My current problem is that reality is getting in the way of theory.

I have spend the last two and a half years working on developing hypotheses and theories about what the world should look like, and it seems determined to prove me wrong in a rather spectacular way.

Aparently, it is called "making progress in your research", although what it is going to progress to is as yet unknown. It is incrediably frustrating, as have spent months working out in minute detail what current thoughts and theories suggest the world of conservation politics should look like. And it doesn't resemble it at all. I would tell you what it does look like, but I would probably get sued. You'll have to wait for that one.

On the plus side, my work therefore has the capacity to contribute something new to academia. A physical geographer friend of mine says that you know that an article is human geography, rather than sociology or economics because it contains the phrase "this work challenges important assumptions...". It is a phrase that we do hold dear, and love to use at any opportunity, in the same way that anthropologists prefix most things with "meta", and cultural theorists use "post". I could probably do well as a cross disciplinary academic by talking about "this work challenges post-colonial meta-assumptions...." . At the more boring conferences, I am sure there are sweep stakes on how long it takes this phrase to appear in presentations (other suggestions for academic catchphrases welcome). Therefore I can assert my claim to be a human geographer as I now have not only an assumption, but a newly discovered challenge to it.

The reality of this is that the work seems incrediably frustrating. It has been my full time job for a whole year to develop ideas and write literature reviews, essays and research proposals, and for this to be (partially) torn up in a few days is depressing. If I was told when struggling over my literature review that most of it I would later reject, I might well have become more dissolutioned than I ever was. It does seem that all that reading, thinking and writing was a waste of time, but I am sure that my colleagues will remind me that it wasn't, because I am now in the position to know when I am wrong....... as Donald Rumsfeld so nearly said.


Update: Just recieved this in an email from supervisor: "Always a good thing to have as many of your expected ideas to be refuted as possible on a phd. Its a sign of thorough preparation (for without it you would not have made such detailed refutable speculations in the first place). "

Still doesn't make me feel better.