Graduation is coming up mid-May and I couldn’t be more excited – and anxious. I am more than ready to take a hiatus from late night studying and test-taking, but the decisions that are going to be popping up soon after I graduate are going to be equally as stressful. My original plan was to take a year off from school, get some experience, relax a little, and center myself. Then, I’d take the GRE, apply to grad schools and (hopefully) start school again in August of 2009. I’ve been planning for 4 years to apply to Ph.D. track graduate programs in anthropology; however, this decision is slowly changing. It seems my primary interests lay with media and communications, which means it may be a better fit to apply to these programs rather than anthropology programs.
I’ve got some definite tension from this potential decision. Personally, I think they both go together beautifully – I mean, I learned about media ecology from my adviser here at K-State while studying anthropology. I even wrote my senior thesis with these two disciplines in mind and it proved to be a valuable combination for analysis. But, what bothers me is the exclusive tendencies of “separate” disciplines. I really value anthropological theory and the emphasis on ethnography and participant observation, and I was looking forward to honing in on this during grad school. I’m afraid I will lose this opportunity if I choose to study media and communications. I *love* anthropology; I think it’s valuable. Not to say studies of media and communication aren’t valuable. Indeed, I also think they are extremely important. But can’t I have the best of both worlds? So much potential for overlap exists between the two.
My adviser recommended I take a look at the graduate program at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC. As one option, they have a Ph.D. focus of media, culture, and communication. As a description:
The courses in this track provide an overview to theories of media studies, media effects and cultural studies, including both social science methodologies of media analysis and humanities theories of cultural analysis.
The area introduces students to a broad array of theories of media and culture that provide the basis for analyzing television, the Internet, new media forms, advertising and other cultural artifacts and events. We explore the production, reception and critique of visual culture in commercial, technological and popular forms. Analysis focuses on the production practices and consumption patterns of media within and across communities.
This sounds like a nice blend of anthropology and media studies. I plan to inquire some more… There’s also the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, but I haven’t looked much into it. I’m not so sure about New York, but I don’t think I have any right to be picky. All I know is I want to incorporate anthropology with media studies… any recommendations?
Tagged: anthropology, grad school, media
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3 Comments
What do you want to do with a doctorate? Do you want to be a professor?
I am with you in the general malaise of the establishment. I think your advisor would tell you that you should just work from the inside out; get into a program and then study what you want to regardless of what program you’re in. I myself am very skeptical about how easy that actually is to do. Two years out from graduation and the prospect of subjecting myself to that sort of reductionist and stifling environment still inspires me to inaction. I also find that while I would like the further education and the title it would bring (credibility), I am not convinced that I want to be a professor or work entirely within academia. You may find me a doctoral student a couple years down the line, but for now I can’t bring myself to do it. A friend who went off to grad school last fall recently told me that he wishes he would have done a masters first, and recommended such to me. He said it would have given him time to become very educated in a specific area, allowed him to focus what he wants to study, and tested him to make sure grad work is really what he wanted.
My only recommendation is to do some reading on integral theory, as I have found it to be the only academic (and pseud-academic at that) avenue that doesn’t leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
I would like to have the option of becoming a professor. I like teaching, and I am around enough bad teachers everyday that it makes me want to become one myself (counter-intuitive, no?) so I can help to tip the balance in education. I also like doing research, so this influences my decision as well. You have a good point, however, about perhaps a Master’s is all that’s needed… or that doing a Master’s before a Ph.D. might convince me that I don’t really want to be in school that long, but a lot of the programs I’ve been looking at are Ph.D only. USC’s communications grad program is only Ph.D. (unless I overlooked something)… and I’m more interested in the theoretical aspects of media and communications that the nitty-gritty (although both interest me). According to their website, the communications focus is centered around theory while the other options seem to be more technical or unrelated to what I am interested in.
The bottom-line aside from wanting to study both anthropology and media studies is to do something that nourishes me as a human being. I’ve spent a lot of time in my years as an undergrad pretending to like what I am doing… I don’t like doing that. Sure, it’s beneficial at times… as Wesch would say… but damn… it gets really old when you have to do it a lot. This isn’t to say my interests are narrow… they are very broad… but I think you know what I’m saying – the teaching of a subject can ruin all the fun and here there are many classes where the fun is completely ruined =\ At this point, I feel like being an undergrad is detrimental to my creativity, especially while taking classes in the psych department (perhaps I shoulda given up the psych major a while ago…). I miss anthropology classes so much!
You have built a good websitea