.jpg)
Call My Supervisor! A PhD podcast
Call My Supervisor! A PhD podcast
Series Three, Episode One: Cristina Ramirez
Cristina Ramirez, a doctoral candidate from King's College London's Department of Political Economy, joins us to unpack the complex relationship between populist leaders and electoral institutions. Through the lens of her research on Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, Cristina reveals how the centralised electoral system in Brazil might just outshine the US when it comes to resisting populist pressures.
Our conversation also uncovers Cristina's academic journey and she shares candid insights into the trials and triumphs of pursuing a PhD, emphasizing resilience, adaptability, and the indispensable role of a support network. Cristina's story is a reminder of the balancing act required in academia, from mastering new skills to maintaining focus amidst the inevitable challenges.
Hello everyone, and we are back again for a new series of Call my Supervisor, the PhD podcast for the School of Politics and Economics at King's College London. Would you believe they've let us do it all again for a third time? You know the format by now, but for those who are new, in this series we'll be speaking to doctoral candidates from one of our departments and we're going to be picking their brains about all things PhD, from their research and ideas to their revelations and advice. So my name is Daniel Mansfield and I am the Communications Officer for the School of Politics and Economics, and it is my great pleasure to introduce our guest for this episode, cristina Ramirez, a doctoral candidate studying with the Department of Political Economy. Welcome, christina.
Speaker 2:Hi Daniel, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:So, without further ado, let's launch into it, and I'm going to ask you to introduce your research by giving us the title and just a brief overview.
Speaker 2:Yes. So my research is the undermining by populist leaders of electoral institutions, a case study of the US and Brazil. So, in other words, I am trying to measure how the cultural relationship between institutional design and democratic resilience when it comes to electoral institutions and I'm using these two case studies, which is the US and Brazil, and specifically with the populist treatment would be Donald Trump and Bolsonaro. So I always try to describe it as an engineer trying to measure this huge building, or two buildings one that was built in a seismic area and one that was not built in a seismic area, and they both had a earthquake of similar proportions. And what I'm trying to find out is which were the mechanisms Like? Was there a reason why one did better than the other? And, if so, what are the mechanisms that allows for these buildings, in the case, electoral institutions, to be resilient?
Speaker 1:Okay, so what about this area interests you? Why did you pick this for your PhD?
Speaker 2:So, again, like probably every single PhD, at least in the humanities area, I started with this huge question and this huge idea that I wanted to do, and then I had to bring it back to earth for it to be a doable project. So I was very interested in populism, and especially from a comparative perspective with the USS and Latin America. I'm from Latin America and I was in 2016,. I was in the US because I'm also a journalist, so I was covering the 2016 election when Donald Trump won and one of the things that struck me was how similar Donald Trump and that entire campaign was to what we were really used to seeing in Latin America, what we were not necessarily used to seeing in the US politics or in European politics, in what we would consider more mature democracies. So this idea stuck with me, trying to figure out a way to try to understand this phenomenon and then, throughout the process, an understanding populism and you know the underlining sort of reasoning which is predominant in political science, while some authors would disagree that populism ends up being bad for democracy. And then it became how am I going to prove this? And that's a huge question, that's a very loaded question. And then I am fascinated by institutions and I think political institutions are what makes democracy keep going, and I do think there is a relationship with how those institutions are designed and then how they can perform while under stress. We consider populism an endogenous challenge to democratic institutions. And you know, that's how I sort of ended up where I am right now, from this massive question of three countries, because I wanted to do Mexico, brazil and the US, and it had to be narrowed down.
Speaker 2:And I think Brazil and the US are a great comparison because it's very hard to compare US politics with Latin American politics. It's very hard to do simply because of the socioeconomic differences that have always existed between the South and the North. But here we had a very interesting case Brazil, as the US, is a federalist country. It's a huge country and it has a very decentralized federalist system, comparable to the US, to the point that after the democratization process, the first constitution of Brazil was actually copied or mimicked after the US constitution.
