“Like a tiger in a zoo”: some voices on Ph.D. studies

Generally speaking we may argue that any efforts of education are intended to change a person. We are talking about heightened skill levels or changed perspectives when perceiving the world. A Ph.D. exam may be regarded as a stepping stone into the business world, but it is a requisite for a career within the academic world. The public defense of the student's dissertation marks an end to an effort that has lasted several years. During these years of vocational training some students are likely to go through an emotional roller coaster, filling them with doubts on whether this is an education for them, or not. The formation of a professional must produce some chafing of the soul, that is, stirring up emotions that evolve into feelings. In this text the complaints of the Ph.D. students will be studied as they emerge in the contents of five video-clips from Youtube.

The research question posed in this paper is: How do Ph.D. students represent their complaints of the education on Youtube? The research design is as follows: For this study five video clips have been downloaded from YouTube. They are all video clips showing (american?) Ph.D. students performing songs about their education. Youtube is open to everyone in Sweden, so there should be no problems in accessing this field. The method used for this paper is observation in the virtual field called YouTube. 

This study is about the content of the five downloaded video clips. The content is going to be analyzed in three dimensions: The first one is the lyrics of the five songs that will be typed down and analyzed with regard to their content. Secondly the imagery of the video clips can be said to be used to fortify the lyrics and will be taken in account as well. Thirdly there is the performance which of course can be said to be a composite of the lyrics, the imagery in conveying an idea of what it is like to be a doctoral student. 

The research question is linked to the notion that whatever humans do they complain about it. That complaining is a manner of showing that you know what is worth complaining about in your profession and thus you show that you belong in that profession.

Will the Research Design help answer the Research Question?

The research design takes into account the major possibilities to analyze statements by the students in the chosen video clips. The way this is done is through triangulation of the material by using the lyrics, the imagery and the performance as empirical sources for the analyzing. The idea behind this is that the lyrics may tell as story, the imagery may reveal a whole other and the performance will presumably add some insight on what is said in the five video clips.

Difficulties conducting the study

The main difficulty was that the material was treated as if it was recorded while meeting with these Ph.D. students in the video clips. The fact that they have written a song, recorded it and uploaded it on the Youtube indicates that they want to accomplish something. That is, the students can be said to have an agenda. Furthermore what is studied is not their spontaneous answers to a researchers´ questions or observations. The students have staged their material beforehand. It is not even sure that what is said in these songs are created by the performers. That the students participate in this video clips is some kind of story telling. Through their performances they are creating, or representing, an impression of what Ph.D. studies are like. Another problem, that was not anticipated, was that the soundtracks of the video clips were poor in parts. That, in combination with trouble understanding the dialect of the singer in one sample song made for rather advanced guessing as to what was being said (Sample song 2). It might also indicate that this researcher never have heard some of the terminology pronounced, but have only seen it in texts. That is a major problem when, like in this study, you use poorly recorded material that you have not done yourself. If you yourself conduct the interview, or as in this case, shoot the video for the video clips, you had been there and have had the opportunity to ask people to rephrase and/or repeat when you do not understand.

The five songs make up a small sample. Searching the YouTube.com for the words “dissertation song” gives a astonishing 2.360 hits. Choosing only five songs to be studied means that the results of this study are only to be regarded as valid for this sample of songs. The five songs were chosen because they contained imagery as well as lyrics. As soon as five songs were identified as containing both words and imagery further search was abandoned.

Familiarity with the Research Topic

As I am writing a Magister Thesis in Sociology this semester with the working title: “Dissertation Blues : a study in the emotional journey towards a Ph.D.” I would say that my reading during this last summer has made me a little acquainted with the research topic.

The Ph.D. education may be described as a rite of passage, in the manner Van Gennep (1960) used to describe these combined series of events. A rite of passage is according to Van Gennep a series of events that, when you pass through them, have a major impact on you. Van Gennep takes the example of a peasant, who wants to become an urban worker and a mason's helper to rise to mason. Van Gennep argues that they must fulfill certain conditions, all of which have one thing in common: their basis is purely economic or intellectual (Van Gennep 1960:1). That is, you may experience that you undergo a change of mind, that may be lasting, or temporary. The rewards might be a better paid job. The Ph.D. education in this respect is aiming to form the students for their future life and career in the academy.

