Why I won’t ‘stay in my lane’ in academia
Who owns knowledge, and why do I have to ‘stay in my lane’ anyway?
I’ve been toying with whether to write about this or not, but like many topics that end up in my writing, it’s been grating on me for months.
I’m so very tired of being told - directly or indirectly - to stay in my lane. And I know I’m not the only woman being told to do this, so I wanted to write about it.
Let me explain what I mean by this, as it is a phrase that can be used in several contexts. To ‘stay in your lane’ is usually a form of insult. It means to stick to something, a class, a status, a genre, a skill, a job, a role, that has been designated to you, that you should stay in instead of getting ideas above your station.
‘Stay in your lane’ is a way of telling people to get back in their box cos they are not good enough, or will never achieve anything else. It reminds me of the older phrase ‘don’t quit your day job’.
Instead, ‘stay in your lane’ refers to driving, usually said to mean ‘stay in the slow lane, because you can’t keep up with those in the fast lanes’. They are better than you, or know more than you, or you are not welcome in their ‘lane’.
I am going to write about this in the context of academia and specifically, psychology and psychotherapy, so listen up psychs and students.
To become a psychologist in the UK, you need a doctorate. We are all ‘Dr’ by PhD, basically. Fun fact: The PhD came before medical doctors, so being a ‘Dr’ of a topic predates the use of the word doctor to mean a medic.
There are two routes to becoming a psychologist - one is a doctorate by practice and placements with a dissertation on your chosen specialism in psychology (usually DClinPsy or DForenPsy among others), and the other is a PhD in your chosen specialism in psychology with a much larger piece of research that you are then examined and tested on.
Because of the weird and restrictive way academia works, you do your doctorate in one topic, and then there is a strange expectation that you are supposed to ‘stay in your lane’, and research that topic and related topics forever. People will often question what the topic of your PhD was, as if your PhD was the end of your learning and development. This can even happen with post-docs.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it. For me, my PhD was the beginning of my journey, not the end of it. My choice to do a PhD was deliberate - I understood classism and elitism, and I knew what a PhD meant. I certainly did not see it as reaching a pinnacle of knowledge - quite the opposite, I saw it as a skeleton key to open many a gate, so I could understand and access lots more knowledge.
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