A podcast from Kelly Preece about researchers, development...and everything in-betwen!
Episodes
Wednesday Jul 22, 2020
Wednesday Jul 22, 2020
In this episode I talk to Tracey Warren about the challenges of being a self-funded, distance, international PGR. You can find Tracey on twitter @TraceyW19521302
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Podcast transcript
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Hello and welcome to R, D
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And the inbetweens, I'm your host, Kelly Preece, and every fortnight I talk to a different guest about researchers development and everything in between.
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Hello and welcome to the latest episode of R, D and the In Betweens.
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I'm your host, Kelly Preece. And in this episode, I'm going to be talking to another of our postgraduate researchers, Tracey Warren.
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So Tracey contacted me after we released an episode of our doctoral college podcast, Beyond Your Research Degree,
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where I talked to James Alspp, who was a self-funded postgraduate research student and is now working as a secondary school teacher.
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Tracey got in contact because she was pleased to hear the experiences and the challenges of being a self-funded student articulated in this way.
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And so we decided we'd record an episode of the podcast about her experience of
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being not only a self-funded but international postgraduate research student.
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So, Tracey. Are you happy to introduce yourself? Okay.
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My name's Tracey Warren. I'm a self-funded international.
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Research student on the EdD programme, which is a bit of a mouthful.
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I sometimes have to remember which part of that sentence to remember.
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So I'm self-funded, which means that I pay for it myself.
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I'm an international student, although you can probably tell I'm British.
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But the main reason I'm an international student is because I lived abroad for quite a long time.
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And when I started this research degree, I was living in the UAE in Abu Dhabi, and hence why I am classed as an international student.
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Why the EdD and why a research programme? Well, that's a, that'll probably take up a lot of the time, but
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Yes. It's something that has been on my mind for quite a long time.
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I'd say about 15, 20 years.
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So it's been something that's been part of at the back of my mind, thinking about doing.
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Whilst I've been having my very busy career and 15 years ago or thereabouts, I had had an offer to do research at Manchester.
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And then life comes along and a whammy. So I put it to one side and life carried on.
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And then in 2016, I decided, you know what, I need to revisit this.
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So I say, yes. The grand old age.
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I think at the time, 52, I decided that this is something I need to take up before I got too long in the tooth.
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Why a research degree? Because I've had a lot of experience in education, management, leadership.
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Special Needs Inclusion International UK that I just thought that I could bring something to the wider audience.
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And that's why I wanted to do something in research. At the time, I thought I knew what I wanted to do.
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But obviously, as time's gone on, it has become much more narrow.
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And I'm in the fourth year. So it's been quite a long journey for me, though.
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So for two years, I was at Exeter for February and then summer.
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So it's been quite a lengthy journey, but one that's not only been challenging, but also completely interesting and totally absorbing.
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That's fantastic. What an introduction.
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So you've spoken a little bit about why you wanted to do the research degree, but I wondered if you could talk about the other side of that,
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which is not just the decision to do the research degree, but to fund it yourself.
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Well, the self funding was a no brainer, really, living abroad meant that I had very little in the way of access to opportunities for funding.
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So not even from the company that I worked for would have even considered that.
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I mean, we are talking of when I think I first started out,
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it was about seven and a half thousand pounds a year and it's risen to about nine and a half.
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So it's a lot of money and therefore the decision to go down this path.
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I knew that I am a complete a finisher, so therefore I knew that I would get there.
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But the decision to actually go down the route of doing a research degree at that level of funding requirement,
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I sort of knew that by the end of it, with flights we travel with, accommodation, we are talking of over 4-5 years of an investment.
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And that's the word I would use of about fifty thousand pounds, which is a heck of a lot of money.
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And it was something that I knew from the start.
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And it's only now just becoming challenging because obviously I'm going to approach a fifth year.
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So the rationale was very, very clear.
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The reasoning for going self funding was very clear that I had no alternative.
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But also, I knew that I had to work to find that funding myself.
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So I did work full time for the first three years, as well as juggling everything else that I was required to do for the for the cause.
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So that was a leadership director position and trying to juggle a research.
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Part-Time Degree. So let's just pick up on that a minute.
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What is it like to undergo that juggling act of a full time job and a part time research degree?
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You have to be very organised and also almost blinkered because, for example,
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I also commuted between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, which took out three hours a day minimum.
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So during the working week, it was very much blinkered work.
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And then weekends, it was very much focussing on. I've got two days.
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This is how many hours a week I could do. So it was being very organised about my timing and planning well ahead, like I'd write an action plan.
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And also, I had very little in the way of holidays. Living abroad is very different.
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You have very different terms and conditions to your employment.
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So I was only entitled to 22 days a year.
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So even coming back to Exeter. For the requirement for I think it's February or March, like a two day weekend and then the summer school.
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That was part of my leave. So for the first two years, it was hard work, knowing full well I had very little in the way of holiday.
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So being very well organised, well planned and focused was the only way to get through it.
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It was tough the first few years. Yes, incredibly tough.
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And the level of dedication it takes to undertake a research degree under any circumstances is huge.
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But to do that was working full time and knowing full well that you you're giving up your free time, you're giving up your holidays is colossal.
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But I think that's that's a level of. Not just focus, but eagerness to to make that leap, because I also had a lot of backing.
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You know, my husband who has been amazing because it meant me spending a lot of time in my study.
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So that in itself was a big decision at the start that we knew that I'd have to give up a lot of time.
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So the big holidays that we'd have, we reduced and the time going out at weekends was reduced.
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So there was like a not a written, like a not to a code,
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but we had the understanding that it was for a very short period of time and that so long as I
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was clear and dedicated that I could get through it with the support of my husband and my family.
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Absolutely. And a lot of the rhetoric around being a part time student is that it's not just an individual commitment.
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No, you have to have a level of support.
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Like, for example, there were times when I had to get assignments in that it was all day all nighters and he'd throw food in through the study with,
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you know, door like he or his food. So, yeah, I think it's the level of support you've got behind you that that helps.
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I know I, I couldn't have got to this stage without that level of support.
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What's it like being an international student? What is it like starting out at what is a very considerable distance from the university?
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There's two things, really, because I have relocated back to UK and September the 30th of last year.
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So I've got two perspectives. So as an international student, I think up to and I'd say up to almost COVID, I would say it's quite disembodied.
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I felt very much part of Exeter and being a student when I was there, especially during those spring and summer schools,
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I found them great because it was that opportunity to connect with like minded people, academics, my tutors, my supervisor.
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And therefore, it was it was quite it was quite absorbing being there during those times and all embracing because you
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met others in your cohort and mix with other people from different cohorts in different groupings.
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So it was an amazing experience, but very disembodied I would say because you'd fly in or I would fly in as an international student,
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arrive, check in, throw my stuff into my room and start reading and preparing.
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So those times are really great because I found as if I was part of the university when I was away.
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There was a little bit of disconnect, and I found that quite challenging because I actually quite like a spark with people.
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I like that engagement. So I had to then think about how I was actually going to gain that.
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So a group of us actually did like a WhatsApp group and and supported each other through the first couple of years.
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So that was nice because we actually kept in contact. But as an international student.
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It's part time and living abroad. There is that little bit of a disconnect,
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and I will then talk about what's happened recently because I would be constantly sending e-mails about what's happening.
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And I'd be really fascinated.
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Oh, I really want to join in and listen to that, or I'd love to be there during that time, or there will be some course that would be really useful.
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And when I'd ask for perhaps it could be put online or whether it could be recorded.
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That wasn't possible at that time. Which was. I'll say disappointing and disheartening, but I'll say since COVID it's amazing what's happened.
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I feel as if now, though the opportunity has been embraced by Exeter,
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and I feel that now they've recognised that the use of virtual online training access is possible.
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And I feel much more part of the university.
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Now more than I had before, because there's a lot more happening through zoom through teams.
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So there's much more engagement online and a good one, I think, is how we got in touch with the shut up and write sessions.
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I was fascinated. Oh, OK. I'd love that. But since they've gone online, I have actually been attending, I think, for the last five, six weeks.
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And to me, that has really helped my writing really helps with engagement with other students and understanding that I'm not the only one.
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I'm not actually alone. There's other people struggling as well and sharing those successes as well.
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Even if they're small, those type of sessions have been great.
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The fact that they're now online and I can access them. So I think there's almost been like a journey for Exeter.
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And for me, as well as a distance international student, because I had to find a way of being engaged, motivated.
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And I think it has been.
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Very. Upsetting about what's been happening in the world.
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And for certain people, it's been really distressing.
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But there's also been another side of seeing what opportunities have happened and taking note.
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And it's been amazing to see what's happened with the university about it now going much more online and giving greater,
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greater access to people like me. So I wonder, what have the other challenges been for you as a part time international self-funded student?
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We've talked about access to on campus support. But what else what else has been a real challenge or a barrier to you?
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That's quite tricky cause I always try and turn things around. I talked about the negative and I'm not one that always harps on the negative.
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I always try and find positives. I think if you got if you are doing a research degree or a degree part time with.
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You have to be well organised and planned.
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I think the best thing was actually being provided with all the dates of assignments so I could put them in my calendar.
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And I'm a very electronic person anyhow. So I had all of that down, all of my dates.
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It is about being organised and about developing that, developing a rapport with the other students in your group.
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Also with your supervisors. I think that was crucial for me,
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especially if the last two years whilst I'm in thesis stage developing that rapport has been crucial because there's times or I've been like.
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You know, I've got to write reports for my CEO. And having that relationship to be able to say I need that space, but also for my supervisor,
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Yeat but Tracey, you know, you've still got to keep within target dates and then and timescales.
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And for them to understand that you're in a different you have different priorities.
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So it's those priorities ebb and flow.
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So, for example, I knew that I needed to get an assignment done.
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So work didn't just take a backseat, it rolled along.
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But I was able to change my priorities during that period of time.
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So it's it's looking at your priorities being action, planning, being well organised.
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Knowing the library really well. Yeah.
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I'm a great reader and organising not just your time, but organising your files.
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That was something that I learnt.
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From doing an open university course was that, you know, to get your literature sorted out very quickly and a system for that.