On YouTube

In the “YouTube Reader” Peters & Seier (2009) comment on the attraction of uploading video clips on YouTube. The authors argue that what attract people to place videos on YouTube has to do with self-expression in an easier manner than going through traditional media channels (Peters & Seier 2009:201). You may wonder if that means that it is easier to express yourself publicly today, compared to the time before YouTube, which was launched in 2005. With more than three billion views everyday, 800 millions users and 45 hours of video material uploaded every minute is a powerful media hub (YouTube blog: Pressroom 2011). Just looking at the figures that YouTube presents gives an idea of the impact this media channel have on the audiences around the globe. YouTube has become a major player in the world of popular culture.

YouTube is here looked upon as a public space in the way Habermas (1984) saw it. That is a sphere away from the sectors of family, government and commerce (Habermas 1984:46). In thinking with Habermas the idea is to show that YouTube is a channel for public ”conversation”. YouTube is a business, so it is not totally alienated from the commercial sector, but the limitations of that seems to be marginal for the material gathered for this paper. YouTube has rules governing the kind of material you may upload, but as long as it is not offensive you will not encounter any problems. Problems may still occur in that a government may block Youtube as a whole, or parts of it, for a country. You are supposed to upload only material you control the copyright of. How the participants obey these rules is open to debate – there seems to be a lot of copyright infringements, especially regarding clips from movies and television shows. Prosser (2011) addresses the problem arguing that visual researchers working within the qualitative paradigm shoulder an additional burden. The ethics committees adopting a conservative, regulatory/medical approach to ethics may hinder the researcher (Prosser 2011:493). Visual methods comprise a wide array of approaches and types of media and raise particular challenges, as in the case with downloading material from Youtube.

In order to complete this paper material from YouTube has been downloaded. I do not have the copyright owners consent to use their material. Since the thought of uploading material on YouTube is for it to be watched I have disregarded that lack of consent for the benefit of this paper. I did not try to contact any of the uploaders, my experiences doing so at another occasion resulted in me getting an answer after one year.

The already imprisoned can be monitored effectively. Bentham (2002) presents his vision of prisons built as a Panopticon. Bentham establishes that the effectiveness of the new method is that a few jailers can monitor a large number of inmates. 1791, when the book was written, Bentham's book was a part in the debate on how hard detention would be. Here, writes Bentham, the imprisoned need not wear shackles (Bentham 2002:84). What Bentham campaigned for was a more industrial means of locking up prisoners. The link to the present day, for example, might be about entertainment like Big Brother where participants officially are supervised in a panoptic manner. An even better example is perhaps the digital Panopticon we become increasingly embroiled in – every time you make a call with your cell phone and every time you pull my Visa card you leave a digital trace. It is not direct supervision, but if a prosecutor gets involved, all these traces or tracks are presented in the daylight and support your story of your whereabouts or topples it.

There is no intention here to argue that the doctoral students are prisoners, but there is a large amount of control of the students that is exercised through the supervisors, the seminars and their fellow students. Whenever you take part in any group activity you are supervised and seen by the other group members. They all seem to know if you delivered your text on time, on par and what you are going to comment on at the next seminar. In that respect any working place or university department is in its small way a panoptic surveillance. Maybe we check on our colleagues in order to know what the competition for the next promotion is, or just to be prepared, in a broader sense. As the title of this paper indicates at least one song touches on the feeling of being caged in, one of the songs studied states: “You know how I feel, I feel like a tiger in a zoo” (Sample song 5). There might be a feeling of being watched, or being disciplined to use Foucault´s vocabulary.

The study of the five video clips may give a hint on what kind of information is it possible to gather on Youtube and what is possible to learn from it.

What the lyrics tell

The lyrics were the first point of interest in the beginning of this study. After a while it stood clear that the imagery and the performances were of interest for the outcome. First things first, starting with the lyrics. It all to easy to think that you have accomplished anything when you transcribe interviews, or in this case, the lyrics of songs. Peräkylä & Ruusuvuori (2011) underlines that the topic of the research is not the interview itself, but rather the issues discussed in the interview. In the case with the lyrics from the five video clips the issue is what the lyrics are about, what they express, what issues they present. Peräkylä & Ruusuvuori go on describing the almost informal way in which transcriptions may be analyzed reading them time and again, until some key themes appear (Peräkylä & Ruusuvuori 2011:529 ff). The lyrics do not consist of a lot of words so in this study the reading and rereading the texts was a simple and not time consuming exercise.

