What can you do with Sociology/Psychology/Cultural Studies/Social Anthropology post-grad qualification

[onebatmother]

Apart from pat self on back?

I am thinking of retraining but no idea about jobs. Those are the things I'm considering studying - what REAL ACTUAL JOBS might I get with a postgrad MA/PHD in them?

I mean ones that pay money. Any money. But must be money.

Thanks dearies.

The thread title is now starting to seem like the opening line of a joke.

This one especially made me laugh out loud:

An economist is someone who has had a human being described to him, but has never actually seen one.

And this one:

I begin with the assumption that economists have their uses. I know many of you will disagree with this, but as economists themselves say, 'we can relax the assumption later'.

You can laugh at economist jokes all afternoon here but I'd better go back to work...

What can you do with Sociology/Psychology/Cultural Studies/Social Anthropology post-grad qualification?

A: Change a lightbulb in a wide range of amusingly self-revelatory ways.

Ba-boom.

How many cognitive behavioural therapists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Two. One to tell the lightbulb that it has to keep a detailed diary of the correlation of black thoughts, dark feelings, and unilluminating behaviours; and one to explain how the fuck you write a diary in the flaming pitch dark.

Bloody hell. This has moved on since we discovered sausages weren't porn.

Am tempted by the health and humanities one myself! I dream about starting a new PhD about literacy practices utilised by people using the web to research their own health (prob maternal/neonatal needs)...

What do you mean by 'literacy practices'?

Habbibu, I am supposed to be writing a research proposal on something very similar. How people access the internet to manage their own health (not that I have any real interest in health research but as others have pointed out further down the thread, the interesting topics in the social sciences don't have funding money at the moment but health does).

I'm involved in a research project about that at the moment too. using my, ahem, "expertise in internet forum talk" aka mumsnet experience.

I would call it discursive practices rather than literary practices but that's a disciplinary difference.

literacy practices = googling

lol swedes/

And what do you mean by discursive practices fennel? Is is something like 'the way people interact linguistically online'?

Ha! I posted that, went away, thought, "damn - someone is bound to ask about that, and it'll be Threadie...". It's basically about seeing literacy as a social and culturally defined practice (writing this on this thread makes me realise I was less of an empiricist than I thought); that the literacy/illiteracy dichotomy is essentially false (and yes, I know, duh, but in my field and others that came across as a fucking revelation to some, believe me).

Lots of work is done on "situated literacies" - so that the literacy practices you bring to reading a gas bill are not the same as those you bring to a novel; and these influence and are influenced by the physical setting of the text itself, and that's where my interest lay at PhD/postdoc level - examining not texts, but the physical nature of manuscripts to see what literacy practices could be understood from them, if that makes sense.

My putative proposal would be - and I'm not sure how it would work - to do a similar thing with the internet - pick a few sites, look at layout, access, printability, colour, language type, claims to actual or spurious authority, etc, and then do some audience analysis, etc. But I think it's (a) a long way off and (b) probably done. Also (c) I'm really fucking rusty at this stuff and (d) some bastard friend of ours borrowed my key texts and left them on a train...

I wouldn't be so much looking at chat forums, Fennel, although that's another very interesting literacy practice - more on texts set up to be authoritative, and how people respond to that, and what they bring to it. Some discourse analysis elements - not sure it that's in your area?

Thank you Habb. That is lucid and interesting. Gosh, it seems like what you have done re physical manuscripts is doable on a massive scale re internet -- it's like situated literacy on stilts.

Well, I'd be very selective. I mean, in some ways it'd also be interesting to look at where people access this info - at home? At work? In a library? Do they print or just work from the screen, and does looking at a print copy make a difference (i.e. you're more likely to annotate it, refer back to it, take it to a GP, etc)?

My PhD was partly triggered by people looking at children's school projects, and the physical nature of those - binders, colours, stuck in pictures, etc.

Have you come across this journal?

(Is this a meta-literacy/meta-discursive practice.)

Ooh - no, I hadn't. But David Crystal is on the board! Oh, I'm so behind the times it's probably been done seven times over.

Actually, people sharing and reading stuff together is another kind of literacy practice - the virtual nature of it changes it slightly (i.e. you don't know what bit of the site I'm looking at, unlike if you're looking over my shoulder).

The big guy on this when I was doing it was someone at Lancaster called David Barton. His books were very good.

So. We can expect a MN Institute of Very Clever Projects very soon.

You know it's not a bad idea: we'd probably get more selling out sponsorship funding than my tinpot institution anyhow.

We could have a virtual 'college'. And a virtual launch party. And a virtual journal.

It's been done hasn't it?

The Foundation for Metachat and Wanking.

And anyway, where was the best Myers-Briggs test. I wanna do it. Just to confirm I am entirely unemployable. I was going to write 'except in the job that I do' but I suspect really I'm entirely unemployable in that too.

Scroll down a zillion posts. A few people inc me have linked to their results and you can access the test from there I think.

Onebat can be Director of Research at the Clever Projects thing. Sorted.

How many procrastinators does it god that sock drawer is a mess.

I'll have you all (eyes Lenin ) know that I am not procrastinating! I am definitely moving forward in a totally unprecedentedly informed and non-chaotic manner, towards some kind of resolution which will bring me closer to researching the areas necessary for making a decision about what to research.

Really - I really am. Didn't do any of the phoning today but for good (ie paying) reasons but about to embark on it now. So apols for absence. I am achieving. [groin]