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So I think that's fair. Any student. But for me, it was very much so.
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I could find it very quickly, both it in my literature organising my filing so that I could gain it easily.
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So, yeah, I'm being very adept.
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So, for example, I'm talking about I love to learn.
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So like youtubing, I've had to do use and NVivo this during my thesis.
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So I'm adept at looking at courses online to check out how to use things.
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So it begue being self disciplined as well as self-reliant.
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And that's part of being a researcher I think is actually eagerness to learn.
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And therefore, if you've got a problem, how to work around it.
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And I think that's those are the key things I've had to do, be independent, self-reliant.
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And a problem solver. Okay, so imagine for me that there's another Tracey out there who's about to embark on a research degree
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and they're going to be thinking about doing it part time.
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And as an international student and funding it themselves, what advice would you give them before they started?
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I knew would be tough, but actually that's the part that's been the toughest, is the writing up their thesis?
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I'm used to writing. I had to write reports for various people and thousands of words that I've never been a problem.
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But writing this thesis up has been the biggest challenge, whether it's the case of the blank screen.
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I'm not sure. But I am now at, say, two thirds through.
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I think if it was, the advice to myself would be.
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Think about the writing beforehand. Okay.
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I've taken a lot of time preparing all the data, collecting it, analysing it, but I really hadn't anticipated how challenging this writing had been.
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So I think if I'd have known that my my the advice myself for myself would be to go read many more ideas
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that I'd been published to go and have a look at some of those before I started writing.
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So that's one of the things I think also that the old adage of it's a marathon, not a sprint.
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That's never been me. I'm such a goal orientated person.
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Yeah, I could do this. I can do this. But actually, that has been one.
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Probably one of the best things that.
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I had to remind myself of especially the last couple of months, because I have found through writing since about March.
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And I think some of COVID, it has impacted on me. So I think keep reminding myself that you're in for this for the for the long term.
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So even if you only write 100 words a day, just do it.
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I think for me, that was the best thing, was keeping myself motivated and always give myself some space.
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I think those were the three. If I had to give myself that advice four years ago, that's when it would be.
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And be kinder to myself. Think sometimes we're not.
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I think sometimes we're not. We might be kinder to others, but we're not always kind of kinder to ourselves.
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That's a really poignant piece of advice and I think.
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So if that's what you need, if that's what you'd say to Tracey, what would you say to universities?
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What do they need to think about more in terms of the lived experience of being a part time international self-funded student?
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For me, I think the university needed to engage much more with their international students,
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not just send an email saying, oh, those these courses going on at the student, there's this seminar, this I just felt.
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Yeah, okay. But that actually doesn't help me. And I feel that they have they are making those changes,
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and I feel sad that it's taken some some of it has taken a pandemic for it to make that big change.
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Yeah, I completely get that, but I think, like you and I try and see the positives.
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And I felt really, really energised by some of the shifts and changes that have come about lately because of the pandemic and the shift online.
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And it's like so it's like when you're thinking about accessibility and inclusion, you don't make things accessible.
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You don't think about inclusivity just to support the needs of one person.
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You do it because actually providing things in multiple formats, in multiple kinds of engagement, it benefits the entire community.
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It benefits everybody, not just that individual person with specific needs.
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Oh, you said it so beautifully. Yeah, I'd say I'd say it's about inclusivity because that is actually part of my research is about inclusion.
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And to me, when I've been doing going through the process of a thesis and writing,
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some of it was quite poignant and it was a bit that's how I actually feel.
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And and being part of something and that's why I said the key words to me were about engaging,
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feeling a part of something, and therefore that helps you with motivation and inclusivity or diversity.
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It's amazing the world out there.
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And the university has the opportunity to engage much more with international students, which will then increase their diversity of ideas.
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And that in itself is is worthwhile because there's a lot happening out in the world.
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And it's just saying that there is a blinkered view or there has been because this is amazing research,
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some amazing ideas, but it's sad that it's it it it's inward looking.
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And I feel that that engagement,
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participation and idea of opening out and being much more inclusive would gather these ideas and increase participation by international students.
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I think what we've seen with the Shut up and write sessions is actually it doesn't need to be anything particularly complicated.
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Oh, absolutely. I love watching and see where everybody is.
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I mean, I can see the same the same group, core group comes in and that's great because that's that's probably the stage you're at.
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I mean, certainly for me, it's very right. So between nine and 12, I'm going to do this.
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And that's great. It helps to organise your day if you're that type of person. And it helps you to focus.
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But not only that, it also helps you to feel part of a community. And that's why I talk about engagement and participation.
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You need to feel part of a community, the community of Exeter,
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and that that should be what the that the university should be about of making people feel.
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Part of that community. Community of learners.
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Thanks so much to Tracy for taking the time to talk to me and making some really, really powerful and salient points about.
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About kindness to yourself and but also the importance of community of learners.
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And that seemed to be something that kept coming through.
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About the challenges of being that international part time self-funded student is how how you engage with and how you develop that sense of community.
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I was also really, really interested to hear her talk about the disembodied nature of being an international student,
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particularly somebody that used to research embodiment in in digital world.
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So that's something that to me sounds like a challenge.
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And I'm one I'm going to think a lot more about, about how we can bring embodiment back into the virtual world, into the online training that we do.
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And that's it for this episode. Don't forget to, like, rate and subscribe. and join me next time where i'll talking to somebody else about researchers, development, and everything in-between!
Wednesday Jul 08, 2020
Wednesday Jul 08, 2020
In this episode I talk to Warren Speed, postgraduate researcher at the University of Exeter, about the development of an emergent approach to research ethics during his PhD, and the Research Ethics Conference that recently secured funding for March 2021. During the podcast we discuss:
- British Education Research Association (BERA) Ethics and Guidance
- Research Ethics Conference website
- University of Exeter Research Ethics and Goverance
You can find Warren on twitter @WarrenSpeed1.
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Podcast transcript
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Hello and welcome, R, D
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And in betweens, I'm your host, Kelly Preece, and every fortnight I talk to a different guest about researchers development and everything in between.
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Hello and welcome to Episode four. In this episode, I'm going to be talking to Warren Speed.
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He's a postgraduate researcher in the University of Exeter's Graduate School of Education.
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Warren takes a really interesting and I think innovative approach to research ethics in his project.
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He talks about research ethics as going beyond the processes and procedures that we have to engage with
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to meet university ethical requirements to what Warren terms an emergent approach to research ethics.
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Warren are you happy to introduce yourself So I'm Warren Speed.
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I'm studying PhD in education and I look at fundamental British values with the Prevent Duty.
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And I look at how schools apply this agenda across the across the regions of England.
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My conference has come about from what? DHT, although it wasn't expected.
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The conference. Funding for is to put on research ethics conference where it brings together people who
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are from various different disciplines across cost discipline and also from various
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universities and also outside organisations to get together and present papers and to attend
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and listen and do workshops about everything and anything to do with research ethics,
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to kind of open up conversations around things like, for example, I'm a social scientists.
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So, for example, things I wouldn't have thought of which animal animal ethics people do.
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And it's about trying to get those types of ethical kind of stuff together.
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So how did this come about in terms of your research?
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So what how how is it that you got so interested in some of the challenges in the discourse around research ethics?
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Yeah, I think it's a few things released in my background was I used to be teaching union for about 12 years,
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and my role mainly within this union was Equalities Officer. So within Devon mainly, I was the quality of service to schools around Devon.
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So I always had a thing about equity,
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all kind of rights of equality and ethics and making sure that everybody was treated equal and fairly and respectfully at all times.
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And the other thing was during my P.H. day, which looks at fundamental British values,
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it's got really deep roots into counter-terrorism within schools.
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So I had to be very mindful of that and mindful that participants might not want to get
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involved because they might they might have their own concerns and worries about it.
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And since thinking along those lines of of that, I my ethics awareness.
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But he's got greater as he got greater, I got a lot more interested in it.
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So now my PHC doesn't just have an ethics section.
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The entire thesis is all about fundamental British values and research ethics and how I've applied ethics and an ethically minded,
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very emergen ethically emergen approach. Might the H.T.?
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Yeah, so I think the thing that really has interested me when we sort of said in the past is that idea of emerging ethics.
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So the way in which ethics is embedded into the research process rather than being an approval process, I guess, that you go through at the beginning.
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Can you talk a bit more about that and how and what that means in terms of your research?
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Yeah. Okay. I actually wrote a paper on this. So I looked.
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I looked at what was happening in regards to the procedure, ethics or institutionalised ethics.
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So things that were going on within university and that the university wanted
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you to do in order to get ethical approval had to jump through some hurdles. I to look at some guidance forms and things like that.
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And although I do agree with it, that does definitely have its place.
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I know. So I've always thought is never enough. There was never enough done in order to really, truly be ethically minded whilst conducting research.
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So procedurally, people would fill out an ethical application form.
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The application form gets sent to an ethical panel.
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An ethical panel will decide whether or not the article ethics application form is sufficient enough for you to.
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Research. Once you've got that approval, I was curious as to know how many people actually went back to rehab a day.
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The ethical approval through the data collection or research process.
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And I found out through contacts at the University of Exeter that it's not very many at all.
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And they actually can't think of any and any people. I've actually had to go back and read keep on redoing it.
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So I had massive issues and concerns around that because I was thinking when your cadet conducting data,
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surely your ethics or your ethical standpoint should change because you're meeting people,
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you're building rapport and friendships and relationships, whatever, with participants, therefore, does this.
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This should change the dynamic of ethical approach.
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And this is why I thought taking a very emersion approach whilst applying complying with procedure or ethics was very important.
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The immersion approach allows me to to to really think about as effectively as I'm going along, the kind of the ethical dilemmas or implications,
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not even ethical successes that are coming ahead of me or happening at a time and the things that I need to do to change them or how.
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Yeah. The other thing I used to do it well, I still do. Actually can.
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Still collecting a little bit of data through the process.
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I've spoken to my participants as well in regards to the ethics and if there is anything specific
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to that school that ethically I should know about and how I could ethically support them,
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because I have a variety of schools with a variety of backgrounds.
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And by asking that question is quite good, actually, I managed to get quite a lot more information I never would have thought of.