Content of lyrics

The lyrics of the songs in the five video-clips cover a great range of subjects relating to the everyday life of a doctoral student. There are of course words like writing, transcribing, interviews, reading and dissertation, meaning both the actual work on the thesis and the public defense of the thesis. There are words like epistemology, correlations, sample, degree, prospectus, hypotheses, registration and methodology. All these words can be seen as markers of the university world. The lyrics also express believed shortcomings of the students, i.e. they fear that they will not be able to continue their studies and/or that they will never get their thesis completed. There can be said to exist a subtext that expresses the feeling that some day soon the supervisors will discover that the students not at all are the stuff that doctors are made of.

Sample song no 3 tells the story on how the singer wrote her dissertation: “I wrote my introduction and did my lit review/ It took a whole semester for that part to get through” (Sample song no 3). The complaining is rather subtle, like that “it took a whole semester”, but there are emotions trigging feelings that must have a release, hence there are complaints present. In Sample song no 5, on the other hand, the words are more outspoken “You know how I feel, I feel like a tiger in a zoo” (Sample song 5). The students compare themselves with a caged animal, which may be seen as a way of telling the observer that the students find their situation worth complaining about.

   
At the same time there is an ambivalent description of what the students do as they go on with their doctoral studies. At some level there are descriptions of boredom, inertia, being overwhelmed by the demands put forward by the supervisors, who are acting as some kind of gatekeepers for further advancement in the writing of the thesis. As sample song no 4 states it, the students love, or hate their work, they are not certain which attitude they should adapt as their own. I can relate to that because of experiences from my studies at the university college of journalism in Gothenburg in the early 1970ties. One week I got a scolding by a professor because I spelled bourgeoisie without an “r” - twice! I got insecure and wondered if I would really focus on the writing. A couple of weeks later the professor said: “Uffe was the only one that placed this piece of news in Gothenburg, why did you others think that it was not important?” I gather that in a vocational training the participant has to adhere to certain standards – you have to be mainstream in your profession – with a twist of creativity. But maybe not too much creativity. Experiences of flow and stress are well-known occurrences in everyday life, according to Bloch (2002). Some of these experiences are related to tasks immediately connected with work such as administrative tasks, projects, computer services, dealing with people, working on one’s own or as a member of a team (Bloch 2002:106). Others are far removed from the work sphere: here there are activities in leisure hours. That would indicate that experience of stress at work could have its roots in the leisure time, and vice versa. If the Ph.D. students are malcontented with their environment in their university department it does not make the education badly suited for them. It might be something else at play.

The supervisors play a small role in the lyrics. Two names in one of the songs: “Enrico sends the emails out That I need to do more and more” and “Bob´s giving me the fear” are the only mentioning of persons (Sample song no 1). As Enrico is telling the student to do more and more the assumption is made that Enrico is a supervisor. Bob may be a supervisor, or maybe a professor that the student is answerable to.

What the imagery reveals

The imagery was from the start more regarded as only a way of rendering the lyrics more vivid. As time passed the imagery became more important in painting a more full picture of what the doctoral studensts were trying to express.

Content of imagery

Leaving the lyrics and turning to the imagery there is immediately a striking difference. In the imagery the supervisors play a far greater role than in the lyrics. At several instances in the different video clips there are (staged) supervisors tearing a student´s paper into shreds or just tossing the paper it into a wastebasket. There are several scenes where the supervisor is more gentle and just hands the paper back to the student. One scene shows the student camping at the xerox machine. A person, that might be the supervisor, grabs him. With the aid of yet another person (fellow student?) the first student is brought back to his room, supposedly to continue his studies. Here it is possible to see a critical attitude towards the supervisor. Even if the scenes are filmed in a near comic manner (given that the “actors” are the students singing the song) it is remarkable that this criticism of the supervisors occur only in the imagery.

