As someone who got a Ph.D. in Physics years ago and then continued to do research in the same field some few years more I can say that I spent at least 10 years of my life going around offices where comics from phdcomics.com were printed and hung at the walls or used as computer’s desktop backgrounds.
I then decided to change my career path (not because of the comics…) and I have been to Humanities departments and Social Sciences departments. I am now doing my second Ph.D. in the field of STS. STS stays for Science and Technology Studies or Science, Technology, and Society depending on the decade or the geographical area you refer to when you talk about this discipline. Of course, you cannot tell (not yet) STS scholars that STS is a discipline because the aspect they promote the most to society and to funders (the "boundary-work" they do...to speak in Gieryn's terms) about their discipline is that it is interdisciplinary. It is ST- StudieS not ST-Study. I might agree on the interdisciplinary roots of STS, but I would say that now STS has its own technical language, its canonical authors, its journals, and its cycles of conferences. In this respect…it has the very same structure as an academic discipline. Anyway… the focus of STS is on the interaction between science, society, and technology and the interdependence of the three. Society shapes science, science shapes technology, technology shapes science, science shapes society, society shapes technology, technology shapes society. It works more or less like that. And I love it.
Now…what I wanted to talk about is the following: when I changed the kind of departments I was hanging around, the phdcomics.com disappeared from the radar. My new colleagues did not know about that. Apparently, it is very (very very) popular in Natural Sciences departments but not elsewhere. I found this asymmetry curious. The main topics in the comic strips drawn by Jorge Cham (Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford) are about the frustrations and work dynamics of graduate students in the Sciences. When I was doing physics, my fellow students and I found those strips very funny. But above all, we identified in the description of the scientific world as hierarchical, dependent on grants and therefore on politics, developing projects without being so sure about what the results will be, and as individuals, losing faith in ‘progress for Humanity’ and increasing interest in salary’s raises instead.
Even if it is said in a funny-bitterish way, the core of the whole STS canonical writings is there, in those comics. I invite my reader to check the comics strips as “The Author List”, “Addressing Reviewer Comments”, “The Actual Method”, “The Grant Cycle”, “Intellectual Freedom”, “If TV Science was more like REAL Science” and so on. Browsing phdcomics.com is like having access to the backstage of science in the making and laughing at it together with scientists.
Now I wonder the following. On one hand, natural scientists are often depicted by sociologists, historians, and philosophers as being not aware of the social and political ties of their work. I know, this is a generalization …but let’s talk in general terms. On the other hand, I never met anyone who felt offended by phdcomics.com. Actually, its creator is a Mechanical Engineer Ph.D. and the website is very much appreciated by the natural sciences community. So…has the scientific community changed its own self-perception over the last 30 years, after the canonical writing from major STS scholars were written, or was it always there, but just as a well-kept secret?
My personal opinion is that it is a consciousness scientists do have and keep as a taboo. This taboo is the reminiscence of a long-standing fight for survival and authority. This fight started in a quite violent way, with assassinations and exiles of the first peoples trying to be free to say things different from the discourse promoted by the ruling powers. The only way to win a fight against the hegemonic discourse is to become the new hegemonic discourse (ask Marx and Raymond Williams to know more). The fight is at the core of the origins of modern Western society. It is intrinsic to it. As well as representative democracy. A politician who turns to the masses and says: “This is just my job, nothing more”, “I do not know the answer to this problem”, “We should try this way to do things but it might fail”, “I do not have a clue”, “What I will actually do is what my financial supporters will allow me to”, or “what I am doing is what I know will allow me to stick to my chair”…is a dead politician. Put the same words in the mouth of a scientist and the same happens; it is a dead scientist.
As a civil society, we are aware of that dimension of politicians, and we forgive them for not openly admitting it to us. But we are not ready yet to forgive scientists. Therefore, scientists…keep phdcomics.com for themselves.
留言