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I could put into my ethical kind of writing my processes and my application forms.
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So be an immersion approach is I highly I highly recommend it is very beneficial and it really puts your self and the participant,
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the human participants in my case at the central research.
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Ethically, I think ethics is it should be the centre of the research without the ethical clearance not doing things properly, respectfully.
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You can't actually have, I don't think, a very asao ethically sound piece of work.
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Yeah, and I think there's something in that that really resonates with me as.
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Somebody who as an academic and researcher was always working with with people and certainly as an arts researcher.
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Kind of a strong awareness of and presence of kind of an eye and reflection of your subjectivity within the research.
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And I've always considered that to be about. About the methodology, but also about the ethics of the research is about being making clear about your
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place and perspective as the researcher and how that frames everything you're doing.
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And I think there's something really interesting about this difference between
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that you've that you're cutting procedural ethics and that emergent ethics,
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which is it's a sort of really speaks to me is, you know, a form of ethical, reflective practise.
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Yes. And it's something to me that I find quite odd doesn't actually happen.
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This is the reason why I want to put this conference on this.
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It's not these conversations to say, look, you know, procedural to institutionalised ethics does have its space.
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It really does. Of course it does. And also, the university has to mitigate sells against any issues.
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And, you know, anything that might happen, you know, there's legal requirements there as well. It has to happen.
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But I'm hoping that this conference start opening up this conversation to say, look, everyone,
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we need to start looking at ethics, not just an emergent way, but also a very innovative way.
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The world is changing quite a lot at the moment. You know, we've got a lot going on.
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We've had you know, we've had we have a very controversial things happen in the U.K. like we've had Brexit.
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We've had to change of prime ministers before October 19. We've had a lot of things happening.
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We've got Black Lives Matter movement, which is happening at the moment. We really need to not just be very static in what we do.
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And the only to do the one of the negative things I think about procedural ethics is which the universe is all institutionalised.
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Ethics is that we are expected to follow a specific or recommended ethical guidance.
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So, for example, the sort of education we want.
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We're told that we need to look at. We should be looking at, as you know, is the SPARER, the British Educational Research Association ethics.
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But that is very static. It's only stuck at a certain point.
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And I think it's up to the researcher to really go as far as they can consistently through
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their research to start looking at innovative ways of how they can be ethically do.
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The research can be ethically minded the entire time. And it doesn't happen.
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And I know it doesn't happen because I've spoken to colleagues, both academic colleagues and, yes, Senate colleagues.
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And I've had this conversation with them and they just don't.
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One of the things I've been told, which just it doesn't it doesn't normally I say, is that when HD,
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for example, need to update their ethics, they should keep on putting it through the ethical panel.
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An ethical panel should be approving it. That's what they're there for. That's what they should be doing.
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And it also keeps a paper trail, keeps everyone safe as well.
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I've been told by a senior academics that all the know the universe isn't haven't times that people don't have time to do that.
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And my my response is, so what is your responsibility to do it?
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It shouldn't be happening. We should be obeying our participants and ourselves and the universe.
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And everyone's resolved the research. The utmost respect that we do not is necessary.
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Thing happens all the time. No, I don't think there's a number of things that I think are really crucial for me in terms of because this is you know,
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this is something that is quite new to me as a topic area and that sort of thing
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about ethics not being static because the world is static and research isn't static.
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We know that research is constantly evolving through the through our research processes.
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So why would ah. Why would our ethical standpoint or ethical approval or ethical methods.
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Why would that be static if we know that the research is in and of itself ever changing?
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Yeah, I mean, it has been like that is it is is static, but I don't think it's static that anyone's fault.
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No, particularly. I just don't think we have. There's not enough training that goes on at all level.
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Was undergrad master p h d right up to presses ships and there's not enough training that goes on.
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On ethics we need training. Right from the beginning of all of studying, when we looked at looking at human,
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no data or tissue, animal ethics, whatever we need, if we need ethical training.
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Right. Beginning to just say to us that you do have to use procedural stuff is static.
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But it is a star. Don't frown on it. It is dirty. You do need it.
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But you do need to take a very emergen approach. And that comes from you as a person.
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The university. And you can't do that. It's individually.
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And then you got to ask the question, I guess, who is going to make to about that particular pasty old person of the day is take an emergent approach.
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Do they do it themselves? The supervisor cheque on it, just like the doctor college do it.
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I mean, it's not built into the E.M.S. stuff within the university. We don't have any.
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We don't have anything. Nothing exists, which I find strange. I find it really odd.
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Yeah, and I. I I really hate what you're saying about the difference between, you know.
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Because I guess the message that came back to you from that senior academic is about the I guess the administrative or workload associated with.
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The resubmission of know the kind of emergent approach to ethical approval and confusing that sense of of workload and box ticking with the actual.
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The fundamental kind of principles of the way that we operate in this environment, and I can see, you know,
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I can really see how this approach or imagine ethics would be crucial not just in terms of conducting research,
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but thinking about how we operate and treat each other as a community.
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Yeah, I mean, I do find it really odd that we we don't have emergent ethics properly.
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No one really talks about it. I can't. And I know a lot.
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I'm always up to conversations like this all the time. But I still can't believe I have a conversation.
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I'm having conversations where I'm still trying to prevent this sort.
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So we're trying to talk about it. It's really strange that this just doesn't happen.
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I think that the university. All university is not just us.
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So everyone and all of the. We need to do more. I mean, we have we got great resources.
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We've got great people in university where we are at the moment, where we've got we've got the governance and ethics manager.
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She's brilliant. She's so good. She's so good. And she is she's always got work to do.
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Surely that says that there is this. So if she's always got work to do.
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There's more scope. There's more things that we can do within ethics that needs to be more people to support this person within her role.
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I don't think many places take it as serious as they as they make it would like us to think.
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I think they just they just do it because I think they have to do it.
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And it's not enough and it's disrespectful to participants or it's disrespectful to any living thing,
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your your doing research on how is the conference going to challenge some of these kind of fundamental issues and flaws in our system,
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in the sector of approaching research ethics? Well, I mean, I don't think as much as it is about challenging.
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I think it's about starting to open up conversations. Yeah, I I've done a little bit of a look around to see what conferences go on.
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I've got a regards to research ethics within the U.K. or England, and there isn't any Ivens.
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I found anything. So I'm trying to open up that debate in conversation to get people to start sharing their stories, to open up networks.
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But what's even more important is keeping the conference free. So it's accessible,
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but also making sure that we invite actively in by organisations within the south west to come along
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for free and to apply for a bursary if they need one or the or if they're self-employed or something,
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where we can we can have Akeda in academia, academics,
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and we can have these professionals in organisations or skilled trades or whatever
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coming here to have or come into the conference to have these conversations.
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I mean, we don't we don't know what's going to happen within the conference call.
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That hasn't never happened yet. But what's really important is starting to open these conversations and start to
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start to ask questions about how we conduct our research ethically that way.
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Yes. Opening up the conversation and getting people to think more about.
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The way they approach ethics within their own research, but also outside as well.
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Yeah, some research cross discipline, looking at everything. Because we don't we don't when when do we ever get the chance to.
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I don't get the chance, for example, to speak someone to who looks at human tissue or animal ethics.
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I'd love to. I would love to be able to take something away. I would never have thought I would actually would work or would work as a form
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of a model which I could adapt to fit within my social science research.
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I think I think that's what we need to do. I think we start open up is really,
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really important conversations because we owe it to the participants of all the animals or to other living things, organisms, whatever.
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We owe it. You can't be can't just take it.
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You can't just do ethics to an ethical obligation to take off and get on with it and never look at it again.
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I think that is I think that's unacceptable. It's a responsibility.
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Of course it is. Yeah, I think you're doing research.
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Usually you should want to feel responsible for the living things and the participants, et cetera.
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You would want to make sure that these people are safe. All these these things are being respected.
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It's complicated, but you can do something about it even if you don't understand it.
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So by having these conversations challenging the status quo on ethics, challenging the ethical panel's challenging,
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why did the organisation or academic institution isn't doing enough for ethics?
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I think all you need to you need to look at everything and constantly thinking challenge.
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You don't ever have to understand that. You just need to be making an effort to protect yourself, funds and everything else.
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I think so. Aside from our responsibility to those involved in our research, whether those be human participants or animal participants or tissues,
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what what has this kind of sense of emergent ethics brought to your research?
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Well, you seem to sort of be saying by having those emergent ethics,
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ethical conversations with individual schools, you if you were getting more information.
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So what's the kind of the the benefits that you're reaping of having that imagine ethical approach?
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I think it's the outcome of my books, I suppose, in my research is following this process.
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My research followed a completely different path now than what I thought it would do.
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So I look, instead of looking at all the negative things which I was going to do,
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is going to look negative and positive things are fundamental British values and schools.
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And putting together this, there is no this just was that and it didn't really add anything.
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It's not it's not as nice as something.
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And if the researchers, the participants upon this research celebrate what they say and actually let's look all the positive things that we do.
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Let's share best practise. Let's look at all the great things that's going on.
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Sure. It takes an appreciative enquiry approach.
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So I'm trying to avoid all the negativity that comes with it and focus on the things that they consider that works well within.
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Why is I'm looking for or looking at. And in the hope to share, to share stuff.
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So I think because I I opened up my ethical and open to ethical discussions with my participants.
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This is what I got out of it. It was too much negativity that surrounds it, but it's something I wanted to look at.
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So I had to question myself, do I need to? I did my questions.
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I need to know all the negative things. And the answer is no, I don't.
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I can look at things positively and appreciate the approach, which is what I've done.
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The other thing is, is I've got offset as well.
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You're who I've met a few times. I've come to the context to meet me, discuss my research because they like the approach I take with it.
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Well, yeah, Wheatley's. And I've also got so the funding for the conference,
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as well as the many of the schools that I've got with they want to or they're looking at some of them are looking at waiving anonymity.
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They want. They want. They want to be known within their search was to have the approach that I'm taking.
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And I think that's all because the ethical process I, I, I took or I'm still taking, we should face it,
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informed me that I shouldn't be taking a negative or looking at this disclose kind of negatively.