When attempting to understand or distill knowledge from imagery what catches the observers attention is hard to know. Barthes (1982) presents the two concepts ”studium” and ”punctum” as an aid to interpret photographs and for describing what catches the attention of the observer. Barthes is primarily looking for what photographs can tell, but the photographs are tangible objects of the special character that they represent something. “Studium” is an extension of the picture in the room - a field the observer with the help of his knowledge and his cultural luggage perceive as something quite familiar. Barthes argues that this is about a kind of learned recognition (Barthes 1982: 25 ff). This “studium” makes the viewer function as a part of what the image shows - including both facial expressions, gestures, surroundings and actions. Part of this reasoning leads in the direction that we would not be able to see and understand what we have not already seen. Our cultural heritage in the ethnological sense gives us the meaning, which consequently is not in the picture, it only arises in our brain. That which is outside our terms of reference, we do not understand. By extension, it could explain why pioneering artists have difficulty, at first, getting their art accepted by the viewers. The viewer simply do not have utilities to understand what these pioneering artists want.
 
“Punctum” stands for a disorder, or a beat, in the “studium”. “Punctum” is the content of what stands out from the picture, like a wound or a stab. There is the chance, as a roll of the dice that affects the viewer. Barthes argues that “studium” and “punctum” represents two themes in the photographic image. Barthes can not find the “punctum” in all pictures - many of the images he sees raises only a general and polite interest (Barthes 1982: 27). Barthes argues that these do not contain any “punctum”. They can tell him or not to tell him, but without hitting him. These photos are subject to a pure “studium”.

In the imagery in the five video clips there are familiar localities, office space, copying machines, desks and computers. All that material meets my preconceived picture of what an university department should look like. And, for that matter of how I imagine that doctoral students should look like. This can be said to mean that they are part of the “studium”, it really does not catch my imagination, it just establish the scene. The observer registers this paraphernalia as an office environment that could do as the scene for doctoral education. The role of the supervisor, that was not very clear in the lyrics, appear as more important in the imagery. Here the supervisor has a definite role as sounding board for the students. They go to their supervisors with papers and get them rejected in manners that range from humiliation to indifference. These scenes with the supervisors stand out as the “punctum”. The supervisor scenes are what touches the observer. One of the videos have imagery that stands apart from the others. In it we see a man in cowboy hat standing in front of a wall where several guitars are suspended (Sample song 2). The entire clip shows this man playing his guitar and talking his blues. This imagery resembles a concert situation and this feeling is enforced by the singers spoken introduction: “This one is for you students out there and in particular for those of you who are working on research degrees and in particular, in fact, for those who are reading for the Ph.D., or the doctorate. This one is called: I Got the Talking PhD Blues”. Even if he is singing about Ph.D. Studies he could be anyone that is interested in doctoral studies.

Even if Sample song no 1 has an introduction where the students start plating in a situation similar to a concert in a courtyard that video clip soon passes on to imagery that show the university department where the students work. Sample song no 1 can be said to mix concert and location themes while Sample song no 2 keeps the concert touch all the way through the video clip. We see the students who played in the courtyard in the beginning of the video clip in their natural habitat. Because of that it is easier to belive that they are students and know what they are singing about.

What the performance adds

Does the performance in the five video clips convey an idea of what it is like to be a doctoral student? In order to get a grip of what is being said there are the lyrics and the imagery that in a staged manner conveys a picture of what the performing students try to express as the meaning of their activities. 

 

Content of performances

There are instances in the different performances that indicates that what is presented is a show. That means that the agenda of the students performing is forced upon the observer with no possibility of interaction between actor and spectator. That, of course, is very common. Even if a study is conducted with the use of participant observation in a field, it might be a chess club, the persons in that arena of course have an agenda. At the lowest level they are trying to come across as rational individuals, controllers of their own life and as doing things that represents meaning. At higher levels of trying to look good, ore make at least a good impression, they might come forward as wannabes in your own field of expertise.

