PhD This Fall, Maybe
Apr. 29th, 2011 12:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jhameiaSo I heard from one of the upper-year PhD students (because I like to keep in touch with my seniors, being that it cannot possibly be a bad thing to learn from your elders and all) that some people have managed to get into the fall program even with a Very Late application. So I asked Lorraine, who's in charge of admissions, while I happened to run into her at the department office, and she said she could have the graduate secretary open up the system for a short while so I can sneak on and apply.
They only have two spaces left for this fall's PhD cohort, and waiting to hear back from the applicants they've accepted. However, there's still a chance that the applicants wouldn't take the offer. The fact that Lorraine's willing to have the system opened to let me in seems to be a good sign.
My statement of interest is currently a mess. I know I want to continue working with science fiction and postcolonial theory, but I also want to work with theories on power, and how the discourses of power are scripted to maintain systemic control. I'd like to look at Foucault, Isaiah Berlin, Arendt and Marilyn French (particularly the latter; she's basically the first feminist writer I read who really broke down how kyriarchy works).
And I'm still kinda stuck on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, and I'm especially fascinated by how compelling I find it, even knowing Gilman's pretty racist tendencies as a white feminist speaking in the early 1900s. And it makes me think about other utopian settings, and how they're constructed too, and what in them is a reproduction of the discourses of power, what is a diagnosis and what is a subversion? And what alternatives did they really provide? Are they viable or not and why or why not? And if they're not any good, then what alternatives can we imagine for ourselves now, what kind of visions do we have? And I think I might want to look up WOC feminist writers like bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldua for this project too, as well as other postcolonial writers. It's gonna be glorious, I think. If I can get this statement of interest out.
Or someone else might already have done it and I should be thinking of something else.
They only have two spaces left for this fall's PhD cohort, and waiting to hear back from the applicants they've accepted. However, there's still a chance that the applicants wouldn't take the offer. The fact that Lorraine's willing to have the system opened to let me in seems to be a good sign.
My statement of interest is currently a mess. I know I want to continue working with science fiction and postcolonial theory, but I also want to work with theories on power, and how the discourses of power are scripted to maintain systemic control. I'd like to look at Foucault, Isaiah Berlin, Arendt and Marilyn French (particularly the latter; she's basically the first feminist writer I read who really broke down how kyriarchy works).
And I'm still kinda stuck on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, and I'm especially fascinated by how compelling I find it, even knowing Gilman's pretty racist tendencies as a white feminist speaking in the early 1900s. And it makes me think about other utopian settings, and how they're constructed too, and what in them is a reproduction of the discourses of power, what is a diagnosis and what is a subversion? And what alternatives did they really provide? Are they viable or not and why or why not? And if they're not any good, then what alternatives can we imagine for ourselves now, what kind of visions do we have? And I think I might want to look up WOC feminist writers like bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldua for this project too, as well as other postcolonial writers. It's gonna be glorious, I think. If I can get this statement of interest out.
Or someone else might already have done it and I should be thinking of something else.