Speaker 2:And then you had two leaders, which I think one was a bit of a result of the other. There was a contagion effect there, because in Latin America we are more used to, until Bolsonaro, thinking of populist as left-wing populist. So right-wing populism is relatively while you've had elements, it's relatively newer to Latin America, but then you had two very similar leaders who had a very similar rhetoric, and now you have two very different institutional systems in terms of design One that's exactly designed to try to contain executive overreaching, and then you have another one that really relies on norms and unwritten rules and just like the ethics and the morals of the politicians. So it's a great comparison, because before this you probably wouldn't have been able to do it, and I think it's a different shift to how you look at from a comparative perspective of the constitutional traditions of both countries.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you mentioned there that you started out with this big broad question. You were thinking about Mexico as well. What's the process like, taking this big broad issue and narrowing it down to just the two nations? Is it a process of realizing oh my God, I've got so much work to do? Is it a process of speaking to your supervisor and they say look, this is too much. Why don't you focus? How was that for you?
Speaker 2:This process was very long and I think, if I go from the minute I was even writing my proposal to apply to a PhD to what I have now, which is a workable research question, it was more than a year of narrowing it down.
Speaker 2:The three countries was the first thing that I had to take out. This was a very simple conversation with my supervisor saying yeah, yeah, this project, because it's mostly a qualitative project, not a quant project. If it was a quant project you could have had many countries, but because we're studying the cultural mechanisms, it's much more labor intensive in terms of you know, qual research. It was like you would need, basically, you know, eight years to be able to get this done. That was before I even applied to the PhD and I was like, ok, that could not be done.
Speaker 2:And I think my process, the way I started thinking about it I think this happened in the run up to my upgrade exam and especially in my first year in the PhD is I have great ideas. Ok, but then how am I going to prove this idea? Is this a workable research question that can be proven? In that entire process then, of course, you start yourself to narrow it down because you could say I really think I have something here. Yes, and this is a shift from my way of thinking as a journalist to my way of thinking as an academic. But is this provable? Is this a working research question? And I think that the research design of it it doesn't matter how long it takes, because it's better to have it done perfectly well than then just go into the research part and realize that you do not have a doable or workable research question.
Speaker 1:So tell us about some of the work involved in the PhD you mentioned briefly there. It's qualitative for the most part. What does that involve? Is that interviews? Is that textual analysis?
Speaker 2:So I'm doing a bit of a it's mostly qualitative paper. It does have a bit of at least uh, quantitative, uh analysis for the resilient measurements, but that's taking pre-existing data sets to sort of use um and then qualitative work. I'm doing what it's called process tracing, which is I'm trying to, as the name says, trace the process and sort of find the cultural mechanisms of how a process came to be. So you do that. The way I'm doing it, the way my plan is structured, is first it starts with a comparative, historical, comparative analysis, when I just go back to the background of both countries and how their systems came to be, and then a little bit of how the Trump and Bolsonaro strategies developed in regards to their undermining of electoral institutions. And after that then you go and you find the variables and where you think you can measure what happened, and then find if there and where you think you can measure what happened, and then find if there's a casual relationship. That talks specifically in my case about institutional design and two variables, which is apolitical and decentralized, and see there's a relationship between that and then the other part, which is the measurement of resilience.
Speaker 2:And for the measurements of resilience I've sort of used existing democratic measurements. So I've used VDEM data sets and the perception of electoral integrity data sets and that's how it's been done. And for that to have a bigger implications than what I've done is I've gone back to all of the Americas. So all the countries in the Americas, I've tried to classify their electoral institutions. So all the countries in the Americas, I've tried to classify their electoral institutions, you know, with my two variables is this a independent, mixed or dependent of political parties, and are they centralized or decentralized? And they all have a measurement of resilience. And then pick of that group what would be like your treatment group, which would be the ones that have had populism, and see if there's any effect in the existing measurements.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you mentioned that you're a journalist. You're also working heavily in academia, Switching from one to the other in terms of your writing. Academic writing and journalistic writing are very different. How have you found that? Is that a struggle for you, or do you find that fairly easily?
Speaker 2:It was a struggle for me the first year. I'm not going to lie. I would send papers to my supervisors like no, you need to write differently. It has to be like journalists we write up to the point, short sentences, very straightforward. I find academic writing a little bit less straightforward. It needs to be more explicit, I would presume, and for the first year it was not an ongoing thing, but it was severely one of the things. My supervisor was like no, you need to write this in a more academic sense. But as with any sort of writing, writing comes from reading, and after spending three years of reading academic papers and not just in political science, I tend to read a lot of economic papers as well, especially political economy papers.
