Slides presented to PhD students at ANU College of Law 27.2.15 in their doctoral seminar series, PhOdyssey

1. PhD & beyond:
the apprenticeship model of learning
Professor Paul Maharg
http://www.slideshare.net/paulmaharg
paulmaharg.com/slides

2. preview
1. The apprenticeship model – what’s it good for
2. Occluded genres in academic study & beyond
3. Anxieties of influence
4. Questions, comments, war stories, parables, other
narratives…

3. Narrative ... is a form whose fundamental characteristic
is to produce closure; argument is the form whose
fundamental characteristic is to produce difference and
hence openness.
Kress, G. 1989. ‘Texture and meaning.’ In Narrative and
Argument, ed. R. Andrews, Milton Keynes: Open University
Press, 12.

4. John Dewey (1859-1952)
‘A democracy is more
than a form of government;
it is primarily a mode of
associated living, of conjoint
communicated activity.’
Democracy and Education
(1916)

5. ‘Academic occluded genres are, in part, those which
support the research publication process but are not
themselves part of the research record.’
Swales (1996, 45)
academic occluded genres

6. In reverse order of seniority:
1.Request letters (for data, copies of papers, advice, etc)
2.Application letters (for jobs, scholarships, etc)
3.Submission letters (accompanying articles, books, etc)
4.Research proposals (for outside funding, etc)
5.Recommendation letters (for students, job seekers, etc)
6.Article reviews (as part of the review process)
7.Book or grant proposal reviews (as above)
8.Evaluation letters for tenure or promotion (for academic committees)
9.External evaluations (for academic institutions)
examples of occluded genres

7. Journal
editor
letters
Journal
editor
letters
Response to
reviewer
letters
Response to
reviewer
letters
EmailEmail
Published
articles
Published
articles
Conference
presentatio
n
Conference
presentatio
n
Grant
proposals
Grant
proposals
Conference
abstracts
Conference
abstracts
Response to
reviewers
Response to
reviewers
Reviewer
evaluations
Reviewer
evaluations
Submission
letters
Submission
letters
Journal
article
Journal
article
ManuscriptsManuscripts
Researcharticle
publicationgenrecluster

8. Journal
editor
letters
Journal
editor
letters
Response to
reviewer
letters
Response to
reviewer
letters
EmailEmail
Published
articles
Published
articles
Conference
presentatio
n
Conference
presentatio
n
Grant
proposals
Grant
proposals
Conference
abstracts
Conference
abstracts
Response to
reviewers
Response to
reviewers
Reviewer
evaluations
Reviewer
evaluations
Submission
letters
Submission
letters
Journal
article
Journal
article
ManuscriptsManuscripts
Researcharticle
publicationgenrecluster
Feak (2009,18)

9. • Yes! And we never learned them at Edinburgh
• Seek out opportunities to learn them through PhD &
early career and beyond
• We all need to (re-)learn them, eg Maharg & PFHEA
• Useful text: Swales & Feakin (2004).
are occluded genres part of PhD apprenticeship?

10. • Even more so!
• The genres still exist but in
different & mediated forms –
new contexts, processes, etc.
• New genres are emerging
do we need to learn them in our digital age?

11. • The academy can exclude, suborne, oppress private
lives
• We are not just legal academics,
and we can create our best work when
we explore what we’ve done in our lives,
who we are, our intellectual influences
and affective bonds.
• See text of Interview: PM & MM
our lives contain occluded genres

12. ‘Now is your time to begin Practices and lay the Foundation of habits that may
be of use to you in every Condition and in every Profession at least that is
founded on a literary or a Liberal Education. Sapere and Fari quae sentiat are
the great Objects of Literary Education and of Study. … mere knowledge
however important is far from being the only or most important Attainment of
Study.
The Habits of Justice, Candour, Benevolence, and a Courageous Spirit are the
first Objects of Philosophy the Constituents of happiness and of personal
honour, and the first Qualifications for human Society and for Active life.’
Adam Ferguson, Lectures, 1775-6, fols 540-1, MSS, Edinburgh University Library,
quoted Maharg (2007, 109-11)
the academy occludes genres, too

13. Non tu corpus eras sine pectore; di tibi
formam,
di tibi diuitias dederunt artemque fruendi.
Quid uoueat dulci nutricula maius alumno,
qui sapere et fari possit quae sentiat, et cui
gratia, fama, ualetudo contingat abunde,
et mundus uictus non deficiente crumina?
Inter spem curamque, timores inter et iras
omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum;
grata superueniet quae non sperabitur hora.
Horace, Epistles, I, iv
You are not merely a body without any feelings.
You have been given beauty, wealth and the means to
appreciate things.
What more would a nurse wish for her sweet little one
Than wisdom, the power to express what he feels,
Much kindness, health and fame,
An elegant way of life, and enough money?
Amid the hope and worry, fear and anger,
take every day that dawns as your last –
the unlooked-for hour will be a welcome surprise.

