Sunday, October 15, 2006

Reductionism inherent to grad school

Another Sunday night, another important book of social theory reduced to a mere two page summary for a 5 minute in-class presentation.

This, following the reducing of my entire two years of MA life onto a single page for the Ontario Graduate Scholarship application, and a comparatively expansive two pages for the SSHRC Canada Masters Scholarship (both of which get submitted to my department tomorrow, for better or for worse...)

Reduce, summarize, compress, congeal. These seem to be the action verbs of my emerging MA identity. But since I prefer to expand, elaborate, detail and examine, this new ethos isn't fitting me so well. I'm tired of butchering amazing works of social theory (Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment today) to fit a five minute "bebe la-la" presentation for a class.

When do I get to be broad, deep and complete?

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