Home /

Why I Study What I Study…

/
/
/
726 Views

Mr. Trend has a thoughtful post about why he studies military dictatorships in Latin America:

But studying dictatorships has a particular oppression looming over it. Environmental destruction, strike-breaking, and war all have really ugly components. Yet, at least to my way of thinking (and I think a lot of people’s more generally), dealing with issues like methodical torture, disappearances, and murders in lop-sided “battles” is really, really hard to deal with. I’m pretty sure every Latin Americanist who studies dictatorships (not just Southern Cone) passes through a phase somewhere in their professional path where they seriously worry, “is there something WRONG with me for wanting to study this?” At least for me, it wasn’t just some passing question I waived off – it ended up involving some pretty heavy moral and philosophical reflection in my second year of my Master’s. And I’ve known many people who started off wanting to study dictatorships, but once they really got into how awful those governments could be, they opted out, choosing to focus on some other issue either topically or temporally (or both).

Trend’s musings spurred a couple of thoughts. First, I’m quite interested in how academics come to study what they study; my recollection from graduate school is that student’s dissertation topics rarely matched up very tightly with what they had intended to study when they arrived. Figuring out how academics ended up specializing in particular topics and subfields is sort of interesting in and of itself.

This inevitably leads to the second question, which is “how did I end up specializing in security and military doctrine.” This has a relatively straightforward answer; I never really outgrew an adolescent fascination with weapons of war. The fascination slept for a while during undergrad, but awoke when I reached graduate school. Consequently, I focused on security studies, and eventually found enough space in the literature to write about how military organizations interact with one another. I credit Group Captain Lionel Mandrake for providing the proximate inspiration for my dissertation.

Anyone have an interesting story about how you came to study what you study?

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar
Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views :