Pembroke College Cambridge

PhD to Professor: In Conversation with Jacqueline Gallo

At Pembroke we’re often amazed by the wealth and depth of research conducted by our students and Fellows in their time with us. We’re always proud to celebrate our members’ academic achievements, but what we don’t talk about as much is what happens behind the scenes.

An academic career – whether you’re an undergraduate contemplating a Masters or a senior lecturer in a University – is no simple matter. Postgraduate study and PhDs take a lot of intellectual and mental energy, and early career researchers often face uncertainty as to what their next position will be, or where in the world it will take them.  But academia can also be hugely rewarding.

Over the next few weeks on the blog we’ll be talking to several Pembroke people at different stages in their academic careers. Topics include ethnography as a tool for research, postgraduate mental health, and the path from a Masters to the all-important first research fellowship or lectureship.

This week’s blog is an interview with a current PhD candidate. Before starting her PhD Jacqueline Gallo (2018) worked as a teacher in the US. She’s now applying that expertise in the Karamoja region of Uganda, where she works with girls in secondary schools to understand what shapes their lives throughout school and beyond. You can watch a video about her research on our YouTube page.

Jacqueline is an ethnographer, and this shapes her entire research approach.  She feels that it’s the only way to fully study and represent the women she works with.

“There’s an academic who says that in ethnography the researcher is the main research tool. So how you go about creating and maintaining relationships with people is incredibly important. I don’t think you can do a study about the dignity of women, showing their multidimensionality, unless you have a methodology that allows you to do that.”

The central role of the researcher means that Jacqueline’s background as a teacher is extremely important. In last week’s interview with Dr Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, he mentioned the importance of taking some time away from academia to remain passionate about it.  Jacqueline’s approach proves there are other benefits, too; professional experience can be useful in a research context.

“I think it’s very hard to do educational research in schools without having a background in a school, whether that is as a teacher or a counsellor, or something else. With the teaching profession not being very highly respected in many parts of the world, I think going into a school you have to be able to empathise with the teachers. When I was a teacher we had outside consultants come in, and I remember thinking to myself ‘I don’t care what this guy has to say, he’s making three times as much money as I am and he has no idea what’s going on in my classroom’. So I know the resistance that teachers have. I think it allowed me to know how to enter a school.”

Jacqueline’s focus is on gaining an in-depth understanding of a small community. To that end she works with sixteen girls in a Catholic-run school in Uganda. These girls come from a community where very few complete a secondary education, and many girls face problems like sexual abuse, teenage pregnancies, and high expectations from their families if they are in school.  Jacqueline looks at the stories of individual girls to try and better understand the problems they, and others like them, might face.

“So in ethnography one of the things that’s really exciting is that it’s not just about what everyone is doing. Even with my sixteen girls this is a very small and detailed studied. A huge piece, for example, was when one of the girls in my study became pregnant and had to leave school early. She’s not the outlier that we sort of might forget about if we’re looking at it from a quantitative perspective. She’s actually the key to what’s going on. So why is it that she’s out of school? What resources does she need that maybe she doesn’t have? What’s going on in this society that she got pregnant in the first place? What’s going on in this society in general that there are very high rates of pregnancy in the region at early ages? So I think what ethnography can do is really show that. It’s not as much about what’s going well, and creating a neat narrative, but it has the ability to show the messy and complicated reality of life.”

It’s not an easy methodology. In Jacqueline’s experience ethnography comes with its own unique challenges. She spent 15 months in Uganda, and had to carefully curate her identity as a researcher.  Here her professional experience came in useful again.

“Ethnography is a very lonely process in a way. It’s isolating, there’s a lot of questions about who you talk to and how much you say, you’re constantly evaluating your own behaviour because you are the research instrument. Having done a very independent job like teaching was really helpful in giving me some of the skills to cope with the daily reality.”

Adding to this already challenging experience was the fact that many of the women Jacqueline spoke to were struggling in some way. In her view it takes both compassion and discipline to do this kind of research.

“I think one other thing about ethnography, particularly in my context, which is challenging but always of the utmost importance to consider, is how you are being perceived, and constantly trying to get feedback on that. I was always trying to understanding what my place is; I’m not an aid worker, I’m not a religious sister, and yet I work with women who are hungry, I work with women who haven’t eaten in two days. I have to ask myself, what role do I have in creating reciprocity but in a way that does not deteriorate the rigor or the integrity of the research project? So trying to be myself, a fully human being, and having compassion for those who’ve shared their lives with me, and doing the research, is really difficult. But I also think that with ethnography the kind of questions you’re able to tackle, you have to be compassionate. You have to be disciplined to do the work well.”

Next week's blog will explore one of the options available after completing a PhD: a Junior Research Fellowship.

 

 

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