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I should be celebrating the great work that they do to an end.
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It's come about that way.
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And it's just I'm quite I mean, I've got a lot I've still got a lot work to finish off all this, but it's it's done me really well.
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And I just feel up to really great relationships with different organisations and groups of people.
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And also my relationships with the participants is excellent. It's really good.
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And they're always positive to add more and get involved. And that's because I've kept them within the process.
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So they've they've been part of the methods, the type the way I collect the data,
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they've been collect the part of the the ethics, the really part of the the at the end as well.
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They've all got a chance to write a thesis about something. I would write about my about that story,
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about the research and what it is they've learnt and how they can do thing might do things differently or all that and that type of stuff.
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So the ethics stuff in it gives you I think it benefits you in more ways than what you actually might think.
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It's not just ethics in looking after people who suspected PPI participants,
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but it's also about the other the other bits I talked about the approach I take and
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appreciate Biglari approach and that that I think that goes hand-in-hand with ethics taken.
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Appreciate the quarry approach. Yeah, and it sounds like the the impact.
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The research has is going to be so much more wide ranging with the way that some
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schools are potentially waiving anonymity and sharing that best practise isn't.
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I was just I was just this one.
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I just think, you know, the other thing is, is the ethics of is still going on right now because of the created 19 thing.
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So we're saying I've still got some information to collect from some of the some schools and teachers,
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etc. But I have to ask myself, is it ethical for me to ask teachers now?
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Yes. They reach interested and carry on with the research, or do I have enough time to do it?
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Well, I could wait and I am waiting. I'm not going to put any more pressure on them.
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They're already under a lot of pressure. What we're teaching union. I also used to be a teacher and I can imagine the pressures are on.
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And I don't think it's ethical for me to continue right now to collect data.
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That's why everything's on hold at the moment. Yeah. And I think particularly with David and the way that the world is shifting.
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Again, these things are going to come more and more crucial because the ways in which we.
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Conduct, race research and the environments in which we work in and the pressures, the pressures that we're under.
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All of that is shifting so massively at the moment.
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And it's shown as well during the P.H. day with especially teachers around schools in the regions of England.
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What I do is I keep a touch base with them and ask are how they are asking if there's anything they would like me to do to support them.
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So I'm doing a few things to support some schools at the moment.
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Mostly is that around is around my research, but creating some sessions with with the teachers there to try and support them.
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And sometimes it's just touching base with them and asking if they're okay and that type of thing.
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Just so you know, I forgot about them. Still, there is no pressure. We don't need to get involved the research yet.
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I know that they know that they need to do it, the things that they have to do.
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And I know that they're waiting. And they did. Yeah.
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It's just been respectful listening. I would always say it's not ethical. That is four steps.
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Yeah. There's something, you know, some perhaps somewhat somewhat ironically, given the kind of fundamental, precious values that you're researching.
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There is something about fundamental value system within this.
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In research about respect for those that are involved in our research and care as well.
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Yes. Seems to be a huge amount of care in the way that you are approaching this.
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Yeah, I mean, it's really I think it is important. I do know that those are people that do come.
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You do care for them. But equally, there are, you know, what is it?
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There are quite a few people that just it's just a hurdle.
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The quality, the ethics or the respect, it's just what they do because they wanna get the research done, not because they actually care about them.
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And it sounds horrible, but I know this because I've had conversations with people about this and I don't.
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I do challenge them on it a little bit, but I didn't go into it too much. But it does sometimes.
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I do have to feel like I need to hold back. I try very hard to hold myself.
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Perhaps before I say something, I. I probably shouldn't say I don't want, sir.
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I don't know. I have issues with it. I'm more. And it's I guess it's finding the right environment in which to challenge that.
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Yeah, yeah. And the conference would be the perfect environment.
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Yeah, absolutely. So when is the conference planned to take place?
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Okay. Yes. So the day is now the 26 of March. It'll be around that day.
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We've got we're getting everything ready. We've got a team of people who are already on it.
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Which is brilliant. I am going to put another call on my first call out for anyone who wants to join the team.
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And that's site that is for us, everybody that says staff and students, because we've got a mixture of staff and students on the team as well.
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Yeah. Twenty six will be all day. But what I want to try and do is to get some organisations in with some decent academics
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from various disciplines or related disciplines to the organisation before the
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conference to do some workshops so we can go on to and trying to promote and highlight a
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conference and also to support organisations as well with with they might need support.
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Well, I could be writing something or poster or it could be just a networking session.
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And then on the day we're going to have a mixture of papers. It can be organisations, local sound institutions from the southwest.
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So but still we accept them if you are invited and academics and students as well.
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This is everybody just open up conversation. And at the end, we we have a drink section that'll be fun.
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And this that's somewhere online at the moment where people can find out information or keep keep up to date with the conference.
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So is that forthcoming? So if that's been made, we've got someone in the committee at the moment who is responsible for social media and the Web site.
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The Web site is a landing page, but it's not. We haven't published it yet.
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It should be published.
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I think in this couple of weeks and that'll be w w w dot research ethics conference, dot dot U.K. and then they'll be up there.
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And then we've got we've got Twitter and Facebook pages as well.
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So imagining that someone listening to this who hasn't really thought about ethics much beyond the kind of procedural institutional processes.
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And what would you say to them? What what do you want? What questions do you want them to ask themselves or to think about?
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I think we just need to think about taking it slow when doing ethics isn't a hurdle.
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And I think in that they do remember that removal is something which is going to affect your participants.
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It is going to affect them. They're involved in issues, are involved in research that in some way they might not be good or bad.
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It might be well could be anything. And I think it's just about making sure that you're mindful of the type of people
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or the type of person that's involved in your research and also speaking to them.
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You can't you can't do ethical. We can't complete an ethical application without finding out if there's any ethical concerns for your participants.
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But you can't access your participants and you've got ethical clearance so you don't get ethical clearance.
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Then you should speak to your participants and you shouldn't look a previous eight or pre talk or something like that,
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anything and just about and build rapport. And you should be doing but take some time to really ask them.
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Is there anything that really worries you about this research that I can do that might make you feel better?
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Is really support. I can give you, you know, that type of thing. And I think it's just take take your time.
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But every time you have an interaction with a participant, just reconsider.
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Is anything changing? If it does change it. And don't forget to write down your thesis.
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Thanks, Warren, for what must be one of the most illuminating discussions I've ever had about research ethics.
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I think the thing that's stuck with me the most is the fundamental thing that research isn't static.
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So why is our approach to research ethics static?
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And that's it for this episode. Don't forget to, like, rate and subscribe and join me next time where I'll be talking to somebody else about researchers, development and everything in between
Wednesday Jun 24, 2020
Wednesday Jun 24, 2020
In this episode I talk to Jo Sutherst and Sam Jones, postgraduate researchers at the University of Exeter, about their experience of studying for their research degrees at a distance. During the podcast we discuss:
- The Supporting PGR Writing project and our daily Shut up and Write groups
You can find Jo on twitter @JoSutherst and Sam @samjonesrnli.
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Podcast transcript
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Hello and welcome, to RD, D and the Inbetweens, I'm your host, Kelly Preece,
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and every fortnight I talk to a different guest about researchers development and everything in between.
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Hello and welcome to Episode three of R, D and the Inbetweens.
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This week I'm joined by two of our PGR's, Sam Jones and Jo Sutherst, who are going to talk to me about what it's like to be a distance PGR.
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So Sam and Jo were both distant students before COVID-19.
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And I think that this conversation is really timely because increasingly we're all working as distance students and distance workers.
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But also the likelihood is that sector is going to shift and we're going to have more more people studying
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at a distance because hopefully our online provision and support is going to be even better than before.
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So Sam and Jo, are you happy to introduce yourselves. Hi, I'm Jo.
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So first, I am a first year PGR in the College of Humanities in art history and visual culture.
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And I am based in the forest of Dean in Gloucestershire.
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Hello, I'm Sam Jones and I'm based in Tobermory on the beautiful Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides off West Coast Scotland,
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and I am a second year part time PGR in maritime history.
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So can I start by asking you both, why did you decide to study at a distance?
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So for me, I actually did my M.A. by distance through Falmouth University.
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I've been living in the forest of Dean for over 20 years and I'm really established here.
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My husband's work is established here and I didn't want to up sticks and move to university.
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And I when I started to look at the PhD course, I looked at my local university, it's University of Gloucestershire.
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And I also then looked to Exeter because of the distance programme.
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And for me, choosing a university where the supervisors match my kind of interests and can give me the best experience was important.
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And I wanted to study at Exeter, but I didn't want to move. So that's really why I chose the distance programme.
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What about you, Sam? For me, I think it was because the university has a specialist centre for maritime history
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and I discovered that it was possible to do an MPhil or a PhD via distance learning.
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So I got in touch with the department and said, this is the area that I'm thinking about working in.
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And they put me in touch with Dr Helen Doe, who is now one of my supervisors.
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Brilliant. And so can you tell us a little bit about the kind of day to day experience of being a distance PGR?
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Obviously, it's gonna it's gonna be markedly different from those they're based on or living near campus.
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Well, for me, it's I tried to get myself into a routine and get obviously just the normal getting up
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and getting ready in the morning and then sit down with the computer to start working
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sort of between nine and 10 and having access to things like the shut up and write
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sessions have been really good because they give you some structure to your day.
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And I then tend to work for two to three hours in the morning, have a lunch break and try and then and do other things for a while.
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Look away from the screen and really refresh the brain and come back to again in the afternoon.
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But I think it gives you flexibility.
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Working actually at home as a distance student, because if you're not well or like me, you have a medical condition.
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You don't have to work at set times you don't have to be in when other people are in the know in an office.
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If you if you're not feeling up to working in the morning, you can always shift your day and work later and work into the evenings.
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So it gives you a lot of flexibility. So days tend to be a bit more flexible.
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But I try to get that structure in of trying to do two to three hours in the morning and two to three hours in the afternoon.
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What about you, Sam, because you're obviously managing this part time with work.
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Yeah, I think I am. I think it's I think the point that Jo has made about routine is really, really important one.
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And this is kind of second time around for me. I did a doctorate 28 years ago now.
