Putting together the PhD Puzzle

During the years since finishing my master's degree at Claremont Graduate University, I have struggled with visualizing what my entry to a PhD program might look like despite the fact that I can't imagine my vision(s) reaching their full potential without a scholarly community. Therefore, I have felt somewhat stalled with respect to my academic career—but there is indeed a silver lining in it since my stewing in whatever it is I'm stewing in has produced two published essays, both some strange offshoot of "nature writing" that pull in semiotics, ecological identity, and cultural history. For a while, it seemed that these scribal projects were taking me further away from my context as a religious studies scholar, and therefore left me more confused as to where my academic "people," are. I've also spent that time getting married to a person equally geeky about ecological consciousness (yay!) and cutting my teeth as a nature educator and wilderness guide. I've gotten the feeling lately that I've passed a zenith (or nadir?) and am on some sort of return, a drift to inevitable community—scholarly and otherwise.

So then it seems to be an issue of "which discipline" shall I land in, since a central struggle for me has been how to reconcile my work in nature education and ancestral earth-based skills with the highly literary/theoretical world of the humanities as I've experienced them. My field thus far, religious studies, is already a multi-disciplinary field, yet I've still been hard pressed to find departments in which the combination of scientific and literary analysis is an acceptable approach to analysis of human relationships with the transpersonal and sacred. (A big part of this is the methodological and ethical impasses many claim between the cognitive and evolutionary sciences and postmodern/poststructuralist approaches to cultural studies. I, for one, believe that they can be reconciled as long as we keep working to redefine and expand our definitions of "cognition" as well as "culture," which are, respectively the things that each approach takes as their universal referent)

I see these realms of thought and practice--the study of what humans consider sacred and the (often participatory) study of ecology, that is, not only naturalism/nature observation but ecology as a sort of practice and mode of being-- as interconnected. One way they are interconnected is in my experience of the ways that human-animal, human-landscape, and human-other relationships inform identity and personhood, for myself and others. Growing up, I was ripe for a paradigm shift around identity since I was queer and gender non-conforming in a small New England town, and so had to look into the virtual, beyond the human, and beyond the Western for representations of personhood that could provide me with a sense of belonging in the world. (Hence my fascination with animals as well as hacker and cyberpunk culture.) But that curiosity opened a door to a whole other world—more precisely a multiplicity of worlds—where definitions and standards of knowledge, ways of knowing, personhood, and agency were radically different from those of the modern Western culture I had known. Such perspectives come most blatantly from animistic and shamanistic world-views, but treatment of the cosmos as alive, inter-subjective, and reciprocal can also be traced in my own ancestral Greek history, even in modern Greek religion's iconographic tradition. For all this theory there has been a fair share of practice. For example, when engaging in earth-based living skills like tracking and hunting, the intersubjectivity in the natural world--the phenomenon of being seen, noticed, and apprehended by the non-human world--has become for me an unavoidable fact.

There have been inklings of my fate in encounters with some of my intellectual heroes, like Donna Haraway, Stuart Kauffman, Barbara J. King or Ellen Dissanayake, who did and do really important and relevant interdisciplinary work in the vein that I imagine, in the intersection of ecology, semiotics, and religion/spirituality. But now the literary and scientific trend toward animal intelligence and language (thus semiosis, meaning-making, in the non-human world, in my estimation one of the worthier literary trends coming out of environmentalist culture) is getting too big to ignore and it's inviting, in some sectors, a reframing of both science and the humanities. It's also manifesting in the form of recognizing indigenous ways of knowing as legitimate means of tempering and de-centering some of the more limiting hermeneutics of western science. 

When I began this blog back in 2008, my rallying call (still visible above) was that "natural ecologies must be seen as the original cybernetic systems," which, though I wouldn't stumble upon biosemiotics until years later in grad school, was my attempt to gesture at the perhaps not-fully-awakened ability of ecology to reframe our ideas about information, computation, and cognition. Many of the themes that I have tracked under this rubric now are really able to be put in conversation (and recognized as something integral) via what some are calling "posthumanities" which some describe as being characterized by the "non-human turn" in the humanities (and in the philosophy of science). This is very exciting! 

Philosophy and learning I think is so much like tracking (following and interpreting a trail of signs made by an animal which can provide novel information and encounters). Cognitively, tracking I think provides a framework, even a theory, for semiosis (meaning making) and this explains why when I was studying history and tracking in separate context, I started to see historiography as a form of tracking and tracking as a form of historiography. I elucidate this idea in an essay forthcoming in the eco-poetic journal Written River, "Tracking as a Way of Knowing," which I look forward to sharing here.

I only see a piece of this. Looking at the generation younger than me, (at least the kids I work with at Feet on the Earth, which are admittedly a very specific demographic) I can already tell that as they come of age they are going to blow this sh*t up. I want to respect my own dreams, so they can dream as big as possible.

I think it's time to pull out my old notes on PhD programs...