Dear wonderers,
I don’t even know how to start writing about this.
Research has always been my dream, even if I didn’t name it as such when I was a kid.
Imagine a small Alice with a +1000 pages thesaurus full of sticky notes, or a passionate teen taking notes on Egyptian archaeology from the Discovery channel documentaries, or a nerd collecting world atlases and wanting to chase tornados and see volcanos erupting. You get the picture. All my memories are like that, to be honest. And I still have those notes :))
I just loved and love studying and understanding.
Fast forward to 2006, my journey in communications sciences (better said, social sciences) began. And a love-at-first-sight meeting with semiotics. I didn’t know then, but it would change my life. And my (critical) mind.
After one excruciating first research on modern mythology, cinema, and Tolkien, I knew I wanted more. So a long and painful fight started to get accepted and find the funding to study in one nordic country.
Fast forward to 2011. With a personal loan, a lot of effort from my parents, and my hopes up, I was entering the world of the Research MA in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam or UvA. It was a pre-doctoral programme (of course I wanted a PhD at this point), and it blew my mind. The rigours of training young researchers, the abundance of resources, the labs, the informal study groups, the actual research I got to do… I miss it even now.
Fast forward to 2017. Long story short, I was defending my PhD thesis in Communications Sciences (and Cultural studies, to be honest). But my UvA love affair was long gone and, instead, I was burned out and disappointed after almost 4 years of aloneness, blockages, and feeling like my research didn’t count (I heard it so many times, in so many committees, it was becoming cliche). Shout out to a few supporting professors that I didn’t give up, as I was very, very close to.
So why this nostalgic, out of nowhere storytelling moment?
No fast forward, just February 2022. I’m preparing to teach my first class on contemporary cultural phenomena at uni, and all those toxic moments and hurdles seem so far away. Don’t get me wrong, I had proposals to embrace academia full-time before, but it’s not a healthy environment for me. Yet, this opportunity as an external collaborator was just what I needed to remember why I fell in love with it in the first place.
Research has never left me.
I just felt better using it in business and NGO environments. Be it user research, social research, popular science, or monitoring & evaluation.
But, the academic siren call can be sweet. Sometimes.
If you’re curious about how you can critically study culture and popular culture (specifically), here are some starting points:
Video essays tackling film studies: Every frame a painting, Cinefix, StudioBinder (also great content marketing execution) & The Cinema Cartography.
Video essays about contemporary and popular culture at large: Wisecrack, Nerdwriter & Idea Channel
Crash courses on social sciences and more: Crash Course.
What are your go-to(s) for some critical analyses?
P.S. Yep, still a nerd, that’s what I do on Youtube.
P.P.S If you want to see me nerding about Satoshi Kon, you can watch this.
And a more pragmatic view on how my business experience made my academic writing so much better. The other way around was implicit ;) https://beyondaworld.substack.com/p/business-writing-academic-writing