Feral (2002) argues that theatricality is about linking the spectator with what is looked at. There is some kind of perceptual dynamics in play that does not belong to the objects, the space, nor the actor himself, but each can become the vehicle of theatricality (Feral 2002:105). This suggests that this relationship, temporary as it might be, is about two entities making an agreement on what is going to take place. Feral describes this as a paradox of the actor that also is the paradox of the spectator (ibid:100). This relationship might be described as “I know that you know that I know (that I am pretending)” and vice versa. We might look upon this relationship, this contract, as a way of entering into an imaginary realm. In this realm anything might exist: vampires, werewolves, a man of steel who can fly, animals that speak, and more ordinary things like that the actor is portraying a person from the 18^th century. Regarding the agreement between performer and spectator it is about accepting the other worlds or realms for some time. In a cultural performance such as the doctoral students songs they are performing and catching the attention of the audience, but they do not rely heavily on the responses of the audience. Even then, we must remember that these songs on the video clips are mediatized a couple of rounds. Firstly when they are written and performed in front of a camera. Secondly when they are uploaded and watched on Youtube. If our neighbor happened to be a doctoral student and knocked on the door and performed a song about his studies it would to some degree be another case. We would have a neighbor-neighbor relationship and the performance would be live. We might ask him, or ourselves, why on earth he performed the song, but he is not, to us, a totally anonymous person on the Internet.

Loxley (2007) digs deep into J. L. Austin´s thinking on performativity and what performativity does. According to Loxley Austin sets up a list six rules for a successful performativity. The rules state that there must be an accepted conventional procedure with a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances. The persons and circumstances in any given case must appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. The procedure must be executed by all participants, both correctly and completely. Where the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thought or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of the participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves, and further must actually so conduct themselves subsequently (Loxley 2007:1,9-10). If Austin´s rules hold up to measure, we do not recognize the message in the performativity if the rules are not abided. The performative aspects of an act, an utterance or even a gesture lies in that it is pointing in some direction, either out of the realm created by theatricality, or still deeper into it.

 
Does the thinking on performativity mean that the performance of the doctoral students in the video clips follow some kind of pattern? Some features appear in the staged performances in the video clips. We are shown the supervisor as a judge and the student as a victim of circumstances, that is, the will and agenda of the supervisor. There seems to be two kinds of performativity at play, the one in the video clips and the real one we might suspect that the performance in the video clips is copied on. One thought is that the imagery of the video clips have a close resemblance to what really happened i real life, because if that was not the case we would not think that this could happen and the performance in the video clips would be regarded as off. Or, at least, far from reality.

 
Does it have any importance that these video clips are presented on Youtube as digital pieces? Bratteteig (2008) tries to determine whether it has any importance that storytelling is done digitally. Bratteteig means that, at least for the user it is of importance that storytelling is done digitally. Media consumers can also be media producers and media distributors. This, says Bratteteig, affects very much the user and society. A good digital story uses, according to Bratteteig, the medium to its full capacity and incorporates what is possible to digitize today: text, image, movie and sound (Bratteteig 2008:281). In that respect it could be argued that, even if the quality of the video clips differ, the creators/students to some extent make good use of what they have at hand – a couple of students that are willing to complain over their circumstances when studying.

Summarizing

How do Ph.D. students represent their complaints on Youtube? The research question is linked to the idea that whatever humans do they complain about it. One thing is bothering, the video clips are concentrating on the location of the university department offices, or in the private study. We do not get to know what happens after office hours, when the students leave for their apartments or leisure activities. The hints of strong feelings are represented by students with bowed heads, looking a bit sad when they leave their supervisor after some critic. During interviews with Swedish doctoral students for a magister thesis one of the interviewees told me about the first text seminar, where the student got a very thorough critic on the paper presented, went home and was in bed crying for two days before the supervisor called and said that it had not been a bad seminar. It was a grim experience for this student who was used to being “best in class” at ground level and now had met all the other doctoral students who also were “best in class”. The students´ video clips from Youtube leave but one memory of something going on under what is presented and that is the line in the lyrics “You know how I feel, I feel like a tiger in a zoo” (Sample song 5). This might be an indication of at least two things. Firstly that the students when producing the video clips have avoided going into such really devastating experiences. Secondly that they never have experienced anything like it. In either case there is something to be learned from that. There seems to be a kind of mainstream storytelling of what doctoral studies are all about. Had these video clips been interviews it would be tempting to think that the students gave answers that they thought the observer wanted. It may even be the case that the students are going to all this effort writing and performing songs to present the viewer with a story they think he/she wants to hear.

