After an extended celebration for having submitted a doctoral thesis against the odds, I'm now starting my viva preparation, nobly assisted by George Julian's wonderful Viva Cards.
The 'soft ball' opening question for a viva, so I'm told, is usually something like 'Can you tell us what your thesis is about?'. I am sure it is soft ball to many, possibly even most, doctoral candidates.
If I'm asked what my thesis is about, I'm still stumped. The story I tell about my thesis depends on who has asked. Sometimes it's a thesis about the epistemic (in)justice of public involvement in policy-making and social research. Sometimes it's a thesis about making sense of complex adaptive systems. Sometimes it's a thesis about social care policy and how for the last 50 years, in Wales at least, it has been failing people with learning disabilities by failing to achieve what it says it is designed to achieve. Sometimes it's a thesis about pushing methodological boundaries. Sometimes it's a thesis about developing a new theoretically informed method for public consultation that doubles as a new social research method.
I couldn't even answer a question about where the thesis belongs in relation to academic disciplines, as the one that comes to the fore depends on which story I tell.
Each story forms its own layer. Each layer is its own complex transdisciplinary web. The layers and the stories are interconnected. Working out how needs to be the focus of my viva prep. I trust myself that they do; I just need to make explicit to myself how they do so I can explain it to others. For me, quite literally, this will mean going back to the drawing board. When words fail and knowledge remains tacit, art and creativity take over and bridge the gulf between awareness of 'something' and turning that 'something' into words.
I wish I could tie the thesis stories all up into a neat single story.
I can't. Or, perhaps rather, I refuse to. To tie them into a neat single story would require a violent shoe-horning into a simplistic shape. There is a reason that I was so grateful for the metaphor of wrestling an octopus into a box. A thesis must fit in a box. And the image of one tentacle popping out as fast as I squeezed another in certainly resonated. In so far as my thesis has a central co-ordinating 'head', I guess it is the importance of drawing together things that are often held apart, with the intention of making sense of why 50 years of policy isn't delivering what it says it wants to deliver - and then developing a tool to do something about it.
I can only hope that the 'hard ball' questions are less challenging than the 'soft ball' opener!