14. • Poets are anxious about powerful figures in the past, eg early Yeats is too
strongly influenced by Shelley.
• They need to misread the texts of their strong precursors, revisioning the
relationship, and at least in six ways or ‘tropes’, including tessera and
clinamen.
• Misreading or misprision, like intertextuality, opens up latent,
marginalised or hidden textual meaning, and it is possible to use it to
explain and engage with the ideological complexities of powerful texts
and ways of reading within hegemonic traditions. (Bloom 1980)
• All interpretation is misreading (Bloom 1974)
anxiety of influence (Harold Bloom)

15. • Santos takes Bloom seriously by misreading him: poems
distort reality just as law does, and for similar reasons (Santos
1987, 281)
• Santos’ use of clinamen is typically Bloomian in his emphasis
on the creativity of the move: ‘the clinamen does not refuse
the past; on the contrary, it assumes and redeems the past by
the way it swerves from it’ (Santos 2007, 86).
Bloom & de Sousa Santos, part 1

16. • Constitutional arrangements, which are particularly porous,
are always open to misprision: examples are the
endlessly creative debates around the First Amendment
in the USA – in Scotland, post-Referendum,
the discourse of ‘reserved matters’ is another.
• As legal texts, constitutional documents tend to be more
open to arguments of public policy and
rights-based arguments.
• As such, they become shaping texts that,
quite apart from the legislative authority they bear,
are heavily symbolic of the self-identity
of a community.
misprision and constitutions

17. • But just as in Bloom’s critique authors cover influences, or
perform creative swerves around dominant predecessors in a
culture of belatedness, so too does a constitution.
• Every constitution has a relationship to predecessors; and in
addition to granting rights, it creates a normative mode of
discourse that closes down future debate, prevents the
development of new discourse, establishes its own autonomy.
Maharg (2012)
Bloom and constitutionality

18. • Bloom’s work exposes the rhetorical nature of constitutional
discourse and normativity that has the force of law’s violence
• Santos uses this to argue, particularly in his recent work, for a
replacement of the ‘canonic tradition of monocultures of
knowledge, politics and law’ by an ‘ecology of knowledges’,
central to which is ‘the distinction between conformist action
and […] action-with-clinamen’ (Santos, 2007, 85).
Quoted Maharg (2012)
Bloom & de Sousa Santos, part 2

19. the anxiety of influence in doctoral studies

20. (Some of) our anxious questions:
•How original is my work?
•How will my evidence & argument be interpreted?
•Am I fitting into a canon? Challenging that canon? Creating an
‘ecology of knowledges’? How will I do that?
•Is conformism what I want here?
•How do I move out of apprenticeship, find my voice, join the
full community?
the constitution of doctoral studies

21. Bloom, H. (1974). The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Bloom, H. (1980). A Map of Misreading. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Feak, C. (2009). Negotiating publication: Author responses to peer review of medical research articles in thoracic surgery. Revista
Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 59: 17–34. Available at:
http://publica.webs.ull.es/upload/REV%20RECEI/59%20-%202009/02%20Feak.pdf.
Maharg, P. (2007). Transforming Legal Education: Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century. Ashgate
Publishing, Farnham.
Maharg, P. (2012). The identity of Scots law: redeeming the past. In Scottish Life and Society. A Compendium of Scottish
Ethnology. Law, ed. Mark Mulhern. Birlinn Press & The European Ethnological Research Centre, Edinburgh.
Santos, B. de Sousa (1987). Law: a map of misreading. Toward a postmodern conception of law, Journal of Law and Society, 14,
3, 279-302.
Santos, B. de Sousa (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking: from global lines to ecologies of knowledges, Review (Fernand Braudel
Centre), 30 (2007) 45-90.
Swales, J. (1996). Occluded genres in the academy: the case of submission letters. In Academic Writing: Intercultural and Textual
Issues, Eija Ventola, Anna Mauranen, eds, John Benjamins Publishing, New York, 46-58.
Swales, J., Feak C. (2004). Academic Writing for Graduate Students. Essential Tasks and Skills. Second edition, University of
Michigan Press.
references

22. Email:paul.maharg@anu.edu.au
Web: paulmaharg.com
Slides: paulmaharg.com/slides