You may wonder if what the doctoral students are trying to express is the same thing that is received on the observer´s side. If we regard the five songs as talk, we may also recall that Gubrium & Holstein (1997) argue that talk is a way of expressing the emotional experience. But, Gubrium & Holstein issues a warning for the researcher – how do we know how others feel if these others do not use the words adequately to convey their feelings (Gubrium & Holstein 1997:197)? As the manner of collecting empiric material in this study really does not involve any interaction in the traditional sense the risk is that the words in the lyrics are taken at face value. My connotations of words in a second language might not be what the students had in mind when they wrote the lyrics. Words in the lyrics might stand there for the sole reason that the author needed a word that rhymed with another.

It is time to return to the question whether the Research Design have helped answer the Research Question? Generally speaking the research design gave an answer that some of the students in the video clips complained in a joking way and others yet were quiet sinister telling that they were at a point of no return, and not in a positive sense.

The research design took into account the lyrics, the imagery and the performance. In retrospect this gave more information than just a plain interpretation of the texts. Mainly because the imagery gave an addition to the representation. The supervisors´ role was rather underrepresented in the texts, but in the imagery they were seen representing the power to ask for more work to be done. The performance in the video clips might have been totally lost if there had been no imagery. The performers are not professionals, even if some of them sing and play their instruments well. Looking at the imagery there are instances of “bad acting”, people looking into the camera or smiling when they should have been more austere in their attitude to convey the things the students complain about. Had this been video clips produced by drama students there would have been a suspicion that the “bad acting” was not so bad at all, it could be a part of the make believe. So, you might suspect that some of these video clips were produced for the fun of it, summarizing the possible injustices and lack of overview of how to write a dissertation.

Looking at the performance in the imagery there is an ironic, fun way of reenacting (true?) scenes from the everyday life of the doctoral education. Especially in the scene where the supervisor brings the student back into the student´s room, with the help of yet another person (Sample song 5). When the student is back in his room, some kind of lightning is pulsating towards his head and the lyrics end here: “You know how I feel, I feel like a tiger in a zoo” ending with a tiger roar. The student is caged, just like the tiger in a zoo, some kind of radiation is impressed on him, he has do study and quit hanging around the xerox machine. 

 

Final comments

This paper started out with the thought that doctoral students are likely to go through an emotional rollercoaster during the education, filling them with feelings of doubts on whether this is an education for them, or not. In this paper some of the complaints of the Ph.D. students in the five video clips have been scrutinized. The main thought that lingers as the paper reaches its end is that complaints are represented in an ironic, or maybe joking, manner. That holds true for at least the imagery in the videos. Supervisors are (presumably) playing along and taking part in the videos. Why that is can probably have to do with the possibility that if you are somewhat ironic you do not have to stand up for your views. It is easy to say afterwards that you were only joking. Still, these students can not be unaware that Youtube can be reached by hundreds of million people. That means that just my song on Youtube may be the final depiction of what it is like to be a doctoral student for somebody out there, maybe on a farm in southern France or in Hawaii. Most of what is uploaded on Youtube may be regarded as entertainment, but there are loads of serious instruction videos there to.

 
For further studies it would be interesting to transcribe more songs, on different occupations, and look for areas of interest that are more common than others. A study on what you complain about in your job situation with a wider take, including several different vocations, might be a way of discover what different professionals tell their peers to let them understand that the person complaining knows what the profession is all about. A study like that could focus on different aspects, but what comes to mind is professional jargon. When I got back to the university after 40 years I was struck by the young people who uttered: “context, paradigm, saturation and discourse” as soon as they spoke at a seminar. The professional jargon is a real divider – there are those who understand and can use it on the inside – and there are those who cannot – and they are on the outside.

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Others sources

Sample song 1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42odMdLwZKI (I Can't Write) No Dissertation  
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Sample song 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE1YExlW1BE (I Got the) Talking PhD Blues

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Sample song 3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmOepdJn6LE Dissertation Blues (accessed   
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Sample song 4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZMmkPq1UXg Dissertation song (accessed 
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Sample song 5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbaO8cWSvV8   Ph.D. Blues (accessed September 
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