Graduate Researcher Series: an interview with Catherine Roberts

Felicia Lee

Catherine is a final-year PhD candidate at the School of Language and Linguistics. Catherine has submitted her thesis for examination and is now teaching academic English to students who speak English as a second language at a local university. 

Felicia spoke to Catherine about her doctoral research and her journey thus far.

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Hi Catherine, I’m so excited to FINALLY hear about your PhD project! Tell us more about it!

My research is about gossip. But really what I’m looking at is conversations between Anglo-Australian people in groups of about three to six. I’m just looking at the way that they talk about people who aren’t present in the conversation. I was hoping to find out if there was anything unique about those conversations, something that could be considered gossip.

There’s nothing entirely unique in talking about people who aren’t present as gossip, at least not from the conversations themselves. I didn’t find anything particularly unique across three dimensions: sequential organisation, knowledge organisation, and organisation of evaluation.

Sequential organization is, for instance, looking at how people get brought up as a topic, how people maintain that as a topic and how it ends. With that said, gossips are not really unique in the sense that these conversations seem to open in a similar way to most other storytellings or news in conversations.

I also looked at knowledge organization, for example, do you need to know the person beforehand to speak about them? I looked at how people were treating knowledge and whether there was marking of epistemic territories and how people dealt with talking about somebody who isn’t there. Now that one is a little bit interesting because I did find that people did want to manage some sensitivity when they were talking about people. It seems that they are aware that their words have permanence to them.

The third aspect that I looked at was the idea of evaluation, and to ascertain whether there’s a lot of negative or positive evaluation. I found that for the majority of cases when people are being spoken about, evaluation about them is mixed. In other words, there can be both positive and negative things that people say about others. Also, one pattern was that people would say something negative about a negative about somebody, and then they would follow it up with something positive, kind of like balancing out that bad comment. It’s like, “I don’t want people to think that I think badly of them so here’s a nice positive thing about them.”

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Everyone loves gossip whether they admit or not. How did you conceptualise your idea, though?

I started off my PhD very differently. My PhD project was originally going to look into narratives in conversation. So, I was going to look at storytelling among Anglo-Australians and an indigenous community in Victoria. I’d come up with my proposal and I had gone through confirmation in my first year. In March 2020, I was going to head off to do fieldwork to collect data and we had this little thing called the pandemic that started up. Hence, my fieldwork plans were delayed and cancelled and shifted back. Eventually, it came to a point where I was like, “Well, this is unfeasible. I’m not going to be able to finish my PhD. I’m not going to be able to do fieldwork.” So, I took a pause in my PhD and reconsidered what I was going to do. I had to redesign and reengineer my project to see what I could do with the data that we already had on my project team.

Also, I was in the first year of my PhD, and during that time (even prior to that), my cohort mates and I participated in an awful lot of gossip. I was really interested in this phenomenon of talking about people who weren’t present. And one of the claims that really struck me from literature on gossip is that it is an inherently negative thing, that it’s characterized by negative evaluation. However, in my experience, a lot of talking about people who aren’t present is not negative at all, so I was interested to, you know, find out if claims from the literature is true. Is it very presumptive to say that gossip is negative?

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I guess it’s because the word “gossip” already has a negative connotation tagged to it in general, and of course, it seems that the findings from your research has squelched those claims! So, it appears that you’ve already submitted your final thesis. What are you up to while awaiting results and feedback from the examiners?

I’m teaching English as a second language at the moment. During some point of my PhD, I taught for the first time. The subject was an ESL subject, Intercultural Professional Communication with Dr Maria Karidakis. She gave me a chance because I had no previous teaching experience, for which I’m eternally grateful.

Language is a fantastic tool and ESL teaching is teaching somebody how to wield it, how to sharpen it, how to make it work for them so that they can achieve whatever it is they want to do. And I absolutely adored teaching that subject. Then I did do tutoring for Applied Linguistics, which was also lovely in a different way. I think because of that tutoring experience, I realized how much I do love teaching. I love how dynamic it can be and how much I want it to be a part of my life.

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I’m glad you found your passion in teaching through the opportunities that the school gives in terms of tutoring. Now that you’re kind of at the end of your PhD journey, any golden advice for PhD students like us?

I think my biggest piece of advice would be that your success or failure is not reflective of you as a person. It’s very difficult, but try to remove that from who you are as a person because it’s not really reflective of who you are. A lot of success also comes with luck, and then another big part of it is going along to get along.

I mean, you get a pool of people who are exceptionally intelligent and motivated, and you start off with a cohort where everyone is smart and talented. I think what determines people who end up staying and becoming lecturers and people who move on to industry or other areas is not reflective of ability. It’s important to keep that in mind in the first year.

As you go along, it may be hard to have that perspective and that focus. You find that you get that very tunnel vision, which makes sense because a PhD is about depth more than anything, but that depth comes at a cost of, of not broadening your horizons. Sometimes, being able to step back and see the wideness of the picture can be helpful.

I totally agree with that and it’s also a reminder to myself that we have different strengths and weaknesses. Thank you so much for speaking with us, Catherine! All the best to your future endeavours post-graduation!

Thank you, Felicia.