Game on

Here’s a traditional academic thesis.

1. Start with what the academics know. [even if that’s not how your research interest started, this is where you must start]
2. Formulate aims and questions that are permissible to be asked within the academic school, discipline or approach you have chosen.
3. Explain the background
4. Review the academic literature to establish what academics know that is relevant to your question(s). Depending on the discipline, you may also review practice literature or ‘grey’ literature generated by professionals who are not academics but who have a professional expertise in whatever you are researching.
5. Collect data, and write about your data.
6. Work out what you can add to the existing academic knowledge. Do this by seeing where your findings add to or contradict or suggest new approaches to the existing academic knowledge.
7. Conclude that you will do the research better next time, and list ‘more research is needed’.

That is reasonable, given the function of an academic thesis is to attempt to prove you are worthy of admission into the status of ‘an academic’.

It is also an exceedingly good way to replicate the cultural and institutional norms of academia.

But what if…

What if your thesis is about knowing and valuing knowledges?

What if you want to argue as your central thesis (academic) argument that everyone wins if we find a way for academics and non-academics to value their knowledges equally and value the differences between their ways of knowing?

Game on

I spent several years trying to work out how to take a variety of academic ways of knowing, create a suitably academic rationale for my work and then interpret and discuss data co-generated with members of the public using a transdisciplinary academic framework I created.

I wouldn’t recommend that approach. It broke me.

Game over

I decided to settle for second prize and just ‘get a doctorate’ by following the traditional format and keeping my head down. I reasoned that I could write what I really wanted to write at a future date. 

Even that was a struggle. I had such rich data, and any academic approach meant I would have to close my eyes to so much of that richness. 

I couldn’t work out how to justify academically some of the assertions I made, such as the ‘leap’ from saying that what I had learned about public involvement in policy making applied equally to public involvement in research.

Or was it game over?

My happiest time had been in 2019, where three of the four other women and I met for a whole day in a beautiful café in the middle of Snowdonia, to reflect together about having done the research together and for me to pour out my woes at my inability to produce a thesis. Technically it was ‘the final reflective workshop’ and counted as data collection as I had ethical approval for the day and had audio recorded it.  

My second happiest time was a fortnight ago, when all four women graciously and warmly agreed to individual ‘lockdown’ phone or video calls.

From reminiscing while looking over transcripts, I realised that there was thread that could be traced back to the very first workshop in 2015 and crystallised in 2020 as a set of four questions about public involvement:

• How will ‘they’ value my knowledge? [where ‘they’ refers to any institution seeking to ‘do’ public involvement]
• On whose terms would I be getting involved?
• Why should I get involved?
• How can I get involved?

That triggered a new ‘what if?’

What if the reason I couldn’t make my thesis work was because I was starting with the wrong sort of questions? What would happen if I started with these four questions? The answer was clear. Everything falls into place.

My current ‘what if?’

What if instead of the traditional starting point of what academics know, I began with the four questions from the five women. What would that look like? Would it be do-able? And would it get me a doctorate?

The non-traditional thesis.

1. Start with what the women know.
2. Formulate aims and questions that would make sense to the different members of the public I have met over the decades who I’ve engaged with around the topic of public involvement (in research or something to do with health and social care).
3. Accept that, if the purpose of the Background chapter is to help locate the research in a way that is meaningful to the reader, what needs to be in the Background depends the your reader’s starting point. So if I intend to write for more than one ‘sort’ of reader, then I need to use the Background to lead each from their starting point to the starting point for this thesis journey.
4. Begin with what the women knew – ie begin with the findings.
5. Add the academic and practice literatures that are relevant to the findings.
6. Synthesise the different sets of knowledge to create new knowledge, by putting the academic literature at the service of the findings, and the findings at the service of the academic literature.
7. Communicate the ‘something new’ using methods of communication associated with different ways of knowing, while trying to make the communication accessible to academics, other professionals whose role includes ‘public involvement’ and at least some groupings of members of the public.  
8. Conclude that I will do research better in the future, describe a vision for a new way of researching that combines academic and outside-of-academic ways of knowing in epistemically just ways, and list ‘more research is needed’.

I don’t know the answer to the ‘what if?’

But I do know the game is back on.