“It’s good..., but i would have written it
differently!” Institutional ritual and epistemic incongruity in the
evaluation of doctoral theses Cover Image

"E bine…, dar eu aş fi scris altfel!” Ritual instituţional şi incongruenţă epistemică în evaluarea tezelor de doctorat........
“It’s good..., but i would have written it differently!” Institutional ritual and epistemic incongruity in the evaluation of doctoral theses

Author(s): Silviu G. Totelecan
Subject(s): Sociology
Published by: Editura Academiei Române
Keywords: intellectual craftsmanship; rite of passage; epistemic incongruity; reviewing; evaluation; PhD thesis; personal file;

Summary/Abstract: „In a job of writing, to do it well you have to live it”, said,half century ago, the great American sociologist Charles Wright Mills. That’s not an easy task, one may argue, if you want to fully embrace it with its meanings and prescriptions altogether. I took his request on board very seriously, especially knowing that in the nowadays liquid society that kind of writing could be the (only) type of text production meant to resist a bit longer than a split-second the all-encompassing melting processes. The challenge of this paper was not to simply present various life experiences of my own, something that I have done already in my previous works,where I employed (auto)ethnography and participant objectivation as a methodological toolbox (here too), but to incorporate epistemologically, through the act of writing,distinct Lebenswelten into mine, and even to live them. Being caught up in the last years in the process of reviewing doctoral theses (which is both a pleasant and a painful task to handle), with every single PhD manuscript that I have received, I got to know (practically and epistemologically) that I had a text and (references to) alifeworld in my hands. How can one deal with such an issue? There are two possible answers: one can follow the institutional-administrative way or take the unpaved road of pondering on the intellectual craftsmanship of the (thesis) work. This time, I choose to follow a dusty and shaky path instead of an immaculate and stiff one.

  • Issue Year: XVI/2018
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 7-37
  • Page Count: 30
  • Language: Romanian