Week 2

Malcolm Gladwell's “Complexity and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule” was a fascinating read for several reasons, some of which alarm me as an academic who's still quite wet behind the ears. The path I've chosen toward “success,” whatever that means, will require a lot of patience, time, talent, and assistance. While reading the part of the article about “experts” receiving “help,” I thought about someone I know who told me once that part of his success was determined by certain important folks in his field and their ability to say yes to him. There were many who said no, so his trajectory has been shaped by those responses, too.

Even if I become uber talented at research and facilitate/write about the most interesting, relevant studies this side of the Mississippi, I have to submit my work for publication, and there's always the chance that editors – those who could “help” me, using Gladwell's term/point – will say no to my research. Even if it's “good,” it can still get rejected by those who have the power to reject me in my field. Throughout our academic journeys, there will be gatekeepers at various checkpoints. Some of them will permit us to proceed, and some of them will force us to go back and add more hours of practice, so that we can try again. So, I am feeling intimidated.

Further, at the end of the essay, Gladwell states, “In cognitively-demanding fields, there are no naturals,” which is also intimidating but also sort of comforting: good researchers are made, not born, and thus, since I'm not inherently equipped to conduct research, I'm starting off on the same level, relatively speaking, as others who are just getting started, those who are beginning to understand the intricate trappings of undertaking research. I need to continue to practice, which involves a lot of stumbling and reassessing; I may not become the best of the best, but I can get better, particularly with reflexivity and humility.

My tendency to value reflexivity and humility is what makes me identify so much as a feminist, both within a research context and in general. In addition, Kitch's piece, “Feminist Interdisciplinary Approaches to Knowledge Building,” reminds me that the gatekeepers I described above, who I will encounter throughout my experience as a researcher, will often be men and/or folks who are determined to maintain patriarchal standards in terms of the direction of the field.

Kitch offers this as an anecdotal example (which is one of many): “Even when women were somehow allowed into the knowledge base or literary canon, Spencer (1981) observed, it was always on men's terms.” Kitch continues to describe Spencer's articulation of women “gaining permission” to “enter” constructed spaces or domains of knowledge that were seen as male, only to offer useful terminology and discourse to the discipline (in this case, literary criticism and theory). Allow me to share something from my own experience, as a newbie to Kent and to this field. I naively thought that my pursuit of a PhD would severely limit my encounters with misogyny; however, there have been a few instances that my feminist methodology, rooted in feminist theory, was questioned, not because I was using those methods incorrectly (that sort of feedback is always welcome, because I'm still learning!) but because they were seen as substandard methods, with origins in a discipline (feminist theory) that was more of a “stance” than an actual theory. Thus, I find intriguing Kitch's call to go beyond self-reflective feminist research practices as a possible way to counteract the ways in which feminist methodology is undermined: there needs to be interrogation and interaction amongst disciplines in order for change to “stick,” in order for it to be meaningful (pp 131).

Similarly, Sullivan and Porter's “Articulating Methodology as Praxis” asks researchers to be reflexive and thorough regarding the methods they choose, examining such important choices because the “traditional rules” of research should be assessed before they're used; new researchers in particular shouldn't assume that it's an unnecessary risk to challenge the status quo in terms of research practices (pp 57). That is why their call for interrogation and interaction amongst disciplines/research practices is something they identify as a feminist process: the act of constructing knowledge needs to be productive, and that productivity can only mean that those agents involved in the construction are in conversation with one another. One can reshape and radicalize “traditional rules” in order to answer more abstract questions, and the act of reshaping/radicalizing is legitimate. When feminist researchers learn how to meaningfully gather and interpret data to problematize the status quo of their field, they're able to go beyond self-reflective practice and open the door for reciprocity in other ways, namely engaging in conversations with other researchers and the studies themselves. I hope that I, as one newbie feminist researcher, can participate in these spaces without my presence and methods being called into question, and without worry that I need permission in order to practice. In the meantime, I will continue to hone my skills and ask questions, and I may reach at least 10,000 hours before I realize it. Let's hope that those hours aren't invisible.