This past spring I graduated, receiving my PhD in Religious Studies from UNC Chapel Hill. After some encouragement from my adviser, I signed up for the doctoral hooding ceremony. I was on the fence about it, having participated in commencement ceremonies for both my Bachelor's and Master's degrees, but in the end I was happy that I did it. There was something cathartic about dressing up in the fancy robe and sitting with a group of other newly minted PhD's as we crossed the stage one by one, receiving our hoods and waving to our respective entourages of friends and family. Celebrating that day with my wife, son, parents, and in-laws, it was a powerful recognition of all the hard work that had lead up to that moment. Yes, I worked very hard to earn this degree, but so too did everyone else there with me at that ceremony. So much sacrifice involved by so many people, its difficult to quantify what it means, or what it is worth.
The doctoral training process definitely changed me. On the surface, I acquired a host of different skills - learning to read new languages, how to work with centuries' old manuscripts, organizing and writing a massive research project over the course of several years, and of course, formatting all those footnotes (manually, no fancy citation software for me!). Those are obvious changes, things I can point and say that I was unable to do when I started this process five years ago. A real area of growth for me was developing useful analytical frameworks for critiquing how society is organized. From the everyday and mundane to the extraordinary and offensive, I find myself constantly asking questions such about the intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, age, and yes, religion. With the work of critical thinkers like Audre Lorde, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (and so many others) in mind, the world looks very different.
How is my experience living in this world a function of how I measure up (in my own eyes and in the eyes of others) with regards to these categories? How do other peoples' experiences vary, and at times, vary significantly, from my own, and why is that? What is the balance between individual agency and systemic coercion? To be clear, I started asking many of these questions much earlier in my life, but without a doubt my doctoral training equipped me with a much more rigorous and nuanced set of tools. While they certainly inform my scholarly work, I want to stress that they also give me cause to consider (and reconsider!) everyday interactions:
the man who knocks on my door to ask about raking my leaves
applying for health insurance
navigating the power-ful and power-lessness of parenting
With all this in mind, I think the best term for what I have learned and developed during my graduate work would have to be "analytical empathy." One of the professors for whom I was a teaching assistant told me that their goal in teaching was to help students develop a sense of empathy for the historical and cultural Other. That ability to put oneself in another's shoes, even for a moment, and imagine what they are experiencing. In the courses I teach and in my research, I am often times separated from that Other by centuries of time and many many miles' worth of space. But in real life, even though those distances shrink considerably, they still exist. To be clear, one does NOT need to read post structuralism (or any other school of social critique) to have empathy - I'm not even sure the word appeared once in any of the material I read for any coursework for any of my three degrees. I think my ability to appreciate how I experience the world has been enhanced through the acquisition of these tools, but of course there are many other paths.
A few weeks ago, I received my diploma in the mail. Eventually, I will frame and hang it on the wall in my house, or perhaps an office somewhere. When I look at it, I will think about many things. Hand formatting all those footnotes. Learning to read nasta'liq. The sacrifices of so many people, especially those who matter most to me, so that I could pursue this degree. But I will also reflect on how I exist and function in the world differently as a result of undergoing this process. Much like the diploma, that way-of-being in the world is something that no one can ever take away or undo.