Speaker 1:After three years of doing that, it does come pretty naturally after a while and are you at the point now where you're just reading academic papers for fun? Have you read so many that you're sick of them? How does it work for you?
Speaker 2:so one of the things I have found weird about academia is that there's very little interaction between disciplines. So like economists are, I'm guessing, because people have to be very specialized in one thing, like economists are just with the economics, the qual people are just with the qual people, the quant people are just with the quant people. I am the opposite of that. I enjoy enormously going to academic conferences or seminars and political Again, I'm mostly a qual person, but I love going to the quantitative political economy and reading papers about it and learning to read papers about that and on topics that are not necessarily my topic, because I think that's one of the beauty of academia is being near where like knowledge is being created.
Speaker 2:So I think it's it's weird that we're so segmented in like groups and I do try to take advantage of being in that environment and try to mix with, you know, get as much knowledge as I can like. I'm not an economist, economist, but I've tried in my teaching to teach seminars that wouldn't be my natural seminars, just because somebody told me once the best way to learn something is to teach it. So I've tried to make a point of that.
Speaker 1:So how far along in the process are you now in terms of your PhD?
Speaker 2:in the process. Are you now in terms of your PhD? So I think I'm a year out. I have few chapters written at this point. I'm in the full data analysis period. I was able to write a block on like a blog paper not a full academic paper on one of my preliminary findings and I am on one of my preliminary findings and I am hopefully I will have my first academic paper from the thesis, maybe to able to send out by the end of the year and within the overall thesis part. I think I should be done by next at some point in 2025.
Speaker 1:So a lot of people we've spoken to in the series in the first two series have said that when they're done with the PhD they might like to send certain chapters of it off for publication to papers. Some have said they want to make a monograph out of it. Do you have any sort of plans for you? Are you going to wait and see?
Speaker 2:No. So I'm trying to send my first paper before my thesis is over. So I have it as my goal of the end of the year to have the first paper ready. So that is my plan. For sure, I always had this idea that I wanted to turn my thesis into a book and I know that political science has moved away from the book model so you get rewarded a lot more in the top market if you have two or three papers and if you actually write a book. But I do think there is a book there, but I wouldn't say there is a academic book there. I think I have this vision of my academic work that I could give like a journalistic spin to it and write more of a generalist, like general interest book, especially about the comparison of Trump and Bolsonaro, more than the institutional part. I think the institutional part goes a bit to academia, but I think Trump and Bolsonaro there's a generalist interest book to be written there.
Speaker 1:What about a YouTube miniseries? You've got the production skills. What do you think?
Speaker 2:I think that'd be great. I think there's so much to say in this. You know, I was also like hearing something which I thought was really good, really clear. It's like political scientists stay away from real politics, which for me, I do not understand that I am a political. You know, nerd, I'm a political journalist I am. I think there's such a beauty in understanding the theory of politics, of political science, and the analysis and the research on political sciences and then applying it to politics in the real life that when you get the link and when you figure both out, you realize how it gives you a completely new dimension to understanding real life politics.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's talk about findings then. I know the paper's not done, the work's not done, but are there any sort of conclusions that you can share with us about your research?
Speaker 2:in terms of institutional design and resilience, brazil is better equipped than the US to deal with people like Trump or Bolsonaro, and it comes from the origins of why the system was designed that way. So prior literature and research would tell you that in developed democracies, the way that specifically electoral institutions are designed, it doesn't really matter that much, because you have this whole bureaucracy and quality of that's going to take care of it. But when we see is yes, but because you are a developed democracy and you have a high quality government, you also tend to have higher quality politicians. So what really happens when you have no like not this higher quality politicians but you have politicians that are playing in the same level field? As a third world populist, you realize that a lot of those unwritten norms and rules actually harm the system because the rules are not written and they can be used, they can be exploited by bad faith actors and in one of the best examples or things you can compare when you want to prove this is, in the US and the Brazil, the difference in the over-litigation of the mechanisms of voting. So in Brazil it's a very centralized institution, the TSE, with very little influence from the executive and the rest of the political parties and they have a hand in rule adjudication, rule application and rulemaking Very little political interference, and this allows them to play objectively in certain areas.
