Graduate school is a place that can break down the most confident of students. It isn’t just that you may go from being the smartest student in a room to being one of many brilliant students. It is also in the disparities with which graduate students are treated through mentoring in the classroom setting and beyond. Whose ideas get engaged with with zealous during class discussion. What kinds of ideas get public praise. Who is called out as doing innovative research or advancing theory. Seeing the patterns, it’s easy to focus on who you are not and thus associate certain labels with others and not yourself.
That was my experience with theory in graduate school. I was new to theory as I was also new to Sociology as a PhD student. The required classic sociological theory course was the first theory course I had ever taken. I did my best to keep up, but also to understand why this was a required course and why there were not one, but two required theory courses in our curriculum. During that time, the idea of who a theorist was among my colleagues and I solidified in my mind as someone who engaged with theorists. That is, someone who advanced the ideas of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Gramsci, or Bourdieu. It was someone would you could add an “ian” to a name to describe their work as Marxian, Weberian, etc. Someone who was consistent in their use of and engagement with someone else’s theoretical ideas.
That vision of a theorist excluded me. It also excluded anyone who didn’t define theory in a very particular way. Ironically, the one reading I refer to constantly over the years since taking theory points this out. In “The Meaning of Theory” (2008), Abend identifies 7 different ways that sociologists use the term theory. Only one of the definitions (Theory4) aligns with the way I had identified theory and thus theorists during my early years of graduate school. And yet, despite strongly embracing Abend’s argument that there is more than one way to think about theory, I strongly held onto this one vision of how someone was a theorist throughout my time in graduate school.
To be clear, my research has always engaged with what Abend (2008) calls Theory1 or “a general proposition, or logically-connected system of general propositions, which establishes a relationship between two or more variables” (p. 177) as well as Theory2 or “an explanation of a particular social phenomenon” (p. 178). Theory guided my early research on the racial wealth gap. It defined my interest in studying how racial segregation affected parolees’ employment outcomes. It informed my Master’s research and subsequent article on race and gentrification. It was what led to my dissertation topic on how the news media represents gentrification.
It wasn’t until I began to read the literature of W.E.B. Du Bois for a new project during my postdoc that I started to truly see myself as a theorist. Perhaps not surprising that I only first saw myself as a theorist as I engaged with a Theory4 like definition. Moving beyond that took me writing my own theoretical take on gentrification as a racialized process of class change, my first non-empirical, non-methodological publication. Today, I know that what makes me a theorist is that I am constantly seeking to move beyond documenting racial inequality to explain why racial inequality persists and reproduces. This means engaging with more than one theorist. It means thinking innovatively about how theories of race and racism can better inform the study of racial inequality in my areas of study. It means putting theories across subfields in conversation to produce better explanations.
I may never be the kind of theorist I saw amongst my peers in graduate school, but I have emerged as a theorist despite that. Maybe you are a theorist too.
practical phd 