So I can officially say its been about a year since beginning a PhD journey.
Whilst most of this time has been spent forming, planning and reading on the project, it has been without some personal changes along the way from MA to a PhD level. Therefore, I’m making this post more of a reflective piece on the kinds of shifts when starting this academic route to this current point.
Thinking back to my undergrad days, I can start to see where my interest in cultural studies began. My background is in film and television studies, where I learnt the basis of analysing film texts and film histories – where I got my first taste of theory-based studies. I became more interested in studying Japanese anime and film for which out of three years of modules, I had only around 2 lectures that were related…quite a tiny amount really. But still I was both invested as a film student and a fan of that media anyway. Even though I was making plans to be a screenwriter (ended in disaster for many reasons, mainly the experience of my third-year screenwriting project), I still kept up this interest in analysing film texts and were adapting my assignments to what texts where interesting me at the time.
Side note: One assignment I was particularly proud of was to do with heroes and villains in film where one of the questions was around female heroic values and identity – I chose Disney’s Mulan and made comparisons to the original folktale and how that became embodied through Disney’s interpretation. I recently found it tucked away on a cloud drive and was just flooded with memories of the library…
This all came together for my dissertation, where I explored the representation of a Japanese fan culture within a few films made by a Japanese anime director – again, something that wasn’t necessarily greatly taught or discussed at my university at the time but I made do fine.
Then when it came to applying for MAs, I was still set on going into screenwriting and was looking into either media production or creative writing, but after an open day and releasing my module results, I changed on the day of applying and immediately went into cultural studies. It was one of those “something clicked” moments. During my MA time, I was allowed to begin to explore these “pockets of knowledge” that interested me, making my own assignments. The MA exposed me to all these different areas of knowledge, and not one was the same. Lo and behold, I started exploring gaming – I am a gaymer myself but never had thought before to analyse it. Writing this post has actually made me realise I’ve been academically interested in sexual imagery and cultures in gaming longer than I realised as one of the first assignments was about a sexually-explicit game (that was also the main focus of my MA dissertation…).
Still though, I think this is what brought the biggest shift or change. I was in an environment that was limitless to what I wanted to study and in a way eventually found a “zone” for me to continue digging deeper which has since become pornographic video games. DISCLAIMER – the biggest lesson here is don’t necessarily research what you like or enjoy because you could come out hating it. Not in every case, but some. So now, I continued down that pathway, making my MA game focused, and proposing a PhD into this genre as it is now and I won’t be looking back at all.
I think what I’m getting at here is that the shift from an MA to a PhD is not just the academic challenge that most would commonly associate – its also a personal shift in which you in a way find yourself or your voice in something you are passionate about. It might not be on something you necessarily like but it’s something you enjoy speaking about. The PhD is a chance to in essence claim something as yours, not in a possessive sense but you are contributing something of value. My MA taught me to expand my interests, and take risks, and the PhD is teaching me “who I am as a researcher”. So now I’m stuck in an abyss of work on pornographic video games of my own doing and I’m glad for that…..It is exactly why doing a PhD is pretty much a leap of faith.
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