Speaker 2:And there's enough criticism of this essay, but people are not really debating how and who can vote. You know it's done in a much more technical way. You know it's done in a much more technical way. While in the US, since 2016, what we have seen is an over-litigation of the mechanisms of voting who can vote, where can they vote? How can they vote? And this has and that's compounded with a not necessarily professionalized administration system. It all comes from the states and it all comes from the elected officials.
Speaker 2:So we have cases, like in Georgia, for example, where there's a rule that predates the modernization of the electoral system, that it's been exploited to try to get people thrown out of the roll call.
Speaker 2:So you've had like almost 3,000, like one person denounced 300,000 people according, like they were not technically, they were supposed to be not in the roll call because they didn't live there and it was not true, it was unfounded or people knocking on doors to make sure that people say they live where they say, they live like normal, like people organized to do this and it doesn't really amount to much. They're usually quickly dismissed, but it does create a burden to the state, and this can be done because there's so many loopholes and it's such a widespread different legislation that varies from state to state, and it's such a politicized rulemaking system and rule adjudication system that it also creates the impression of it not being fair by both sides. So that's one of the things that you would think. But yeah, so Brazil's system, which is a much less mature democracy than the US, you would think, would be worse off or worse prepared to deal with a guy like Bolsonaro. And that's the other way around.
Speaker 1:So efforts that we've seen from Trump to sort of undermine institutions, to question validity. The American system is less well adept at dealing with that than the Brazilian system, which is more shielded from those sort of attempts, would you say.
Speaker 2:Yes, and it's not also that.
Speaker 2:But one of the things that you find in terms of the mechanisms of undermining is that, because the system is designed in the US the way it's designed, it creates incentives for other political elites to want to continue undermining the system, while in Brazil, it's very, very hard to do because of the power that the TSE holds.
Speaker 2:For example, again the liberal party, the party of Bolsonaro, tried to present a lawsuit against the elections and they wanted a bunch of elections to be like a machine voting machines to be ruled out. And the tse was like can you prove this? No, and then not only did they dismiss the lawsuit, the same way the the us judicial system did, but they also fined the party and they froze the assets of that party until they paid the fine. That creates very little incentives for other supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, that still has a significant amount of support in Brazilian politics, to want to continue this lie. So it was just like no done. You know, this is it? Even though, like Trump, most of Bolsonaro's supporters do believe that the election was stolen, but there was no incentives for the political elites to continue that lie, which is not the same thing that happened in the US.
Speaker 1:Remarkable that they seem to have future-proofed their electoral system, Brazil, in a way that America is having to sort of retrofit protections, don't you think? I think the Brazilian system dates back to the 90s.
Speaker 2:It comes down before, because the TCA exists even during the dictatorship and actually of course it had a different role to play at that time, but it was still a very fairly credible institution. And because at that time it was still a credible institution, it was one of the crucial things that allowed the democratization process of Brazil to happen the way it did. And they have done great advancements in electoral technology. For example, their application of the electronic vote has had even untended positive consequences. There's great research by economists on how the incorporation of electronic voting actually incorporated a lot of people that previously did not vote, that they were disenfranchised, actually now vote because you know they couldn't read or write so they didn't want to go vote. But now it's so easy you see the picture of the character and there's no way to annul your vote because you voted wrongly. It has very positive unintended consequences and it's very safe, as it's been proven, because it's audited all the time.
Speaker 2:So, yes, the thing is the US was not used to dealing. I mean strong men, populist strong men who want to overreach. Their power has been the bread and butter of Latin America for a hundred years. No precedent before Trump, I mean, if you go to like Siblatz and Levinsky's book how Democracies Die. They would tell you that no president before Trump they have like four characteristics of an authoritarian populist. No president before Trump even got like more than one. Trump had all four. So it is an unprecedented character that has created under him a bunch of under-precedent and unprecedented characters that, either by conviction or, you know, political interest, have continued to undermine the process or at least try to undermine the credibility of the institutions.
