No Man’s Blog

[Alternative title: The Long Tail of My PhD]

I’ve submitted my PhD thesis about a year and a half ago. And for various reasons, the moment I was done I moved on with my life and immersed myself in marketing comms, planning, blogging and stuff. In a nutshell, towards the end of it, I was quite fed up with inter-group conflicts, prejudice, self & other, hatred and other social issues of high importance and wanted to have some fun.

My work was about “taking the perspective of the other” - that is, our ability to step out of our shoes and into another’s, or the ability to see the world through the eyes of the other. It is extremely interesting concept as it interlinked biology, psychology and culture. And it has endless applications - from intergroup conflict, to empathy (the ability to “feel with the other”) to understanding consumers and putting ourselves in their place etc. In my (empirical) case, I tried to understand how and why, growing in a conflictual reality like the Israel-Palestinian conflict hinder children’s ability to take the perspective of their “enemy”. I wanted to show that perspective taking is not an internally developed individualistic cognitive ability and that there’s a lot of ideology & culture involved in the concept of perspective taking than previously theorised.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring myself to publish anything as I immediately moved on to do other stuff. Besides, since I decided not to pursue academic career, the idea of working my ass on publishing in some academic paper that 15 other people read wasn’t very appealing. [What I really want is to have the time to actually turned this work into a book, as I still think there's pretty important stuff there]

Anyways, last week I got a short email from my supervisor:

“I am so happy to tell you that you have just been awarded the Robert McKenzie prize for outstanding performance in your PhD.”

And I didn’t even know that I was nominated…Now, don’t try to google Robert McKenzie prize cause all you’ll get is academics’ CVs, but today I got an envelope from the LSE and there it was, a sweet £500 cheque.

So drinks on me!

And if you want to know whats it all about you can have a read here.

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