in a one-off interaction during office hours, which means that the most productive thing I can do, is build a conversation around what a student already knows, and suggest how that existing knowledge can be leveraged, over time, into something that looks more like “theory” in some formal sense.

These conversations take place in a discursive field already stacked against them: the fact that research students are taught to think in terms of something called a “theory chapter” – something that can be isolated out from the rest of their writing, something that they will “test” by their research, something that is often tacitly conceptualised as existing in a contingent relationship to the object or method of analysis – already slips in so many ontological and epistemological assumptions that an enormous effort will be required to engage in more than a fairly limited range of theoretical work.

It’s also not terribly unusual for students to have run into the view that they shouldn’t “waste time” on theory – that they should finish their “real” work first, and then read around in the theoretical literature to see how they might be able to “generalise” their “findings”. I know a reasonable number of PhD candidates who plan on “reading some theory” in their final six months, once the bulk of their write-up is complete, so that they can include a “theory chapter” in their thesis. I say none of this to be critical of the students: people do as they’ve been taught, and the absence of postgraduate coursework for research students (other than the one research strategies course into which I teach) eliminates one of the major opportunities to explore different approaches to theoretical work. The same structural constraint restricts the options of faculty advisors, as they have no ready institutional means to refer students for apprenticeships in more complex theoretical approaches…

When I’m at the point of supervising higher-level research students in a more formal way, I suspect I’ll run my own off-the-books seminars (since there’s no way to run them “on the books” here) – as the price of admission for supervision… If nothing else, perhaps it’ll reduce my workload by encouraging people to seek supervision elsewhere… ;-P For the moment, my strategy is as I’ve sketched above: to try to demystify the concept of “theory” by referring back to what the students already do and think, and hoping this will at least provide them with some sense that this is how all theoretical approaches originate – as attempts to understand and discuss with others what we believe and how we learn. Everything else is commentary… Which they should now go read… ;-P