Speaker 1:Okay, the last question for this half of the podcast. Is there anything that has surprised you as you've gone on over the years and worked through your research, Anything that stood out in particular?
Speaker 2:Yes, because when I first started and I started with this concept of institutional design I wasn't really referring to electoral administration, which doesn't sound like a very sexy topic. I was very interested in having like populism and democracy and how is it undermining? And but then the more you understand it, it is a lot of the ground work of people and public servants and good bureaucracy that allows democracy to keep going. And I think that is something that I didn't really look at it that way, Like a public administration, especially electoral administration, doesn't sound like a very interesting thing when you look at it in the back because it's such like round work, but then when you look at the impact that that has on the overall state of your democracy, it's astonishing for me.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, christina. Thank you so much for chatting to us. For this first half, we're going to take a quick break and then, when we come back, we're going to talk about your personal experience of the PhD, so stay tuned, okay, welcome back everybody to part two of the podcast. In the first half, we spoke to christina about the specifics of her research, and in part two, we're going to talk about her personal experience. Um, and so we're going to start off by asking Christina what attracted you to take on a PhD in the first place?
Speaker 2:It was actually a question. It was in the middle of the pandemic and you had more time. I was in Panama with my family and I was reading books on democracy. Again, I've always been very much into politics, but I started reading different books. That got me questioning this idea of the importance of populism and democracy, and it actually was just a desire of trying to understand a lot of the things I would talk about on a daily basis in a much more profound level.
Speaker 2:And then, in the process of that, I found something that I was not necessarily expecting and I wouldn't say it was the original reason why I started PhD, but I fell in love with the idea of creating knowledge, this idea that you are going to look for a question and you're going to answer either they were either because of form or depth. It hasn't been answered that way before, so you're creating something where there was none. Um, that was something that, when I first started flirting with the idea, fascinated me. And then, when I was already in the PhD, I a friend said and this is not the way I saw academia or research there's nothing more creative than academia because you're literally creating something out of air. You know, you look at the data in a way that hasn't been looked at before, or you answer a question that nobody had tackled that way before, and that is a process that I completely fell in love with.
Speaker 1:Okay, how different has it been to what you expected? Or did you head in with no real expectations at all?
Speaker 2:I would say that I was pretty well warned, I want to say, of how it would be. I knew it was not going to be a straightforward process. I know that, unfortunately, as much as you wanted to organize yourself and time things, it doesn't necessarily always work that way, and something that is very true is that a lot of people, especially outside of academia, think that people with PhDs are very smart and PhDs is a reflection of being intelligent. Actually, no, it's a reflection of being resilient and being disciplined and being persistent, and I was fortunate enough that one of my very good friends had already just finished his PhD in political science, so he and I spoke a bit about how the real process goes um and how it's not as straightforward.
Speaker 2:It is a roller coaster of work, of emotions, of I am never finishing this. This is, you know, I, I cannot do this too. Okay, I can do this. I just have to take it day by day. Um, yeah, it was. I knew it was not going to be a straightforward process and that's exactly how it's been not straightforward.
Speaker 1:Did you jump straight from your master's into a PhD or has there been a gap where you've done some work, you've had a think about different things and then you decided to go back to academia. How did it work for you?
Speaker 2:Yes, I had a huge gap, almost three and a half years. So after I finished my master's, I did flirt with the idea at the beginning of maybe getting a PhD. And I just finished my dissertation, the master's dissertation I was like, do I? My supervisor at that moment, which is my current, one of my current PhD supervisors now he was like, like, but you have to be very clear that the life you've led right now while doing your dissertation is very similar to the life you would lead as a PhD candidate. So I flared about it a bit, but then not really so it was not in my plans when I finished my master's.
Speaker 2:Three years passed. I worked as a financial journalist in London and then I went off to work in Spain for a bank in their communication department, and then I started doing in. 2020 came around and I started doing media again, which I had been away for a while, and again the pandemic happened and you had a lot more time to think about things. Take a look, like a step back into your life and, you know, reassess. Are you doing what you want to be doing? Are you happy with what you're doing? What else can you do? And I think it was sort of that process that eventually led me to consider doing a PhD, and then it happened.