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In fact, I suspect there's some PGRs who weren't even born.
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My doctorate previously that was done full time with an economic and social research council studentship.
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And even then, I had a routine. I was very lucky.
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I was a research centre in Oxford and I had I shared an office, so I had a routine then.
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My routine now as a part time PGR is obviously very different.
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And I think that there's different pre and post lockdown, certainly pre lockdown.
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I was juggling it with a full time job.
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So. I would be working during the day and then take the dog for a walk at tea time, come back and then work on my, my, my,
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my thesis for a couple of hours, and I'd usually spend at least one day weekend, if not a day and a half at the weekend on on on university work.
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Post lockdown has been very different for me because my contract work dried up.
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So kind of flipped around and I'm not. I've basically been been working full time, but generally working during the day.
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Which is, you know, has been fantastic. It certainly kept me sane.
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Having having that discipline and like Jo, I've been, you know,
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shaping my weeks around the shut up and write sessions and having those sort of two hours in the morning and then two hours in the afternoon.
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And I'll generally work on a little bit afterwards. But it's just been fantastic.
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And it's and it's really, really supportive community. I was taking part in them before and in webinars.
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You know, since I started in 2018. But I think they have a very different feel to them at the moment.
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It's just a really, really supportive environment and a great community.
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And I would recommend them to absolutely anybody. Definitely.
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They've made a huge difference to me as well. You know, lockdown has has changed a lot of things for people.
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And although I was working from home on my PhD full time, anyway,
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the lockdown had a different impact on sort of mental health and mental well-being in that being in a shut up and write group.
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I can't go out, but having that community, knowing that every morning or most mornings and most afternoons,
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I'm going to be with a group of like minded people who are sharing some of those issues has made a massive difference.
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And like some is, you know, I would agree it's been a game changer,
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really having all of those sessions and access to those sessions that you can just step in and out if you want to.
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It has been a tremendous thing, certainly during lockdown.
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Because that was going to be one of my really crucial questions was about sense of connection and community.
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And you both obviously really experience that, particularly during lockdown.
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I'm interested to know how you feel like the opportunities for connection and for engagement with the university,
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but also that sense of community, you know, has. Has that changed?
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Has it got better because of lockdown?
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So has this kind of I guess what I'm asking is, has a lockdown provided kind of more opportunities for you as a distance student?
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I think so, I mean, I I've made quite a few trips down to the university to try and network with
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people before lockdown and so had built up some friends within the art history,
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visual culture area. And so that had been fine.
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But I think the shut up and write sessions in lockdown have provided a wider range of people to connect with at different stages.
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So I think it has made a huge difference in lockdown and it has got better.
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Yeah, I think it's got better in lockdown for me. What about you, Sam.
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Yeah, I think like Jo, you know, I try and get down to her when I can.
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Ironically, I haven't actually been on campus since May last year.
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Because I've been seeing my supervisors elsewhere in London, for example, and Bristol and having Skype supervisions as well.
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But certainly, I, I really, really enjoy coming down to Exeter and going on to going on to the campus,
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going into the library and and feeling connected in that way.
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And also, you have some very nice breweries down in Devon.
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So that's always really nice as well. But I think things have got better after lockdown.
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I find there's been some really excellent. College of Humanities webinars as well.
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That's Stacey Hynd's been running, which again, I think made me feel very connected.
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So we've talked a little bit about shut up and write and and the college webinars and also some.
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You've mentioned the fantastic programme that's offered in humanities.
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But what other ways do you primarily engage with and connect with the university as a distance student?
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I think there's a lot of engagement through Twitter as well.
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And, you know, following those different accounts and actually engaging with the conversations and discussions that's happening there.
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And that's not just what the doctoral college itself and the university, but also with.
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I mean, certainly for me, with the Department of Humanities, but with other PGRs
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And there's often conversations going on sort of in that Twitter sphere that are really interesting as well.
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That's that's another way that I found of engaging and connecting with other other PGRs and with the university.
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One of the things I found really helpful. It's the library and the ability to borrow books, obviously pre lockdown to have them posted out.
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It was very I was very fortunate. I managed to get hold of a I think back in February of a book that was was sent out to me by the university library,
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which if I hadn't had access to, I wouldn't have been able to write the thesis chapter that I had been working on for the last couple of months.
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But also the support that you can access through the library online.
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There's a little chat box. And I had some some really, really excellent help from from from the library staff over the last few months.
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Now, if I've been struggling to access a journal or struggling to find something and, you know, that's that's that's just been fantastic.
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A really, really good resource. And another way in which, you know, you do feel you do feel connected and you feel supported as well.
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What are the real challenges and the areas that we need to improve.
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I think a lot of it does go down to who you are as a distance learner as well,
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because you do have people who will just be content to sit back and not actually engage.
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But I like to engage with people, like to talk to people. And I've not really had an issue connecting with people in that way.
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I mean, I've enjoyed everything so far and felt really supported and really glad that
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I chose Exeter sort of distance learning as opposed to Gloucester University,
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which would have been on my doorstep and I could have been a face to face there. You've hit on the key point I think, which is about.
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Yourself, because obviously, you know, the fact that I've asked you to be on this podcast.
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Means that we've connected virtually and met fleetingly in person.
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You are both incredibly active on Twitter and in the shut up and write groups and the various other activities in the community,
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and I think that's probably. Well, I know, I know that's why you're getting so much out of your experience, because, I mean,
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to get the most out of any research degree, you need to be proactive and you need to be engaging.
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But I think that's even more crucial when you're at a distance. It requires an awful lot of work on the part of the student.
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And you both do that. Yes, it does. I mean, it during my M.A, which was a distance programme.
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We started as a cohort of twenty five on the M.A and people dropped out because they just
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couldn't deal with the fact that they were in this virtual community that was online.
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And that was the way that you connected with people. And then when we had face to face events where we would meet up,
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quite a few people wouldn't come because they couldn't make that transition between the two areas.
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So they couldn't transition from being distance to being face to face,
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or they were struggling themselves to actually engage with the content and engage with the rest of the cohort digitally.
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They would struggle and webinars because obviously they they just couldn't actually make that transition from real life into the digital world.
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And I think if you're the kind of person that is going to try and get the most
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out of it and you are prepared to put some work in to make those connections,
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I think that it's it's all there for the taking.
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It is down to you to actually make a bit of effort to no one's going to hand you it a plate and say, hey, you are here's your
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Nice little you're going to talk to you do not actually need to go.
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Hello. I'm here. I'd like to be involved. How can I be involved?
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And I think you know your personality. If you're deciding to do a distance learning programme, you really need to look at.
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Are you disciplined and organised individual? And can you actually make links with people over sort of digital and virtual networks?
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I think that's absolutely right, Jo.
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I think, you know, I think it's it's like many things in life, the more that you put into it, the more that you you get out of it.
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And, you know, I know that I am very fortunate that I've worked from home for the best part of 20 years.
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You know, obviously with travelling around and travelling into workplaces and things. But so I'm used to having that discipline.
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I have a spare bedroom, which is, basically it sounds glorifies
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it to call it a study. To be honest, it's just full of piles of books and papers and and photography gear and stuff like that.
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But I have that space where when I'm in here I'm either working or I'm studying.
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You know, it's not somewhere where I'll come and sit in at night to watch. a film on my my screen or whatever.
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So I have that difference between, you know, when I'm in my kitchen or I'm in my lounge.
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That's my kind of downtime when I'm in here. I'm either working or I'm doing university stuff or I'm doing RNLI stuff.
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So I think, you know, I'm very lucky that I've got that.
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And I know that, you know, more widely in the community, you know, sort of outside the university.
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But I know that during lockdown,
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a lot of people have been struggling with that transition from being in a workplace to all of a sudden working from home and
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having to do home schooling at the same time finding out that your partners got really irritating habits that you didn't know.
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And, you know, so so I kind of I feel that I've I've I've I've kind of coming from quite a strong position anyway.
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But I think I think it's true.
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It is it it is what you what you what you put into it, what you what you choose to invest, you know, you will get repaid.
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You know, in in triplicate. I think the one thing that I think I'm, I miss is having that face to face contact.
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You being able to pop into, you know, if you were based at university, being able to, you know,
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go and chat to other PGRs, you know, just without having to sort of arrange a call or or whatever.
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And I think just going into the library and being able to browse, you know,
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it's great being able to search the catalogue and look on, you know, I mean, didn't the electronic resources that we have now.
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I mean, I don't know how I managed to complete it in 1992.
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Had I don't know how that worked. I know I spent a fortune on photocopying, that's for sure.
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But. You know, just being able to go and browse the shelves and think, oh, that's that's interesting,
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that's that's an angle that I haven't, you know, I haven't thought about. So I think, you know, I just I just love libraries and bookshops anyway.
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So for me, you know, whenever I'm I'm I'm down in Exeter, then, you know,
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I do spend an inordinate amount of time in the library, quite often browsing books that have to be.
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Oh, so. Yeah, I. But I think some.
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For me, I find that it's working very well. It was working very well before lockdown.
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I've got two great supervisors, very, very supportive.
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Dr. Helen Doe and Dr. James Davey. And but I think since lockdown.
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You know, I think I think there's been like a step change, really.
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And I do think a lot of it has been shut up and write groups.
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It's you know, that they have been I think they're a real success story at the moment.
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Definitely. And I think for people who are used to being actually at the university,
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realising that this can all still happen in the virtual world and they can still feel connected.
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I think that it's actually been quite an eye opener for them and perhaps makes them realise how different it is being a distance student.
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But actually, for a lot of those people who have been struggling potentially with having to go and
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work from home or go back to their families and working from their childhood bedrooms,
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they realise that they can still connect with people.
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And I think, you know, in that respect, I think some of myself are lucky because, you know, we chose this way to learn.
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Other people have sort of been thrown in the deep end.
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So I think we've been a bit perhaps a bit more resilient to the changes and the issues around lockdown.
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But, you know, I think that's made a big difference for us, being able to actually help other people as well, saying, you know, it does work this way.
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You can learn this way and we can make steps progress. Well, I think.
