Brooke asked me this morning to write a little blurb for a new page on the Vanderbilt University Political Science website on “What Can You Do with Political Theory?” Specifically, she wants me to talk about the graduate school route and my personal experiences, while also reflecting a bit on my future employment as a teacher. The audience (I assume) is an undergraduate one, for students who are thinking about political theory as their major. It was a lot harder to write than I thought, and after messing up 7 or 8 single spaced pages worth of ramblings, I refined it down to a modest two paragraphs. I thought I’d post them here, for you guys (and whichever poor soul stumbles on it), since I think its important that graduate students know why it is that they do what they do.
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What Can You Do With Political Theory?
“On Grad School”
One thing you can do with political theory is electing to go to graduate school. As someone who has just completed his Masters and plans to begin doctoral studies in a year, I can only say that the experience thus far has been intoxicating and exhilarating. It is intoxicating because my studying political theory ends up investing everything that I see and experience with an intellectual density that makes it impossible to treat my studies as something that I can pick up or put down at will. The option of not thinking through the optics of political theory is simply not available to me. And it is precisely because of this that it is also exhilarating. Rather than finding it taxing, graduate studies in political theory encourages me to take pleasure in finding new ways of seeing and thinking about politics, justice, authority, power, freedom, and the litany of other core questions that form the heart of political theory.
One thing you can do with political theory if you go to graduate school is teach. For my gap year between my Masters and doctoral studies, I will be teaching as an adjunct instructor at MTSU, teaching introduction to political science/theory courses. I see it as an opportunity to share to many others an enthusiasm for thinking politics and justice anew, to afford them the chance to work through and clarify their own political commitments, and—in the end—hopefully to infect them with a lasting ability to think deeply, with sophistication and nuance, about why it is that they are committed to the things that they are. And, from my vantage point, the option of teaching political theory is an unexpected bonus. It lets me invest all of the personal transformations that I gained while studying as a graduate student into a pedagogical philosophy that will hopefully have effects that go far beyond the classroom. Teachers often strive to transform the imaginations of their students, so that the world, which somehow seemed the inexorable result of historical necessity or natural development, all of a sudden appears as an open game with an outcome that can never be promised in advance. Studying political theory as a graduate student can prepare us to teach our students to struggle and make common cause with others for what before, strictly speaking, they could not have imagined.
But I call teaching a bonus because even if I’m unable to land a stable career as a teacher, graduate study in political theory is an incredible end in itself. The voracious appetite for better, more critical, more nuanced ways of thinking and living is invaluable no matter what vocation I elect to lead in the final instance.
Filed under: Kevin Duong, Academia, life, Political Theory
