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A fairly routine day of PhDing under lockdown level 3

A fairly routine day of PhDing under lockdown level 3 : Leah Junck

Starting my PhD in 2016, I felt accelerated by the prospect of conducting interviews across Cape Town for my anthropological Tinder study. Fortunately, these were the pre-Covid 19 days and I successfully managed to recruit participants via the app and meet up with them regularly over the course of almost two years. As I mention in the video: I’m now relatively close to submitting my thesis. That means that I have done the bulk of readings, concluded my ethnographic fieldwork and am, currently, mostly stuck behind my laptop. Some days, I can embrace that. Although sometimes frustrating, it feels rewarding to produce something that contains a lot of yourself.

Before lockdown, much of my thesis writing was done in cafés and in the company of a good friend of mine, Miriam (moral support from peers is hugely important). With the situation out there as it is, Corona-wise, I resolved to staying at home as much as possible. My vlog might suggest that, as a result of staying within the confines of my home, my life now resembles near-stillness. But that is not the case. As the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic highlights, accelerated changes have a way of nestling themselves rather quietly into routines. Even for postgraduates who cannot conduct fieldwork in a traditional way at the moment, there is more happening than meets the eye. Actually, many scholars find themselves in a curious place of rethinking the very paradigms of their field of study and that is more movement than would happen under ‘normal’ circumstances.

Depending on what you’re studying, the day in the life of your PhD might be very different to your peers, and could vary considerably day to day. You might spend more or less time reading, analysing and writing. You may be in a lab, at your desk or busy with fieldwork in a particular setting – at least once the lockdown days are behind us. Perhaps you engage more with people, with microbes or machines. In any case, your day-to-day life culminates in navigating the way towards a ‘significant contribution to our field’, as they say in the thesis evaluation process. (Side note: I always had the vision of an executioner in my mind when thinking about examiners and am currently learning to embrace the process of being evaluated. But that’s for another time).

All of that said, if you’re currently mulling over the possibility of a PhD, take this video as just one scenario and let your imagination run wild as to what it could look like for you. I find that the best thing about PhD is the freedom it offers, although, of course, within some academic confines. So it is, indeed, largely up to you what you want to do with it.

Posted on by leahjunck

Working and swiping my way towards a guiding thread

At the age of 32, it feels like a very long time ago that I worked as a journalist in my early 20s. It is the profession I saw myself growing into when I was younger and the one that I approached with vigour after school through various internships. My ongoing freelance work next to my first-year university studies at a local newspaper in Germany offered me a glimpse into the politics embedded in conveying stories through this medium. Realising its limitations made me pursue my anthropological studies even harder, which, unlike the form of journalism I had encountered, permitted a long-term, in-depth approach to analysing everyday phenomena. At the same time, it allowed me to cultivate my passion for writing. My university studies also led me to permanently re-locate to South Africa 10 years ago.

Fast forward: currently, I am a PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. Here, I have spent the past three years doing research and writing my thesis on the behavioural use of the dating application Tinder. This involved using Tinder to recruit study participants and grappling with how – and with whom – intimacy is cultivated in Cape Town, starting with right and left swipes on online profiles. The focus of the ethnography resulting from this lies on how individuals perceive themselves and others in a partially cybernated process of relating and the ways in which these perceptions are reflected in interactions. Identity formation as well as the interplay of structural influences and individual behaviour also played a crucial part in my ethnographic studies on male refugees in Cape Town and on suburban neighbourhood surveillance. Both were awarded with a distinction and published as monographs with Langaa RPCIG. I am also currently contributing to a research project on professional identity formation among first-in-family students at the faculty of engineering at UCT.

My journey thus far writes itself rather easily. However, it is only now that I feel I can draw out a consistent, guiding tread across it. For the most part, things seemed topsy-turvy and very much characterised by unknown factors, including visa issues and concerns about securing financial support. What I discovered relatively early as a theme and as fuel to keep me pursuing my studies is a passion to engage with the lived experiences of people. Looking back, I can now claim this to be evident in my endeavours to date, just like my profound interest in facilitating dialogue across and beyond disciplines. Yet, these things only filtered through more clearly with time. I consider myself lucky in having developed a genuine desire to immerse myself in study contexts in an engaged, enthusiastic manner. It is even luckier that I had the opportunity to nourish this desire throughout my scholarly career so far. This includes my studies at UCT and my work as a Junior Research Fellow at the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD) at the University of KwaZulu Natal. The most interesting moments have been the ones in which heads were conceptually bumped. Working on and with digital technologies for my PhD got me involved in the Digital Humanities (DH) community and I am among the founding members of the Digital Humanities African Network (DHAfricaN), which is a needed extension of DH scholarship towards perspectives of the global South. I also started regularly contributing to workshops and conferences across the globe, which the ongoing global pandemic has rendered more accessible in an online format. These engagements have been particularly exciting, as they opened up a lot of ground for discussion and, thus, for me to spin the proverbial ‘guiding tread’ of my voyage further.

I am still eager to extend discussions even further and make them accessible to a wider audience – not specific to disciplines and not even necessarily limited to the academic ivory tower. This is why I started writing my own blog (The Junck report), which is my way of marrying my love for social anthropology on the one hand and my persistent devotion to journalism on the other. As I am typing away on my thesis and thinking about how my many years at university (mostly at UCT) have shaped me, I want to share more of my experiences and, through them, connect with people on a similar or perhaps rather different journey. The SAYAS blog is a great opportunity to do so.