My Page on the Lancaster University Website

My department at Lancaster University, Educational Research, requested that doctoral students consider having a presence on the Graduate School, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, website. Now that my doctoral thesis proposal was approved, I thought it was time to list my thesis working title, along with my areas of research interest.

Creating a page on the school’s website in some way shows my current connection to my studies and the university, though it also caused me to do something long-overdue, namely update my CV. Seems like an easy thing to do, but listing my areas of interest, along with the keywords to describe them, is a challenging thing at best, and an seemingly overwhelming excercise for somebody as interdisciplinary (and somewhat postmodern) as I am. I felt a bit paralyzed with something seemingly so simple, as I was concerned I would be specifying myself to the point that I would limit myself and in the process fail to capture how rich I believe my interests are.

Of course, this is in itself one of the challenges with doctoral studies, as that tiny little piece of original work we are expected to do will naturally have to be specific. Any surprise I am interested in threshold concepts as a focal point in my doctoral research itself?