Like all PhDs, my experience has been a bit more complicated than I had planned. There were the shifts in direction, the life events which got in the way, the doubts and confusion that almost everyone experiences.
But the main thing for me was the constant shifting of my relationship to my research ‘topic’ and my feelings about it.
I started this research in an effort to make sense of a significant part of my life and despite what I knew of epistemic injustice and the possibilities within academic work to NOT reproduce the injustices I had been part of fighting, I still tried to comply with academic demands.
How easily I had absorbed and internalised these external expectations! I thought of emotions as data to be analysed or distractions to be set aside. I wanted to be ‘rigorous’ though I had no real sense of what that might mean in terms of my research.
Throughout the writing of the dissertation, I went back and forth. I wrote autoethnographic pieces which were to be inserted into the dissertation, to be analysed. I wrote about the ‘literature’ in more formal ways. I wrote in the first person, avoiding the passive voice, and my writing style was never stiff or overly complex. I pride myself in a writing clearly and I largely succeed in doing so. However, my authorial voice is that of someone in charge of their material. Even writing this now, feels like a particular persona that I often adopt in formal spaces, where I want to appear competent and capable.
But this research involved so much more emotional work than is usual in academic work. Of course, that is true of many other researchers, especially for marginalised people whose research is close to that marginalisation. I often wrote about the emotions in a detached way – “I was upset reading this” – rather than “reading this makes me sick to my stomach”, for instance. Why something would upset me so much is important, I realised, and I wanted to write about why and what it meant. I also wanted to show it, not just say it. But it seemed to me to be a bit self-indulgent.
So why is that a bad thing? I was brought up to think that anything approaching self-indulgence was a major character flaw. I was politically active where collectivity was valued. I wrestled with this of course, feeling guilty when I put myself forward and when others invited me to. But I continued to do it. Deciding to do a PhD was complicated by this fear of getting a bit above myself – that’s not the right phrase because I didn’t really doubt my intellectual capacity to do it. But I did think who did I think I was to go off to do such an individualist thing about a collective project. And I know others asked that too.
I argued with myself, and with sympathetic friends, that I had given a lot to working with others and it was time to work on my own experiences on my own project. Often, despite how it might have seemed to others, I felt constrained in my participation. That I had to dampen some of my thoughts and not go my own way. I will explore that in more detail further on in the thesis.
For now, I am leaning into the individuality of my own experience and of my ever-changing understanding of what that meant, means, could mean. I hope that the particularity of my own life in collective advocacy/service user involvement will resonate with others more than if I had done more standard research.
Dashed this off this afternoon and am sharing it here. First blog post in about 18 months. No apologies!
