Interview

Should I Be Passionate about My Research? A Medley of Voices

Oxford, UK

“Follow your passion.” The phrase circulates easily in today’s information stream: in career advice columns, reflections on life purpose, social media posts about living and thriving, university application guidance, and graduate prospectuses. Passion promises purpose and vitality. It indicates motivation and a willingness to endure difficulty. Yet it also carries a quiet threat: if you are not passionate, are you in the wrong place? Are you wasting your time?

In this article, DPhils from different disciplines reflect on passion as motivation, pressure, intellectual inheritance, and institutional demand. Their perspectives range from personal storytelling to disciplinary critique and intellectual history. Together, they ask not simply whether we are passionate, but what it means to be so, and who, in the end, benefits.

Cultivating Passion: From Solitary Suffering to Postdisciplinary Curiosity

Vincent Straub, DPhil in Population Health, has a multidisciplinary background in social science, computer science, and visual art. He is active across academic research, policy engagement, and a multimedia practice spanning poetry, film, and installation. His DPhil research explores the interplay between health behaviours, mental health, and reproductive outcomes.

Vincent Straub: “I have long felt that the framings of passion in academic discourse tend to locate passion, derived from the verb patior (“I suffer”), as something innate, mildy neuortic, sinister even: something you feel, deep inside, typically by yourself, working on a particular topic, in a dark library or a wet lab late at night. But what if passion is actually something that thrives and is engendered through a particular way of working; one that is postdisciplinary, open, curious, even disobedient? Might that not be the way we can all experience more passion in seeking to understand the world, together?

Postdisciplinarity signifies an intellectual disposition which “differs from other approaches in its openness, disobedient discernment, and critico-playful attitude towards knowledge-making” (Pernecky 2024, 385). It builds on earlier work by Karl Popper who questions the eligibility of disciplines and studies as distinct branches of knowledge (Popper, 1952). Discovering the notion of postdisciplinarity whilst thinking about what it means to be a passionate academic researcher in the present moment, I was struck by its call for more pluriversalist conceptions of the world—a “world of many worlds” that invites more-than-Western perspectives and encourages curiosity across differing ways of knowing.

References

Pernecky, Tomas. 2024. “Postdisciplinarity.” In Elgar Encyclopedia of Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity, edited by Frédéric Darbellay. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Popper, K. R. 1952. “The Nature of Philosophical Problems and Their Roots in Science.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3, no. 10: 124–56.

Credits:

Contributors: G., Lorane Prevost, Vincent Straub, Robert James Taylor

Editors: Robert James Taylor, Huishu Wang

Publisher: TORCH, University of Oxford