I passed my PhD viva!
So is this the end? Or just the beginning?
These are questions I ask myself in the aftermath of my viva, in which I defended my thesis ‘Thrown’, a creative writing project that uses fiction to examine a possible near-future scenario where the competing forces of government and online tech giants use technology to manipulate society.
The viva, although a blast – because who doesn’t want to discuss their work with well-respected academics and writers – was no walk in the park.
Having spent hours making videos of myself talking about my thesis and replaying them, marking up my work with tens of mini post-its (Prince2 Project Managment-style!) and even making a presentation of the salient points, not to present but to help jog my memory whilst in the viva, I didn’t refer to any of it. After all, it was – as my examiners reminded me at the start – supposed to be a conversation. A rigorous one, but a conversation nonetheless.
I prepared the question ‘How is this an original contribution to knowledge?’. They didn’t ask it and when the AI question came up (‘Why did you choose a VR and not AI to model your dystopian view of the future misuse of technology?’) they asked it, but not in the way I’d envisaged.
Some things went to plan. I enjoyed talking about the role of surveillance capitalism in today’s society, about dataism and the misuse of our digital footprints to manipulate society. Somewhat unexpectedly, I found that I had to defend my ambition to tell a cautionary tale. Tempted to quote Brecht and the tradition of didactic theatre, I remembered I’d cut discussion of the alienation effect out of the final version of my thesis and veered away from it. Nonetheless, the question repeated on me afterwards, Brechtian-style.
I was asked about ‘geworfenheit’ (Heiddegger’s concept of ‘being thrown into the world’) and how it’s relevant to the future we find ourselves hurled into, where reality is no longer concrete, where all we can do is respond to our immediate surroundings at any particular point in time and space, be they real or virtual. My existential crisis rears its head in all my work and none more than in this thesis where the simulacrum hovers.
My examiners suggested my creative work would be best developed as a work of speculative fiction, my attempts to shoehorn my work into a thriller format not doing the ideas in my novel justice.
It’s been a long road that started back in 2019 and finishes shortly, as soon as my amends are done and my thesis is committed to the annals of the University of Leicester. It’s been a road that ploughed a furrow through the heart of the pandemic whilst so many other things in life seemed to be falling apart.
I’m looking forward to graduating in a fancy gown and hat sometime next year but beyond that lies a whole world of writing. I really hope I’ll be able to share some of that world with others, whether it be through the publication of speculative novels, essays about my work, or lectures and presentations. Or just more conversations. After so many years of sitting alone at my writing desk, I’m ready to share.
Finally, I hope there’s a novel in this, or at least there will be once I’ve developed it further for commercial publication. More on this soon.
Of course, it’s not the end. It’s the very beginning. For every day is the first day.
