This past weekend, I drove down to Ford Field in Detroit to get my second Pfizer vaccine from a business-like national guardsman named Raymond. Then I spent two more hours in the car listening to Inspired by Rachel Held Evans and wiggling my left arm to cut down on soreness. I took that freshly punctured arm to a (masked, outdoor) baby shower in Grand Rapids, and then another outdoor baby shower the next day, and it was more people in forty-eight hours than I’d talked to in the preceding four months. And as, you know, it happens, people asked about my dissertation.
I defended my prospectus last week and finished my last semester of coursework on Monday, which is my excuse for my post being so late this month. The prospectus, as I explained to several people at these baby showers, is sort of a proposal-slash-research-design—I had to write out what I wanted to study and why and how, and my stalwart committee members offered critiques and suggestions to improve it. “Defense” is a bad word for it, at least in my program, since no good dissertation chair lets you “defend” a prospectus that won’t be approved; it was more like a discussion: how can you refine your research questions? What alternate methodologies could you use to analyze the data you collect? What are the stakes of this project for the field(s) of research it engages?
And that was maybe the hardest question for me to address since the stakes for me are the ones I think the most about: not just the professional stakes of “I have to write an acceptable dissertation to graduate from this program and (perhaps) find employment in higher education” but the personal stakes for how I understand who I am and the worlds I’m a part of. I’m studying the ethical and rhetorical decision-making of early adults raised in white evangelicalism who are writing back to that community on social media. So, you know. Me. Many of my friends and classmates. Many of the readers of this site.
I didn’t want to study this. I’m not sure if I should tell people that. As part of my graduate program, I had to write a sort of intellectual biography describing how my experiences and coursework had brought me to my research interests, and I kept trying to create tidy narratives about my interest in community-engaged writing instruction or metacognition in first-year composition courses until one of my advisors said, “This is fine, Katie, but it doesn’t really seem like you care that much about it,” and then another advisor asked me what I would study if I didn’t have to care about the field or my academic brand or whatever—if I had a year to figure out something that I spend a lot of time thinking about, what would I do? I spend all my time thinking about religion and politics, I said. I spend all my time trying to figure out what it means to be from a tradition and a community I can’t believe in anymore. I spend all my time wondering how and if it’s even possible to be a Christian when my God, my God—what a mess it all is, you know? What do you stay for, and when do you walk away? What’s taking the easy way out, if there even is one? And if there’s not, and we’re all in an eternally messy relationship with this tradition that raised us, how do we negotiate that? How do we talk about it? How do we write about it?
So I’m writing a dissertation on the ethical and rhetorical decision-making of early adults raised in white evangelicalism who are writing back to that community on social media.
I’m still not sure I really want to do it. Mostly because I know—I know, even from talking to people at the baby showers, that raising those questions brings up everybody’s big[gest] feelings. Defensiveness, if they don’t want to or can’t reckon with the problems and flaws of a tradition that is or was their home, or other people’s feelings about them. Anger, if they were hurt by it. Pain. Sadness. Confusion. A few people I talked to this weekend handed me really heart-breaking stories about their bewilderment at the beliefs and behavior of family members they can’t really speak to anymore. Self-righteousness, sometimes if they’ve walked away and think everyone else should too. And occasionally disinterest or nonchalance, which is maybe the hardest for me to understand—the way some people manage to sidestep personal entanglement in the macro stories of white evangelicalism’s investment in racism and misogyny and all kinds of other stuff. I’m envious of that, I think. I wish I could care less—it feels like a luxury.
The point, though, is that different people in my study population are making sense of their childhood faith experiences and their contemporary politics in different ways. They are working it out on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. I want to know how they do that.
Inspired is a long book; it kept me company on the way to Detroit, to Grand Rapids, from the baby shower to my brother’s house to another baby shower, back home. And I thought about Rachel, whom I met once backstage at Calvin’s Festival of Faith and Writing years ago, who was funny and kind and unpresuming in a way I thought I was too cool for back then. I felt embarrassed and sad, driving east, listening to this recording of her talking about learning to love the Bible amidst her questions and doubts. I don’t think I cried. But I wondered why I so desperately needed her to tell me it was okay to care so much it hurts.
Katie is a doctoral student in English and education at the University of Michigan. She loves the New York Times crossword puzzle, advice columns, oceans, and dogs of all kinds.
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Great post, Katie. I really hope your committee found your dissertation topic as exciting and necessary as I (and probably a lot of other folks on this site) do. It sounds fantastic.
You need to turn that dissertation into a book when you’re finished with it.
Thanks for this lovely post, Katie. I’m also trying to figure out how my academic work fits in with the things I most deeply care about. Thanks for the reminder that that question matters.
Perhaps a bit of an obvious statement, but it hurts because we care. If we didn’t care, we could so easily step away from things, not bother with them, because there’s no investment. I think it’s good that you have made this investment, and am excited to know where it will take you.