PhD in 1 year? Not in humanities though.

Photo: Chronicle.com

Bismillahiirahmanirrahiim.

There is a contentious debate in academia regarding the need for quick completion of a PhD study. While this need seems rather obvious for various reasons, I would say not so desirable in the field of humanities.

Regardless of how brilliant a scholar is, to get around the depth and complexity of a phenomena in humanities requires time. A brilliant scholar would be able to solve a clear problem pretty fast, no doubt. However in PhD, the most difficult part is to identify the problem not the solution. the network of interconnected phenomena. An issue cannot be viewed independently of its context.

Rather than looking at an isolated samples in a lab, a scholar in humanities need to put things into context, place, culture, and time, and this requires the knowledge of the world, almost the whole world. Human evolve in thinking and behaviour through times. What is true today might not be true tomorrow. For this reason, establishing the contextual dynamics in a PhD in humanities cannot be done overnight.

One should not start hypothesizing or postulating a study without a clear and steady grasps of the whole phenomenon. This often requires a query to venture beyond its intended field. For example, if one want to understand a problem say in a corporate marketing system. To do a thorough PhD level thesis, you need to understand the history of corporation and in marketing in general. It follows that this requires the understanding of the history and development of various economic model, and this involves the knowledge of the seismic change in technology, in culture, and eventually in philosophy. This is why a PhD thesis has the word "philosophy" in it.

When you are doing a PhD research, you are focusing on a single issue or phenomenon. However, the phenomenon occurs within a context. The dynamics of the context includes previous findings, history, posits, views, dialectic trails, consensus as well as the possible known parametric correlations that eventually contributes to the phenomenon. These are in fact what you would call the background study. Therefore understanding the background is indispensable.

It is of utmost importance that a scholar has good understanding of the whole phenomena, without missing one tiny bit of information even if it is remotely related to the study. Try to imagine finding a missing dog reported missing in a local whatsapp group. The post has all the information about the owner, address, and whereabouts its last been seen, together with the picture of the dog. You might want to immediately drive around the neighborhood with all the information to start searching. But if you somehow miss one piece of information, the fact that the missing plea was originally posted 5 years ago your search would be a futile endeavour.

Unlike research in most natural sciences (physics, biology, chemistry) or engineering, humanities field requires systemic thinking, big picture understanding. In natural science and engineering, most researches operate within a reductionist epistemological model of knowledge. Simply put, for these sciences, scientists believe a phenomenon can be broken down into smaller parts and and each part can be investigated in isolation. This simply does not work in humanities.

To put it in another way, research in humanities mostly works on gaps in human knowledge, something that is missing, hence the word ’search’ in research. To identify the gap, one need to know what borders on the gap, and the landscape beyond the gap, to really inform you what is missing.

In summary, do not rush your PhD study, especially if you are working in humanities.

Z Jaafar

17 Nov 2020