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.

When I left Hereford

I'm still experimenting with styles. 

I blogged before about how I use writing to work out what I think. That's still true for how I approach data analysis; writing is a key element of analytic work. 

Here, I've used writing to work out what I am thinking and feeling. I wanted to see what happens if I use artifacts as a lead-in to exploring things that are less tangible.

When I left Hereford, I kept my first toy. Yellow Ted travelled with me. He grew up with me as I grew into an adult, and a parent myself. Technically he is now my husband's. I could think of no greater gift of myself to him than the one who saw all as I grew up. My own memory of childhood is almost non-existent.

My father died, and I have been clearing the family home. I found the loft toys. I had remembered none of them. Yet as they emerged from the loft, parts of my childhood emerged with them and I remembered me as a child holding them and playing with them. These flashes of first-hand childhood memory left me motionless, not breathing, then blinking. So different from all previous, second-hand childhood memory, my dissociative dispassionate observation of another life, a different child.

Yellow Ted is now back where he belongs. With the toys from the loft. With the cot duck, floppy bunny, the spirograph, and Cubby who was too delicate and precious to be allowed to play with me. 

The loft toys did not grow up. They remained in my childhood. And my childhood remained as separate from the adult me as the lofted toys remained from Yellow Ted.  

Those flashes of me as the toys emerged from the loft are the first taste of a me that crosses the generations within me – child, young adult, parent to children. I am disconcerted, scared and curious. 

For now, cot duck and Cubby sit on the mantelpiece at home. Their friends are back in their storage bag. There is only so much memory one can handle at a time.

Welcoming myself home

It's a long time since I blogged.

This time a year ago, I didn't honestly think I would ever come back to my PhD. A lot has happened since then.

Here's the quick version:

• moved to Swansea
• husband (newly redundant) started exploring botanical papermaking. Quick plug for his Etsy shop and Twitter account
• have new supervisors and a new approach to the PhD
• work part time in Barod and study PhD part time
• just starting to regain confidence and find my feet

We've given me until the end of September to get back to having fun with theory, enjoy getting to know and think with new people, and play with concepts.

1st October is time enough to start thinking about the shape of the PhD and what information I will need. For now, I am happy, creative and (ironically perhaps) enjoying the freedom to make the connections that lead to long term research impact.

Along the way, and believe it or not, it's part of the playing, I'm going to have a go at consulting on a topic using three methods. To play fair, I'm reading up on how to do them so I can try to use the methods in the way they are intended. The terms Focus Group and World Cafe are banded around so loosely that it's been an eye-opener going back to literature about them. My third method is Barod's Coffee Shop Conversations. It's almost time for a blog about them - but not quite! I'm still working out quite how to explain them clearly. Let's just say for now that the Coffee Shop Conversations method is a world apart from other public consultation methods, but not a million miles from what some ethnographers get up to down the pub.

So, I'm back home. Back where I love. Back where I'm relaxed. Back using a blog to help me think aloud and letting me stash that thinking in a place where even I find it again.

Boggled eyes and fellow conspirators

There's only so much data you can look at before your eyes start focusing independently, or cease to focus at all.

I'm so so so lucky with my fellow conspirators (officially collaborators, but sometimes we feel a little more like conspirators). We talk, we think, we chip in. And we are uncompromsingly honest and humblingly (if that's a word) vulnerable with each other.

And we generate a LOT data.

I've just worked through a 54 page transcript for the second time. And that was from our shortest meeting.

So I'm giving my eyes a bit of a break to blog. I'm so glad I got thrown out of my Latin class and sent to the typing group in my distant youth. It means I can touch-type this while looking out of the lead glass windows of the Management Centre and across the Menai Straits to Anglesey so my poor eyes can relax and unwind.

I'm not sure if it is as easy for my brain to unwind. Half of me is blogging, and the other half is still thinking about the key categories and themes that seem to be emerging - that half of me is turning them over in my mind and wondering if they are keepers or for discarding as distractions.

I'm so glad it's not all up to me!

That's one of the joys of doing what is loosely a collaborative analytic autoethnography*. I don't have to come up with the answers. I can work with five perspectives, sometimes given independent of each other, sometimes given as we work together during discussions.

The downside for my poor boggled eyes is that I get five times the data to look through - repeatedly. I'm the only one of us who is trying to get a postgraduate qualification out of this, so I'm the only one who has to work quite so rigorously with the data.

Onwards and upwards - or deeper down the rabbit hole. Time to get back to those data.

*It's definitely collaborative. It's definitely analytic - with more than a touch of evocative from one of us. And it's ethnographic - I guess? I've never quite got my head round what makes something an ethnography. And we are writing personally about our personal experience and views. But unlike CAEs that I've read about, we are focusing on a single shared event (a "coffee shop conversation" rather than a life experience that has been part of each of our lives (like experience of oppression or motherhood or being disabled). It's also different from CAEs that I've read because I'm the only academic-ish person; my collaborators/conspirators are friends from outside the academy.