the limits of 'practical' research

The quality of research being made available to struggling hopeful scholars like me is severely limited. It's not just in terms of funding, but at the most basic level, mentorship is contingent on engaging in mainstream research. I could argue that political science in my country is locked-into mainstream research on 'good governance', 'new public management', civil-society empowerment and capacity-building, as well as in token critiques of environmental degradation and human rights. What this shows is that expertise and intellectual mobility is rooted in 'practical' research -- and while I have no qualms about being practical, it still precludes a lack of criticism, most especially the easy comfort of being complacent about one's assumptions and biases, no matter how limited.

I would probably be accused of hiding behind theory, or, as a navy officer said to me recently, I'm probably good at 'explaining what I cannot do." But it just saddens me that criticism seems to inhere only in the humanities, where it's still safe to be political because it is articulated into art, yet in the realm of politics itself, too much criticism is the ticket to academic alienation. If this is how my life is going to be like, I would rather withdraw into impractical isolation... or just read too much critical political theory into poetry. It's no wonder that I find so much comfort in Milosz and Heaney, with their poems grounded in history, war and modernity, and of course, in Adrienne Rich, with the mantra that writing is first and foremost the act of awakening a critical imagination.

I know that I must move beyond my own local, historical context. I know that practical constraints exist in order to be surpassed, but I'm just a little disgusted right now. It's no wonder that I've been so unproductive and escapist. Maybe I am being complacent -- or as Ellen Wood once said, I'm becoming comfortable within the 'interstices of capitalism'. Is a critical imagination necessarily a socialist one? I'm not sure, but I'd much rather be given the space to read about it and generate critical research on it, then to dismiss it altogether for its lack of practicality.