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Yeah. Yeah. So say I think we're a little bit lucky in that respect because we were used to it.
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But I think it has got a lot better. And that community is building and building and building.
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Being proactive in getting the most you can out of the experience seems to have been the the thread of this whole conversation.
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The. You know, being a distance student requires you.
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To be much more proactive. But because it requires that of you has the potential to make the experience richer.
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I think, um, I think project management is is a is really important as well.
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I've worked as a programme manager and a project manager in previous lives,
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and I think that's a really useful skill to bring, especially at the moment.
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Now, where a lot of people that, you know, they may have had a really good project,
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plans for their research, and all of a sudden it's they've just been torn up.
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You know, people are unable to get into.
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People are unable to go and carry out, you know, face to face interviews if they're working in social science, for example.
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And those of us who are working in history are unable to get into archives.
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There is you know, there is material available online. But, you know, the really important stuff, you know, inevitably, generally isn't.
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So it's you know, it's having to then re, you know, replan and and not to.
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And having your project plan, being a living document as well, not to sort of producing it and then thinking, well, that's that.
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I've done that for the upgrade and now just sort crack on and, you know, put it away in a in a drawer somewhere.
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It's it's actually living thing and and managing risk as well because, you know, the.
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The future is uncertain.
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You know, from a personal perspective, I don't know when I'm going to be able to get back into the archives that I need to get into.
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I mean, I'm fortunate I'm still at a relatively early stage because I'm only my second year part time.
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So first year equivalent. So there is a lot that I can still be doing.
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But there is going to come a point where it's kind of I really do need to get into the archives or get back into the archives.
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And so it's it's it's very challenging.
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And I think it's and I think. So that's a sort of extra layer of challenge, if you like, to people who are perhaps not used to.
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To, you know, to working from home to working from from a distance. And that gives you another skill, obviously,
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that we could have brought up earlier about resilience and actually being able to
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bounce back when things are presented to you that you are beyond your control,
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that affect your work and actually being able to to think outside of the box almost.
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And think of another way of attacking some of that work and perhaps progressing with a different part.
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Being able to pick things up and put them down.
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And I think being distance does take give you a lot of resilience and a lot of ability to be able to be flexible in
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what bit you might be able to do because of the resources and things that are available to you at that point in time.
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If there are people listening who are thinking about starting a distance research degree or even changing.
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Yeah. To studying a distance, if they're midway through, what advice would you give them?
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I think the main thing for me would be.
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Be realistic about whether or not you are disciplined and organised enough to do it from home because it sounds great working from home.
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But if you are just going to be at home distracted by the tele and your family and animals or other activities, and you're not going to commit to it.
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I think that you need to give it some serious thought. You need to understand that it's still a research degree.
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It is still either full time or part time. And you need to commit a certain number of hours to it in order to get the most out of it.
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And I think if you and if you don't have a supportive network around you, people who understand that when you're at home,
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it's not that you're at home and your available to go out for coffee or whatever, that you are at home and you are working,
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then that's also quite important and being realistic about where you might work in a do you have that space at home?
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Do you have an area that is good for reading an area? Good.
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That's good for writing those kind of things or being creative, whatever it is you need to do.
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So you need to make sure that you've got access to those spaces that you can distinguish between that and your home life, basically.
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I think that's all really, really good advice. I think it's I think you have to ask yourself very, very, very firmly.
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Do you have the commitment? Do you have the passion to do this?
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Because when you're waking up on a Sunday morning, if you're a part timer like me and the sun is out, your friends are, you know,
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having a barbecue and you've got to start you've got to spend eight hours reading about Victorian charity and philanthropy,
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you know, because you you you have to you have to have that commitment.
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You have to have that discipline. And it you know, it's it's not always easy.
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I had some very good advice from a friend who had done an open university degree who said, you know,
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when you come to do your studying in the evening, don't take a break from from from from from, you know,
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don't have some downtime between work and study because you'll you'll not do it because you said that's what I found, is that, you know,
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if I just thought I'm just going to have half an hour and, you know,
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watch the news or whatever, then before you know it, you know, it's two hours later.
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And your actually I'm too tired. And so I goes back to this point.
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That routine is, you know, I would finish work, take my dog out for a for a walk, come back and then bang into into the study.
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And so it's having it's having that commitment, you know, do you do you care?
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Do you really, really care about this this this thing that you want to research because you need that that fire to keep going when your mates are
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all having a lovely barbecue in the sun and in on the one day that the sun comes up here in Scotland and you've got a deadline,
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you've got a you know, you've you've got to stay indoors and.
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So it is. And I think I think the point that Jo made as well about having a support network around you.
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It's really important. And having a workspace is is really important.
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And just if you're a few of the right, you know, if you're the sort of personality who is willing to be proactive and is willing to to to make.
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To make the most out of out of this and and and keep going.
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I. Yeah, those are all the sort of things that I would say.
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But if if if you want to do it. The support is there for you.
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From the university. Definitely. And, you know, you'll you'll find it ironic.
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I didn't actually I haven't actually visited the first time I visited the campus of
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Exeter was for my PGR induction because I knew I was going to be working at a distance.
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And what mattered to me was, was having that sense for maritime history,
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that having having that that interest there and having been able to access the support.
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So it was a really lovely surprise when I turned up and realised that it's really, really beautiful campus.
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And I think our beautiful campus is probably a really good note to end on.
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Thank you so much to Sam and Jo for taking the time out of their day to talk to me about being a distance PGR and really share some
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important insights into what that experience is like and the kind of person you need to be to undertake a research degree at a distance.
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So is going to become more and more popular, I think, in the kind of post COVID 19 World.
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And so I think it's it's crucial that we get the message out about how positive and connected and supportive that distance research experience can be.
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And that's it for this episode. Don't forget to like, rate and subscribe and join me next time when I'll be talking to somebody else about researchers, development and everything in between.
Wednesday Jun 10, 2020
Wednesday Jun 10, 2020
In this episode I talk to Edward Mills, a postgraduate researcher in Modern Languages at the University of Exeter about his experience of writing up his thesis – specifically, writing up during the Covid-19 pandemic. During the podcast we discuss:
- CGP Gray’s video Lockdon Productivity: Spaceship You
- How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page, edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari
- University of Exeter Doctoral College Supporting PGR Writing project
- Pat Thomson’s blog Patter
- PhD comics on twitter and their website
- Academics in Quarantine conference on twitter
- Zoë Ayres on twitter
- And for anyone not familiar with our Doctor Who metaphor and jokes
You can find Edward on twitter @edward_mills, and on the University of Exeter website.
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Podcast transcript
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Hello and welcome, R, D. And The Inbetweens on your host, Kelly Preece,
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and every fortnight I talk to a different guest about researches, development and everything in between.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the second official episode of the podcast.
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Researchers development and everything in between. Before I get started with this week's guest,
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I just want to say thank you to everybody who downloaded and listened to the special episode
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released last week where I talked to Victoria Omotoso about being a BAME researcher.
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It's fantastic that Victoria's experience and the experiences of BAME researchers in higher education is having
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traction and getting out there and that everybody is learning as much as I did from listening to Victoria.
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So please do continue to share Victoria's story and the stories and experiences of other BAME researchers.
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So for this episode, I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by another one of our PGRs, Edward Mills.
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Edward is a PGR in modern languages and is just on the cusp or almost at the point of submission.
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So for this episode, Edward and I are going to talk about all things writing up,
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writing procrastination, and then just at the end, a little bit of Doctor Who.
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For those of you that have been looking forward to my promise of bad jokes, this is an episode where you're going to get a lot of them.
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Prepare yourselves. So, Edward, are you happy to introduce yourself?
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Yes. Hello. Thanks for having me. I noticed in last week's podcast you said you're going to be joined by someone else.
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So, hello. I'm someone else specifically. My name is Edward
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I am a final year, hopefully post grad student here at the University of Exeter where I am dangerously close to finishing my PhD in French,
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specifically in all things medieval French. Fabulous.
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So we're going to be talking today about the process of writing up,
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but specifically given the current situation writing up in the time of Corona virus.
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So, Edward, how has writing up been for you in the time coronavirus? It's a good question, actually,
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that it's a difficult one because I'm not sure there was actually a single moment anyway when I realised that I'd started writing up.
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I've been writing up for a few months now. I really started, I would say, around this time last year with the wriiting up process.
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But for reasons I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute. The distinction between writing up and researching is a bit more blurred in the humanities.
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Corona virus has definitely changed things and it's changed things in ways that I didn't think any of us could have expected.
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But hopefully we'd like to point out today, if we can take one thing away from it,
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is that if it's an isolating process, certainly with everything that's going on at the moment,
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obviously writing up already has a reputation for being quite isolating and then adding,
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coronavirus on top of that, it doesn't have to be isolated. And there were several ways that you can go about making sure that doesn't happen.
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So if you sort of started the process pretty much a year ago and we'll come back to kind of the start of that bit later,
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how before we got into this isolate, particularly isolating situation.
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How were you managing the isolating aspects of writing up your thesis so that you didn't become isolated?
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I think the main thing was to maintain and cultivate the networks that I had already built up during the PhD.
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So the networks amongst supervisors networks, amongst other members of the department and networks amongst PGRs as well.
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So we built up some very supportive postgraduate networks.
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And I was even though I was on my own in an office because I juggling the writing up with a different job,
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and even though I was on my own in that office that was given to me as part of the job,
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I was still very, very keen on having people over on invite people to work, for periods of time in that office when there was a space in there.
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It was all about setting up the interaction with people to make sure that you didn't
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lose the friendship gains that you'd already made during the first part of your thesis,
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I think. So were they kind of inviting people to just come and work in the office with you, or was it a more social kind of arrangement?
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A bit of both, really, a lot of a lot of this will come back.
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We'll come back to you in a minute, I'm sure, when we talk about how COVID changes things.
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But it was a bit of both. You know,
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I had a big desk in the office so if someone wanted to come and work up there for a bit or we could go work together in in a different space.
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The important thing really is togetherness, whether you're working or you're not working.
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Being able to maintain the friendships that you've built up through the isolating process of writing up and breaking up the day,
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which might otherwise feel like seven or eight hours of sitting at a desk, generally just mashing keyboard.