Speaker 1:So you talked about the sort of the roller coaster of the PhD, the emotions and the fraught nature of wondering whether you're going to finish. What has helped you through that process?
Speaker 2:The people around me. I mean, it's not a cliche to say that having a support system during your PhD is very important. During your PhD is very important. I have been very fortunate in that regard, because not only do like my family is amazing and my father is like my third supervisor. He's someone I discuss my entire research with all the time, but I also had the fortune that two very close friends who were already academics or already faculty in the university worked right in front of my building and they had gone through this in different stages and nothing that I was telling them of how I felt was something new.
Speaker 2:It's like we've been through this, you'll get through this, you'll get, you'll get through this. So I do have a community who are academics who basically have been able to guide me through the process. And you calm down this. Everybody feels like this. And then, of course, I'll have to say that my supervisors as well your supervisors will break or make your PhD experience, and in that sense, I've been. I've been very lucky and also my friends. I have friends who are not academics and they have also been very supportive and willing to lend an ear when I'm having a crisis of things they might not understand, but they're at least very, very supportive in that sense.
Speaker 1:Can we talk a little bit more about the challenges of the PhD process? A few people, quite a few people we've spoken to in the series have mentioned sort of loneliness has been a problem for them Finding someone who's doing similar research to talk to, because they find that everyone's sort of doing their own field. So there's it's hard to bounce off of people. Are there other challenges that spring to mind for you?
Speaker 2:uh, yes. For me, I think one of the biggest challenges is something that I was also very warned about and is an advice I got from someone I consider way smarter than me, who got it from a person that is even way smarter than them, which is saying no to things you would like to say yes to. Because academic life is very rich and I do again. I do also have my other job and you get a lot of opportunities while you're doing your PhD and you want to do everything, and the problem with a PhD is that you don't have a boss, you don't have somebody you know keeping you accountable, and if you say yes to a lot of things, you tend to lose focus. So, like he says, the focus rule is always saying yes to things. You would always say no to things you want to say yes to, that you would like to say yes to.
Speaker 2:And that level of focus, of keeping your eye on the price, especially because it's such a long process, I have found it very, very difficult. I have not been as disciplined as I would have liked in that regard and it is a bit of a. It's been a challenge, and the other challenge, would say, is because of that because you don't have a schedule, because you control your own time, then making sure that you are distributing your time in an appropriate manner and it goes both ways right. There are periods when I felt that I haven't left my house, that I'm working from Monday to Sunday and I have had to, you know, give up everything else, and then there are other times where I'm busy with other little things and then my PhD has taken a you know a back for a bit, and making sure you find the balance of both for me has been very difficult.
Speaker 1:Okay, so on a similar theme, then, what about and I'll probably split this to two halves what advice would you give to yourself in 2022, when you, when you first started out on the PhD? What would you say to yourself?
Speaker 2:I would have said to myself that I could. So one thing I have done that I've really struggled is that I ended up doing a PhD in political science without necessarily understanding that political science was not exactly what I thought I was, at least at an academic level, and it required a significant more quant skills in any case that I had, and especially because we are in a discipline that's trying to move closer and closer to economics as much as they can, I would have probably gone into like the legal department or something like that, which plays a significant more to my strength than, I would say, statistical analysis. But I really didn't know that as much as I know it now is maybe pretty much what I end up doing, because I got the right advice, which is surround yourself with people that you can go and lunch with and talk about your research with, and not let yourself be alone. The support system creating a support system can really make or break your thesis.
Speaker 1:And is that the advice that you would give more generally to anyone who's listening to this, thinking about whether they want to move into a PhD? Would you say support networks? Would you say thinking about your subject and whether you have the right skills?
Speaker 2:Yes, and also I would also give this advice because I think in that sense, I did do the right thing is like make sure you're very, very and love your topic, because four years, three years is a very long time to be working on one thing, um, and make sure you really love it, because there are times you're gonna really hate it, so make sure you're completely fascinated by it. Um, I think that's very important. Don't pick a random topic just because you think it's, you know it's cool right now, because after four years, it's a long time. Make sure that, deep down the depth, the core of your subject is something that really fascinates you. If not, I think you would struggle, struggle. And then, of course, to anybody who's doing a PhD, I will give the same advice that I was given that I have not taken as seriously as I should, which is prioritize, focus and say no to a lot of things you would like to say yes to.
