Dr. Academic Generalist?

Puzzle board generalist

Over the past few months, this idea has been floating around in my head, but I haven't really found the words to describe my general ponderings, so here goes a freewriting activity that I hope makes sense...

July will be the one-year anniversary from whence I passed my dissertation defense (yay!) and became a "doctor"👏 (not the 'damn it Jim!" kind😜).  Over the last few years, leading up to my dissertation defense, I had spent a lot of time becoming an expert in collaboration, and specifically in an open educational context. There was a little rhizomatic stuff there, but I need to go back and read more about it. I had also spent a lot of time building my expertise on the Community of Inquiry model before I abandoned that line of inquiry, as well as communities of practice, MOOCs, and other peripheral areas to collaboration and open ed. 

One of my friends, who had already completed their doctoral journey a few years prior, told me to really take in, and relish, this experience of doing a deep dive into a particular topic. After I graduated I would not have many opportunities like that.  I took this to mean that future academic work would either probably build on top of past knowledge, hence literature reviews would be more additive in nature (i.e., what's new this year?), or one doesn't really have time for these sorts of fun deep dives.

I've seen the latter (the shallow dive) with people who come from other disciplines and start to write about education. This lack of depth really shows in much of what's been published as "research" into Emergency Remote Teaching these past couple of years. But I  digress...there's a book chapter about that forthcoming 😅.

 Now that I am getting my research groove back, I've started to ponder: Is research (the deep dive stuff) incompatible with a breadth of expertise?  Or, to put it a different way, do academics tend to become typecast and pigeonholed into a specific field (or limited areas of inquiry), so that they have the opportunity to do deep dives, throughout their careers? Or are there academics who are jacks of many academic areas of inquiry?

Is there room in the field for an academic, with a doctorate, that's a generalist? Someone who reads a lot processes it, maybe writes on a blog, and engages with others, and generally has a broader view of the field than someone who specializes on something specific during their careers?  It seems like much of the oxygen in the field is sucked up by people who publish a lot (be it articles, chapters, or books), but there really is little recognition for those deep divers who might be quietly brilliant. 🤔* I guess traditional "success" for an academic is measured in papers had h-indexes, but that seems limiting to me. My metric for success has been measured is interesting experiences, good thought-provoking discussions with people who've become friends, and "aha moments". This seems like enough to me, but does the broader field value that? At the moment, I am not eyeing any academic jobs, so I don't particularly care if they value it or not, just curious. So, if you've gotten to this point in the blog...

What does "success" look like for you fellow doctors and abd'ers?

Marginalia:

* Re-reading this before I post, I am sure there is a lurker connection somewhere here...