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Breaking that up is an absolutely crucial thing to do.
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And friends, these mythical creatures called friends are one way of doing that.
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And that would be the best way of doing it as well, I think. Absolutely. And I think people who.
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There's a there's the interesting benefit of people who are going through the same thing,
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who are also doing their research, we are writing up and so have that very particular kind of empathy for your situation,
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but also then people who know nothing about it and have got nothing to do with it and can be an absolute and total distraction from the whole thing.
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Yes, absolutely. And on that front as well, I've been very fortunate over the PhD to be involved in a lot of other things.
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My my supervisor, if he's listening. Hi.
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Tom has described his job in the past as being the guy who stopped me doing other things, which is an exaggeration,
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obviously, but it is a valid point in that I have a tendency to get involved in all the things.
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Many of them, though, do actually help, as I'm sure we would all agree in getting away from the writing.
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So if you need if you need a day off of Headspace going on a bike ride with the local cycling club is great.
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Going to going to play chess for the university and get destroyed by people half your age is great.
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I'm not saying they both happen. I'm just heavily implying it. This is really important.
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I mean, you already know that I'm a big,
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big advocate for these sorts of things because the impact that they have on your mental health and wellbeing is huge.
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And I know that from my own experience of not doing that and not having those extra things.
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But also, you know, it's it's think it's thinking space.
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It's thinking time. But away from that. Away from the computer screen.
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Do you find you have moments of inspiration when you're on a bike ride or something?
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Yeah, I do. I very often talk to myself on bike rides.
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I feel like this is gonna be used in some kind of therapy session 20 years from now by.
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I very often chat to myself. Okay. Right.
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Just getting the getting the heart rate up now. So what's the plan for today?
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Well, I guess to start off just by processing what you began yesterday is picture this with
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the kind of the countryside rolling gently by and you've got a you've got a notion. So you need to start by finishing off that paragraph.
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You left a sentence over from yesterday. Good.
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And then just before lunch, you can move on and you can you can see if you can crack the back of the next one.
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No, absolutely. Getting out and doing enough exercise is good. There was an excellent video, which I'm sure will be in the show notes.
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This is a a more moving toward a slightly more corona specific point, but it's also good advice before before all of this hit.
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This next one video by YouTube called CGP Grey. It's called Spaceship U.
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And it's basically a lock down productivity guide.
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I know you've seen this because I sent it to you. It's. If you're sick of if you're sick of hearing how to be productive.
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Watch this one instead because it frames it in the context of you in a spaceship and spaceships.
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Cool. Why?
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What I really like about that video is it does reinforce the things we're talking about, about the importance of your wider network of self care.
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And I know that self care is a kind of overly used term in a lot of ways in our culture.
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But those things that you do to look after your mental and physical health are incredibly important
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because those are the things that are going to sustain you to do this really complex and intense.
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And, you know, inevitably, I think at some point is quite stressful work of writing up the thesis.
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Oh, yeah. Jumping, jumping, jumping ahead to what I'm doing after we finish recording this podcast.
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I'm going to go out for the bike ride. And I haven't actually got as much done today as I would probably have hoped.
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To have got done. That's not saying I was completely unproductive, honestly, supervisor, I promise.
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But I do think that the idea of having this built were built in is a non-negotiable, is quite important.
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It is my way of decompressing, if you like it, doesn't it?
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One of the things that the CGP Grey video stresses is that if your if your meant if you'll core, if you'd like has two half the physical and mental.
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It's much easier to start by priming the physical half of your your proverbial spaceship's core because the brains can't think themselves better.
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But exercise is a great leveller. We also know that, you know, from research the positive impacts.
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Exercise has on mental health in terms of the hormones and endorphins that get produced as a result of doing exercise.
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So, you know, there's a kind of a one feeds the other.
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I can. That's exactly what CGP Grey says.
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And I can I can personally attest to the mental health benefits of going wiiiii zoom down the one hill in my local area.
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So how did you start writing up? Like did did you make a conscious decision, like you got to a point in the research and went, okay.
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I am now writing up? Or was it a more kind of fluid organic process?
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For me at least, it's a much more fluid organic process. A bit of context.
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I'm I'm now in my fourth year and my PhD required a little bit of rethinking after an upgrade.
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Viva, which was a really useful experience, probably the most enriching hour that I'd spent on the PhD up to that point, if that makes sense.
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So it was a difficult one because I found myself after that having to reframe a few questions.
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And what that meant was it wasn't really until the end of my second year that I had an idea of how my PhD would be structured.
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I then spent the most of my third year on a chapter of my thesis that would sit somewhat apart from the other sections.
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So to an extent, I'd say that the writing up process started over the summer of my third to fourth year,
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which basically has involved me over the last year taking ideas and plans for chapters and outlines that existed mostly as conference papers actually,
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and fleshing them out one by one into full chapters.
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That's now done. And I'm paradoxically back at Chapter one, which I'm just finishing up now before I turn to the conclusion and the introduction.
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So you mentioned there that those sort of chapters actually were conference papers.
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Yes. That then became fleshing out.
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So when when you came to sort of thinking about that structure and actually starting to to to draft chapters and chapters,
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if you see what I mean, rather than as other pieces of writing. What did that feel like?
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Was that a really intimidating process? It was a bit of both, really.
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As a as a general rule, I'm a fan of using conferences to present stuff that you're not certain about
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rather than using them as as as ways of presenting work that you've already done,
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because they're a great way to basically get feedback and to hear people who work in that field.
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And get a sense of what they think and what you're doing, so in that sense,
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it was slightly reassuring because I had already road tested quite a lot of what I was what I was going to be developing.
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The main the main process really for me for that was saying, OK, in this chapter, what's more, they say in this conference paper.
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What's the what's the main point that you're getting across? And that's another thing I say.
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You can only have one big idea in a conference paper. Yes, absolutely.
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And then I was going through and I was thinking, OK, will this hold up as a whole chapter?
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Sometimes it would. So my my third chapter, I did actually hold up more or less.
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Sometimes it wouldn't. So the second chapter required a little bit more extension and a bit more development with
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something that I hadn't spoken about in the conference paper way back in summer 2017.
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So how do you manage your time throughout this process and and how so you said, you know,
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you you you book or likely book in the bike rides and things which are non-negotiable.
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But how do you actually manage your writing time and has that changed at all because of the change in environment, but also,
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you know, the inevitable change in work habits and productivity that's come through the COVID 19 pandemic and being in lockdown?
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I don't necessarily think I am the most reliable worker.
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There's a very good book, is a very good book on this called How We Write Ways of Looking at a Blank Page,
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which is put together by a group of a group of mediaevalist. So I very much my field and they point out that there is no.
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Single right way to write. And I have been experimenting with different things for.
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Yes. And I probably will expand with different things for years. The main thing I think is, is not to go into your office,
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whether that's a home office or work office and say, right, I'm going to do this for seven hours.
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Because that never works. YouTube is usually open by the end of the first hour.
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You're going to have some. At the moment, for me, it's it's it's German Schlager music going after 90 minutes.
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You're going to be dancing around the place by two hours. And maybe that's just me.
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I don't know. But you're going to get distracted if you break it down into. If you don't break it down.
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Well, then if you say, OK. Seven hours. Here we go. So there are different ways of dealing with that.
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Some of them were things I had tried before and brought up brought up again while watching up some of them.
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Some of them weren't so. Obvious ways of structuring your time, the first one is through deadlines
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Kind of goes is a given. you Know you use them with your supervisors and use them with yourself.
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You can also work collaboratively with other people.
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And I'm sure that those of you who are involved in this will expect the plug for shut up and write groups, which is definitely coming later.
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When it comes to structuring your day, though, those that kind of activity shut up and write remote retreats.
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All of these things and more, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute, are the best way I think of structuring your time on a day to day basis.
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One of the one of the books I use when I'm doing academic writing teaching is a book by Eric Hyot called Elements of Academic Style.
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And he points out that you need to set aside time to write.
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Otherwise, you genuinely have a risk of the tail wagging the dog, which has happened to me on a fair few occasions in the past.
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Absolutely. And I think these kind of different ways of structuring time, particularly the collaborative stuff, as you know.
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And as anyone that knows me in real life or even on Twitter knows is is one of my things
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that I think is quite important about making sure that you take that pressure off,
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making sure that you're structuring your time into small chunks, because that is just how we work best.
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And so we do quite a lot of that at Exeter through when we were on campus, we did longer kind of write clubs.
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So four hours of of kind of pomodoro technique blocks and various different things.
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But we've migrated that online. So we were already running online sharp and write sessions as part of our webinar programme,
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and we've just expanded that quite considerably to be running.
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shut up and write sessions either once or twice a day. But you know about this because you're one of my PGR volunteers.
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Yes. Yes, this is true. Yes. So this is one of the one of the ways, I think, structuring my time during lockdown.
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It's it's a great way to meet people, to focus your work in and to say, OK, this morning I'm going to be spending two hours doing this.
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I want to achieve this. There are other ways as structuring my time during lockdown, which have kind of developed out of a lot of stuff I did beforehand,
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as I say, was about maintaining the networks are built up.
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The most obvious one for me, apart from the shut up and write sessions, is I'm very lucky actually, in that I have a group of office buddies.
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We basically run a virtual office. So we will we will use the Pomodoro technique sometimes.
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Not always, but we will. We will we'll have kind of five hour epic teams sessions, which makes it sound like we're where we're procrastinating.
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But actually what we do is we just turn off our audio and video and then just work for 25 minutes off now or whatever,
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and then come back and chat for five and share some strange YouTube videos and then go again.
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Come back again, go then come back again. So that's one way of doing it.
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The other thing that I do is a lot of the. More social aspects have moved on line as well.
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So that's sort of outside the extra curricular, I suppose, is the word.
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They're my main ways of working around what is a very isolating but hopefully not isolated process.
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You've got to challenge the impulse towards isolation that comes from writing up, especially lwriting up in the time of COVID
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So in the work that I do on doctoral writing and academic writing and research, writing or whatever it is that you want to call it.