Speaker 1:Some of the people that we've spoken to in the series have had to learn new skills, sort of on the hoof or as they've gone, and you mentioned there that you weren't as prepared on the sort of statistical analysis side on the hoof or as they've gone, and you mentioned there that you weren't as prepared on the sort of statistical analysis side, um, on the quant side, as you thought you, as you expected. So have you had to learn how to code? Have you had to learn how to do regression models? What's been new for you?
Speaker 2:yes, I've had a significant. I have a much better understanding of terms and concepts that I was was completely foreign to me. I have a very, very basic understanding now of R and running a regression and cleaning data sets, which is something that I did not know three years ago. I basically didn't even know what R was before I started PhD, so my knowledge of that was zero. I have more knowledge now. That doesn't make it better, but I've also had to try to adjust my PhD to my skill set. I've had to incorporate because of robustness and, you know, making sure that my findings are not completely subjective a very small element of quant-ish. But at the end of the day, you have to play to your skills, and definitely statistical analysis and coding. They are not mine, I have learned, it's good to have learned are not mine, I have learned, it's good to have learned. I, however, could not have done an entire PhD based on quantitative analysis or statistical regressions.
Speaker 1:I'll just say I have no idea what R is either, so can you give us a succinct explanation of what R is for those that don't know?
Speaker 2:R is just a statistical coding model. It's a language. It's like more. It's what political scientists use instead of like Python. Like you know, economics economists use Stata. Political scientists tend to use R because it's better for statistical analysis.
Speaker 1:In terms of the future for you. After you finished your PhD, would you like to use it for something? Would you like to carry on in journalism? Are you looking at further work in academia? What do you think?
Speaker 2:I want to do an intersection of things. I love teaching, which is one of the things I've found very surprising about academia, is that academia a lot of academics don't actually like teaching. I happen to love teaching. It's one of the most rewarding things I've been able to do in the past three years, so I would love to continue teaching in some capacity. I also would like to continue my media work, which is something that I've invested significant time despite having the PhD. So those things are two things I definitely want to do, and there I think that after I finish the PhD, from my current research, there is a lot of data collectibles that I can use for further research, either if I turn it to the book or I try to get another paper out. So I'll probably try to do that with a postdoc somewhere if I, or a place that allows me to combine teaching, media and a bit of writing so it's like the ideal scenario, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah? So just to round it off then what's? What is the PhD community like? What is it like being a doctoral student?
Speaker 2:It has its good things, it has its um, its drawbacks. Again, if you don't make an effort, it can be a very, very lonely experience. As I think it's been mentioned before, for me it's been different because I had to switch departments, so I started out in one department with one community and then trying to embed myself in another community. It's been more complicated because I was right at the half of my PhD. But there's also a lot of richness to participating in academic environments, again, going to seminars, going to lectures. We're very fortunate to be in London, in the, you know, in the midst of three great universities you have King's, you have UCL and you have LSE right very close by and you get to interact with all of these people and go to the seminars in all of the three great universities and you get to listen to people, listen to research that in another environment you would not have access to. I think that is amazing.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I think has been very useful and it's been a great experience is going to conferences, especially abroad, both at the European level and the US level. You get to talk to so many different people that are doing amazing things. Either they're even if they revolve around your research or not. I always make a point every time I go to a conference, not to pick not just to pick the seminars or the panels that relate specifically to my research, but try to see what other people are doing in other areas that I'm very interested in, like political violence or political communication, and you get to experience. I mean, you get to talk to so many intelligent, intellectually driven people that I think it's a privilege.
Speaker 1:Tremendous. That brings an end to today's episode. I would like to thank Christina for sharing her thoughts and inserts for this edition of the podcast and, of course, I would like to thank you, to our listeners, for taking the time to tune in. We can't believe you've come back for a third series, but we look forward to welcoming you again soon for our next episode. Take care.