Guest blog written by SueJeanne Koh (UC Irvine)
Attending APARRI’s annual conference last summer reminded me what I enjoyed most about this community. Of course there is the good food, insightful presentations, and reconnecting with familiar colleagues as well as meeting new ones. But one thing that makes APARRI a unique community is how its singular focus on APA religions is expressed in multidisciplinary fashion. Biblical studies scholars jostle with sociologists, theologians from various religious traditions connect, historians and anthropologists compare notes, chaplains, filmmakers, writers, and other creatives help us to see our shared realities from different perspectives.
Because of its commitment to multidisciplinarity, APARRI implicitly acknowledges how questions related to APA religions benefit from diverse methodologies and expression. I believe that its generative approach to academic scholarship can lead to possibilities for cross-pollination and fresh directions, not only in terms of what is gleaned but how it is communicated, and to whom. In other words, APARRI’s multidisciplinarity makes me think that it is an ideal context for PhD students and recent PhD graduates to begin considering the possibilities of multiple career pathways, and not just the normative one of a tenure-track, faculty position within an institution of higher education. In this first post of a two-part series, I will sketch out a theoretical framework for why we might consider careers apart from faculty positions.
Let me clarify, first, what I mean by career pathways, and how it might be connected to multidisciplinarity, by starting with the basic structure of the PhD program. A PhD program is typically housed within an academic department, and follows a linear and hierarchical progression: coursework, MA thesis, qualifying exams, dissertation prospectus, and then finally a dissertation defense. This dissertation is meant to illustrate the student’s ability to contribute original knowledge to their discipline and other scholars in the academy. Under the direction of an advisor, the doctoral program functions as a kind of intellectual apprenticeship. For many students, this achievement caps many years of personal sacrifice in the pursuit of questions that animate their minds and hearts, not only because they believe in their inherent value, but also as an exercise in “worldmaking.” To answer such questions is to offer a different way of seeing, and therefore inhabiting, the world.
This process of obtaining a PhD is what Shakespeare scholar Paul Yachnin describes as both the “great value” and “deep problem” of the degree. Although students often enter their programs with the hope to impact or transform the world through teaching and writing, the intellectual formation that is implicitly nurtured in a PhD program is often imagined as being housed within the academy, as a kind of “Church of Knowledge.” That is, even though the knowledge and skills gained with a PhD does have value for a variety of contexts, our training often only allows us to imagine this knowledge and skills as mostly legible in the classroom, or through the single-author monograph.
So for me, the question of career pathways is not simply about the reality of a challenging faculty market, unsympathetic administrators who are looking at the bottom line, reactionary politics, or the increasing use of AI in educational spaces.
This post is not about asking students to temper their expectations and to look at the placement numbers post-graduation with a “Plan B” or “alt-ac,” phrases that frame any outcome other than a tenure-track faculty position as evidence of falling short. Rather, it’s a challenge and invitation to think more expansively about how and where the knowledge and skills gained in a PhD might be employed. This is where I’ve found design thinking a useful framework for exploring career possibilities, drawing upon the work of Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
Although design thinking is a strategic model that is well-known in business and STEM contexts, it is less familiar to those with humanities and social sciences backgrounds. Design thinking is an iterative and creative process by which a question or problem is addressed without a predetermined outcome—or said differently, one right solution. This isn’t to say that there aren’t parameters for addressing the question; for example, while the design of cars may vary across carmakers, all cars share common traits, like four wheels, an engine, side view mirrors, etc. But design thinking intentionally incorporates user or human experience to arrive at solutions that aim to reflect not only the user’s needs, but also values, aesthetics, and priorities.
There are two ways one can begin to incorporate design thinking into one’s doctoral program. One is a philosophical shift, a reconsideration of the doctoral program by reframing how we understand the skills being learned in religion and theology programs. I am not necessarily talking in the parlance of “transferable skills,” which implies a competitive contrast with STEM or social science disciplines, insofar as the latter are thought to have skills that can directly apply to non-academic contexts or industry and which theology and religion programs presumably lack. Instead, I’m reaffirming the value of the study of religion and theology, and specifically the value and study of Asian American religions and theologies, and the reasons that animate this work. We aren’t invested in this work simply because of our own self-interest, or because of our investment in the academy. Rather, the work is important because it has public significance, and because of how such knowledge construction can help illuminate “relationships across time: with ourselves, with one another, with our built and natural environments.” Even if this observation seems obvious, the reality is that creating bidirectional bridges between scholarship and multiple publics is not something that scholars within the academy are trained to do, but that graduate students should include as part of their training. It is about imagining how humanities scholarship might be generated, and flourish, in multiple contexts, and not merely through the faculty position.
A second way to consider how design thinking might be employed in graduate programs is more in line with how it’s taught in the Stanford design lab. This direction would underscore the belief that a fulfilling and engaging life is a worthy pursuit in itself, and separate the doctoral program from its traditional telos. Again, I offer this as a possibility realizing that most doctoral students enter their programs with the ultimate desire to teach and write within their disciplines, and that this is a worthy pursuit. But it bears remembering that we are more than the sum of our knowledge, that the limits on our lives—our other passions, families, communities—might be pathways to realizing a generative life; one, as Bill Burnett and David Evans describe, “is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and…always [with] the possibility of surprise.” (Location 312 of 3137)
In my next post, I’ll share some practical resources that can help PhD students consider more expansively about what they might consider after obtaining the degree, and how faculty can advocate for those opportunities in their departments.
SueJeanne Koh is the Assistant Director of Graduate Futures and Research Engagement at the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. She is also a writer and teacher in Christian theology and ethics who has published on academic contingency, Asian American and Reformed theology, and settler colonialism. SueJeanne is invested in building collaborations across educational institutions, religious communities, and nonprofit organizations to address social and political challenges, and help implement sustainable organizational practices.