Partial Truths

…I got accepted into UCL!

Now I just (“just”) have to print and complete the funding application and then: a) find a way to courier it to London by March 17th, and b) hope the money gods smile on me.

Fingers crossed!

It’s always disappointing when promising technology fails – particularly when it’s a slick online application system that purports to make the process much more straightforward than its paper counterpart, yet fails to send out the automatic reference request to referees thus resulting in an application (in this case, mine) sitting in limbo for two weeks. It’s reassuring when, after copious email exchanges, the mechanism works and said references are uploaded and the application is automatically forwarded to the anthropology department for review, thus taking it (finally!) out of my hands. But it’s still irritating, seeing as I had applied in the hope of leaving enough time for me to be interviewed before I left for India. But I leave on Monday, so that scenario now seems remote, and I hope that if I end up having a phone interview, its more impersonal nature doesn’t jeopardise my chances – if not of actual acceptance, then of being nominated for funding. Not a lot I can do about that though.

I mentioned before that I’d refined my proposal somewhat – necessary for my application to make it across the department threshold given its previously garbled nature. Here’s an excerpt which hopefully clarifies what it is I want to do:

My application to the MRes in Anthropology is motivated by a desire to pursue PhD research into experiences of ageing among South Asian immigrants living in Britain. While I am broadly interested in personhood and agency in old people, this particular project is inspired by the increasing public attention paid to ageing as a national concern and the concurrent tendency to homogenise “the old” within a single bracket. An implicit assumption appears to be that all people experience ageing in a similar way, regardless of the cultural norms and understandings that have informed their life course thus far. The concern which I anticipate will underpin my project addresses the impact of shifting cultural and social environments upon lived experience—in this case, the subjective experience of old age. I intend to explore ageing from the perspective of medical anthropology, focusing on the ways in which the process is interpreted and understood, particularly as it occurs in a cultural context different to that in which a person has previously spent much of her life.

A central theme of my research will be the ways in which agency and voice are negotiated by others (family members, social workers, medical practitioners) on behalf of the ageing individual as her own capacity is considered diminished. I am intrigued by how this negotiation takes place and the potential conflict provoked by attitudes rooted in an epistemology not shared by the old person herself—one which may contradict her own understanding and expectation of what it is to age.

Let’s continue as if there weren’t really a gaping six week gap between entries, shall we?

The meetings at UCL went well! Very well. Both Napier and Higgs were very receptive to my ideas and encouraged my research plans, agreeing to act as first and second supervisors respectively, which is exciting. In the interim I’ve had time to refine my focus somewhat (more on that soon), and finally submitted my formal application last week. Now I wait to hear if I’ve been accepted into the programme (which will probably entail yet another interview), and if so then the next hurdle is to secure funding which unfortunately isn’t guaranteed upon acceptance. But the ball is officially rolling, at least!

The mind is a wonderful thing. While my research-related thoughts have been in a state of somewhat hyperactive flux recently (as evidenced by the previous post), an inkling that they would eventually begin to coalesce prevented me from getting too panicked. And they have. I was temping in the offices of a local food production company this week and at some point, amid the copy-and-paste-induced death throes of a significant proportion of my brain cells, the word “personhood” drifted into my brain. And all my musings thus far seemed to stop spinning and take notice of this new arrival, quietly organising themselves under its purview. And now I am calm. The details may still be unclear (and maybe it’s more productive that they remain so for now), but the essence of my project has announced itself, rewarding my faith in my churning mind.

So I’m more confident in what I want to say tomorrow. Or at least how I will begin.

In light of this, I took No Aging in India off my shelf to have a look through this afternoon and ended up reading the last couple of chapters. The book is by Lawrence Cohen and is subtitled: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things. It remains the most astonishing anthropological work I have ever read. And the most intimidating, given that it deals with the subject that I have chosen to pursue for my own research. In many ways Lawrence Cohen set me on this path – I took his Introduction to Medical Anthropology course during my first semester at Berkeley, and it changed my life, awakening an intellectual passion and giving me a glimpse of the standard of academic work I may one day be capable of. Not everyone enjoyed Lawrence’s style of teaching – he veers off on tangents that it can be difficult to keep track of, but somehow manages to end up tying everything together. I am in awe of his mind and of his gifts as an author. Which makes the fact that I am intending to pursue research in a similar vein quite terrifying. Re-reading parts of the book today, I am both intimidated to the point of wanting to run a mile, but also inspired – I remind myself that he wrote the book in his thirties, off the back of ten years of research and many more years of education and teaching by luminaries in whose shadows perhaps he once cowered. That such a standard exists in the field I am choosing to enter will, I hope, encourage me to persevere, to challenge myself and to take intellectual risks along the road to becoming all that I hope to be.

In other news, the universe finally responded to my efforts and I have meetings arranged at UCL on Monday with potential supervisors Paul Higgs and David Napier.

Panic! Excitement! Fear! Anticipation! Anxiety! Confidence! Ah, so many equally applicable nouns!

So the next few days will be consumed by reading and writing and attempting to formulate some intelligible ideas. At the moment my brain is generating intellectual mush along the following lines:

I know I want to conduct some form of comparative study looking at how certain white British people and certain South Asian (probably Indian) people experience ageing in Britain. This will involve looking at the role culture does or doesn’t play in experiences of ageing and I would like to pursue it from a phenomenological and embodied perspective, engaging with individual subjectivities and learning how they may or may not shift over time. The other main part is about agency and voice – I’m intrigued as to how people experience loss of agency and individual voice and both how they respond to this and how those who care for them come to negotiate a voice on their behalf. Does culture play a differentiating role in this? And what about the differences between ageing as part of an extended family and living independently, or in a care home? What about the experiences of those who may have expected to age as part of an extended family, but actually find themselves in residential care? And on, and on…

All of which comprises half a dozen potential theses, is utterly un-nuanced and probably entirely unoriginal.  Hence my slightly amused unease.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m largely motivated to do this work by my plan to begin graduate study in medical anthropology with a focus on ageing next year. To this end I’ve spent the last couple of months deciding where I’d like to study and contacting relevant people about my PhD ideas. I’ve had encouraging responses, but it’s a s-l-o-w process – I’m currently waiting to hear back from a potential supervisor who I built up the courage to ring yesterday only to be routed straight to voicemail. While that was a slight relief, it doesn’t stop me being impatient to hear back from him. Does he not realise who I am?

This hiatus from work has at least given me the opportunity to begin to distill my thoughts somewhat, in the hope of narrowing my focus and generating an initial research proposal (a proposal proposal, so to speak) that I am able to articulate in a vaguely coherent manner. This latter point is proving troublesome.