The evolving thesis

ACADEMIA: Not long ago, postmodernism was all the rage. These days college theses are about soap operas and mobile phones

ACADEMIA: Not long ago, postmodernism was all the rage. These days college theses are about soap operas and mobile phones. Ruadhán Mac Cormaic spots some trends.

The passage of the college calendar into thesis submission season is flagged by some enduring markers. There's the halogen hum of the 24-hour computer labs, for months the lair of insomniacs and exchange students, but now brimming with the red-eyed, nail-chomping throng galvanised by looming deadlines and the scent of the real world on the other side. It's around this time, to a soundtrack of heavy breathing and tightening nerves, that footnotes are scoured, word counts tweaked and the bookend to a four-year fling with hedonism is lovingly assembled.

The range of thesis topics chosen by undergraduate and postgraduate students in itself provides a rich wellspring of insights into evolving fads and fashions. To take a sample of titles on Irish-specific subjects across the humanities departments of third level colleges in the Republic is to take a profile shot of the changing face of socio-cultural debates, preoccupations and, yes, soap opera plotlines.

Gone are the treatises on emigration and its social ills, on church and state as competing wielders of cultural control, and on Biddy Byrne as the archetypal modern Irishwoman. Today, try "The Invisible Irish Lesbian", "Fighting Hegemony: McBealising Masculinity" or "The Catharsis of Carrigstown: a study of the cathartic nature of the contemporary Irish soap opera, Fair City, in relation to the female spectator".

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A sample of those recently-completed or still-in-painstaking-preparation theses suggests thematic patterns across a range of disciplines. Issues concerning men, fatherhood and masculinities (in crisis, usually) form a single emergent bloc in sociology, where gender has become plural and where feminism (itself a term conspicuously absent) is treated most often in relation to advertising, media portrayals and the consumerist image industry. In 1992, a typical thesis at one university's sociology department was "Sexuality and Male Power in Western Society". Today, its stock of submissions is most comfortably represented by "An Explorative Study of the Relationship between Men's Health and their socio-economic status".

Engines of popular culture - soap operas, drama, sport, music and film - are being mined in the way that policy documents and political speeches have been for decades. New minorities have replaced old ones. The plight of immigrants is one vogue topic, our curious gaze averted only by the odd nostalgic nod to the homeless and the halting site.

The passengers of modernity form a common thread, and so alongside predictable papers on technology, globalisation, liberalisation and their meanings, there is wide coverage of the social collateral - political corruption, child pornography, binge drinking, obesity, marital breakdown, suicide, sexual abuse.

Where Ireland's recent history is under scrutiny, it is through the lens of our obsessions in 2004 that this is viewed. Mostly, it's about image. What do people think of us? How do we look to others? Do I look big in this boom? And so, "A study into how John Hinde's postcards of Ireland reflect changes in Irish culture in the 1950s and 60s", "Images of Ireland in the novels of contemporary Swiss-German writers" and so too "Impressions of French travellers to Ireland".

John Charles McQuaid is the subject of one student's doctoral thesis, although the angle - "McQuaid and the Management of Public Relations" - is couched in terms the archbishop would hardly have recognised.

According to Evelyn Mahon, lecturer in sociology at Trinity College, theses tend to run with the tide. "Years ago, it was always the decline of the Catholic Church, the impact of industrialisation or the impact of multinationals on Ireland. Now, the Church has gone out of favour. One of the things you do find is a greater interest in people who convert to other religions - women who have become Muslims, say."

One student at UCC is researching a doctoral thesis entitled "Compound Identity and Social Space: A Study of Irish-Muslim Identity". Another recently completed study at UCD investigated "Attitudes of An Garda Síochána towards Non-National Ethnic Minorities" (ill-prepared, bad communicators, but not institutionally racist, the author concluded). In a sample of thesis titles taken from departments at seven third-level institutions, the word spiritual appears once, and that in an analysis of its treatment in the film trilogy The Lord of The Rings. The mobile phone, on the other hand, is the inspiration for five works, among them the offering "Text in the City: Mobile narratives in urban landscapes".

Popular culture is the terra firma of the undergrad dissertation; some title lists read like a newspaper's entertainment listings section. The Late Late Show as a forum for consumerism. Big Brother as (again) a postmodern consumption exercise. Britney Spears and concepts of virginity in the branding of teenage girls. The treatment of religion in The Simpsons. Has "Deconstructing Closedown" been taken, anyone?

Easily the most minutely dissected of TV shows, though, is Sex and the City. The confused premise of four empowered moderns with a soft anti-feminist core was inviting academic assault, and so we have a hailstorm of essays on "Representations of the female body", "The emergence of the SATC audience" and "SATC as an exploration of contemporary consumer society". As one author asks, "Sexism in the City: Does feminism need a make-over?"

It's a theme picked up on constantly; representations of women and womanhood. "Where to from the kitchen?" traces the changing depiction of women in popular culture from the 1950s to the late 1990s, while much attention is given to cultural representations of the female form ("No spare flesh", "Lick my ripples"), the diet industry and the promotion of body image generally. At DCU, one student is undertaking a study of female masculinity in society and culture; another "Female action heroes in the action movie genre".

It's another newly-mined area, says Mahon. "I've noticed in the last few years that body image is a big one; dieting, the effects of body advertising on consumers, the effects of the media on how people see themselves. That's quite a big area."

She believes that students' concerns often anticipate larger social debates. "They tend to spot things before they're picked up by the main researchers," she says. "For instance, we had lots of projects on drug-related topics before it became an area that received prominence in terms of government funding for research. So I think students' projects often spot things before they come on the public or policy agenda."

Nowhere is this point better illustrated than on questions of men and masculinities, for years the unconquered land of sociology students and now a nascent public argument. Across the social sciences, the recurrence of the topic in final-year and graduate theses is striking.

"There has been a lot of research done on women's roles, and now the emphasis is very much on fathers," says Mahon. "When I was interested in gender studies in the early days of feminism studies in Ireland, we meant women. And now, increasingly, when you're talking about gender, you're talking about men. It's interesting that there is an increasing interest in masculinities, and that's tied up with a new men's movement."

Depending on which you read, men are in transition, in limbo, in crisis, incarcerated, or all of the above. Men, too, suffer demeaning advertising stereotypes that pile yet more anxiety on our disempowered status-craving shoulders, and suffer it alone. Essays from "The Social World of the Irish Male" and "Making Men" to "Issues of masculinity as reflected in Nazi propaganda advertising campaigns" and "Limbo men: Ireland's disempowered" span the gamut of postman patter.

Inevitably, some believe that such topics as "What's at stake with Buffy?", "The World Cup as a barometer of attitudinal change in Ireland" and "Paddy Pop and the Celtic Tiger" are not the matter of legitimate academic inquiry. Where do the boundaries lie? Is the crime of academic jargon its unfailing ability to dignify nonsense?

"I think anything can be the focus of legitimate academic study," says Mahon. "It depends on how something is approached and how it is analysed. There are challenges approaching new media areas, but I think they're also quite interesting in terms of the subjects that people come up with and investigate. Somebody was doing a thesis recently on rap music and the people who follow it, making distinctions between the lyrics and their complete distancing from the lives of people who partake of the music. They might be from comfortable, white, middle-class backgrounds, whereas a lot of the music is portraying a black ghetto misery. It's some contrast. Are they escaping into something that they're not? Why do people identify with certain kinds of music? Are they establishing a new identity for themselves? Students try to explore these subjects in ways that try to make sense of them."

Come to think of it, there must be a good thesis in all of this.