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There is quite a lot of contention about this term writing up,
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and particularly Pat Thompson is somebody that I've talked to you about many times
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and I always talk about in Sessions and is at the University of Nottingham.
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I'll put a link to her blog in the show notes and she in her books on doctoral writing problematises
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this idea of writing up that;s based on the idea that writing up assumes that writing isn't something or doing throughout the research process.
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And particularly as she's a social scientist, she talks about how actually in the humanities,
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arts and social sciences, that more traditional notion of.
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Sitting down and starting doing the writing doesn't really fit.
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And actually the argument she makes is that we shouldn't be doing that for the
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sciences either because we're not practising or writing and and developing,
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you know. You said it yourself, your working from materials you've already got.
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Yes, absolutely, and I think of the production of those conference papers as part of my doctoral writing.
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It's exactly what that was. The I think the reason that it might not work in some of the humanities is that when when you look
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at something like to give a kind of a common example of the images of doctoral life PhD comics,
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that's written from a primarily scientific perspective.
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And in that sense, there is something of a distinction between the data gathering process and the production of research outputs.
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Obviously, a lot of our listeners will know that that distinction falls apart a bit in the humanities where your data might be present from the start.
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Technically speaking, if you are.
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If you are looking at that in a published literature, for example, it might not be if you doing archival research and that's been the case for me.
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But the analysis results, creation vs. lighting up process has always, for me being quite blurred one.
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I think. I describe it. I'm writing up in the sense that because of how I spent my first chapter.
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There was something of a gap between writing those conference papers and writing up.
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The chapters, so I produced the conference papers for sort of summer 2018,
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and then it was it was the best part of a year working on something that was not connected to
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either of those papers before I went back to them and redevelop them into full papers themselves.
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All three of my my main chapters, weirdly, have existed at one point or another as conference papers.
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And I found a very useful way to do it, for what it's worth. There are still a lot of conferences which are either moving online or have moved online.
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I've done one myself. This was for the other project that I'm working on alongside finishing up the PhD
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But I would very much recommend that you look into them. So that's one one that is general purpose.
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called academics in isolation. I'm sure we'll put that in the show and that's OK.
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There are plenty of others to do a bit more discipline specific, and it's worth just taking a little bit of time to look through those.
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I'm sure a future episode of this podcast will talk about Twitter.
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But one of the one of the best places to find information about all of these is Twitter.
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Definitely worth going on there. If you don't have an account looking for opportunities to present your research.
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And of course, here in Exeter, we've got things like the research showcase as well.
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The doctoral college blog and various ways of writing in both the kind of a more conventional academic and a less conventional style.
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I think these are the ways in which.
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COVID 19, has disrupted that writing process for people in the sciences.
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You know, I'm talking from the perspective of PGRs that have spoken to me about this is quite interesting because it's for
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a lot of them forced them into that writing part of their work much earlier than they ever would have predicted,
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because they've because they can't be collecting data if they're not in labs or if they're not able to do fieldwork.
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And so they have the thing that they can do at this point in time in a remote, isolated, locked down environment is writing.
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And so there's this. Dr. Zoe Ayres on Twitter.
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She does these great infographics or posters. A lot of the ones that she does are about mental health and wellbeing and research.
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But she's done this kind of like scientist without a lab. These are the things that you can do.
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And there's all sorts of things that she talks about, including things like writing journal articles, drafting chapters, visualising data.
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And it really highlights, I think. Yeah, the way that that traditional process for the sciences has been massively disrupted.
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But, you know, I talk to a lot of academics in like bio sciences, for instance, where we talk about the need to get.
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People in the sciences writing much earlier, because when you do start the quote unquote,
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writing up six months before the end and you haven't really done any of that writing work beforehand.
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You've got a mammoth near impossible task in summing up.
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I want to talk about kind of key advice and things that you advice you would give yourselves.
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So i magine I am the doctor from BBC's Doctor Who and I have a TARDIS and I say, Edward, come back in time with me.
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One year ago to prewriting up Edward.
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What piece of advice would you give past Edward?
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What would you what kind of key thing have you learnt throughout this process that you wish you knew a year go. Like a TARDIS
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The writing process encompasses more on the inside than you'd expect from looking at it from outside.
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And what that means is you need to be ready for it.
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This goes for corona virus specific cases like mine or people who hopefully will not be in the same position in a couple of years time from now,
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you will have built up networks over the course of the PhD friends, colleagues, supervisors.
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The really important thing is even if the means of keeping up those networks have changed.
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Now. For those of us who are watching right now.
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Keep those networks. Do not let yourself retreat into a wririnf bubble or tell yourself or let anyone else tell you that you are writing up,
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therefore you should not be meeting other people or talking about research or anything like that.
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Writing a PhD is really hard. Speaking from experience here,
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but you can make it a lot easier by allowing yourself to be with other people in remote circumstances to, you know, through
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Zoom rooms or you know Actual physical rooms. Once once things start opening up again, that's the important thing.
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I think it's that you trust the networks that you've already built. And you.
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Milk them for all they're worth.
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I've certainly I'm certainly very grateful to the people who have tolerated my whitterings and they know who they are.
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Over the over the last couple of months. And I think this made me made my thesis a lot better.
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I think it's also made my acknowledgements a lot longer than they probably will be allowed to be.
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But that's That's a story today. What a fabulous note to end on.
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And you heard it here first, folks. Edward Mills writing up is like a TARDIS bigger on the inside.
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Thank you very much for having me. Thank you. Thank you so much to Edward for taking the time out with a very important thesis writing
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process to talk to me about that process and also for indulging my doctor who jokes and puns.
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You can find information about all the different things Edward and I discussed in the show notes,
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as well as where to find Edward on Twitter and online. And that's it for this episode.
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Don't forget to like rate and Subscribe and join me next time.
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We'll be talking to somebody else about researchers development and everything in between.
Wednesday Jun 03, 2020
Wednesday Jun 03, 2020
In this special episode I talk to Victoria Omotoso, PGR in Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter, about being a BAME researcher in Higher Education and the world today. During the podcast we reference:
- AdvanceHE Equality in Higher Education Statistical Report 2019
- An article from the American Psychological Association about Unmasking Racial Microaggressions
- Noughts+Crosses, a BBC adaptation of the novel by Malories Blackman and I was wrong, Malorie Blackman was not the first black woman writer for Doctor Who – she was the first black writer in the show’s 50+ year history
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Episode Transcript
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Hello and welcome to R, D and The Inbetweens.
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I'm your host, Kelly Preece, and every fortnight I talk to a different guest about researchers development and everything in between.
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Hello and welcome to this special episode of Researchers Development and the Inbetweens
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I recognise it's slightly strange to have a special episode of a podcast when your one episode into the series,
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but I wanted to provide a response to the events going on across the world and particularly in America and the death of George Floyd.
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One of the things I want to do with this podcast is provide a platform to discuss the real lived experiences of our researchers.
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And it would seem remiss to let this opportunity go by to talk about the experience of being a BAME researcher in higher education.
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I'm delighted to be joined by one of our PGR, Victoria Omotoso
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to discuss being a BAME researcher in higher education and generally in the world today.
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I want to point out that I have not edited this conversation.
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And the reason for that is I don't want to use my privileged perspective to change or alter Victoria's voice.
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So, Victoria, are you happy to introduce yourself? Yes. Hi, Kelly.
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Thanks for having me. So my name is Victoria. Omotoso. I am a PhD Theology candidate and just recently submitted. Congratulations.
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Thank you. I'm currently
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at the University of Exeter. Yes, my research kind of looks into the Jesus films and yeah,
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it touches a lot actually on ethnicity in films and how Hollywood has whitewashed a lot of stuff.
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So yes. Thanks for having me. Thank you.
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And the so to start with is really, really big an open question, which is just about what is it like to be a.
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BAME researcher in higher education. What's the environment like for you?
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What's the experience? Yeah, definitely being a BAME researcher.
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I think one of the main things you kind of come out from is that, you know, that there is there is an underlying thread, right.
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Of kind of inequality and discrimination. And a lot of that comes with stereotyping as well.
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And it does kind of lead you when you do occupy these white spaces.
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Makes you so much more conscious, actually, of the colour of your skin. And even though that shouldn't be a thing and, you know, in this modern age.
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But you do feel that especially in, you know, we enter a room and you are the only,
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you know, BAME researcher, you know, whether it be at a conference many times.
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Many of times I've entered conferences. I'm the only the only BAME researcher there.
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Or, you know, seminars. And sometimes when you.
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You know, Ia lot of the times when we're talking about things, you know, in the humanities,
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for example, you know, we're talking about, you know, histories and stuff like that.
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And you're always conscious of how people can respond.
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If I speak out, they're just going to label me as an angry black woman.
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Or are they going to, you know, just say, oh, she's just another person that's just trying to make a point.
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So all those things just come into play and you're constantly just aware on how you have to navigate yourself through these,
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you know, through the walls of of H-E really. And.
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You know, there's always a sense of. Trying to over perform.
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That's a big thing that always just comes up because I think we all. No matter what race you are, we all experience imposter syndrome.
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Right? You know, we all have that. We all have that thing.
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But it's somehow always heightened because you feel that I need to prove.
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To the white people that I'm good enough. Oh, gee, I'm like, you have to almost.
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Kind of prove that as a point. That, yeah, I, too, can engage in, you know, intelligent conversation, because, to be honest,
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I have experienced, you know, some people that, you know, would just kind of pass me by.
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But when I open my mouth. They'll be like, wow, I, I have no idea.
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You know, you were educated like that. Oh, seriously.
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You know. And and it's just again, it's just this kind of this underlying kind of like I said,
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this underlying thread that so, you know, just building up stereotypes that.
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You know need to be broken down. Really, for people to be able to actually break through those walls.
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And look, I will acknowledge that personally, I acknowledge that I'm privileged to be able to study.
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You know, in institutions. Everyone that's able to study in HE is a privilege.
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Absolutely. Exactly. And but, you know, I am also aware that.
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The colour of my skin, may, sometimes acts as a barrier for me.
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And, you know, I think. It comes to a point of trying to just dismantle those.
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Structures that have been set in place, but they can't be done by BAME researchers alone.
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Absolutely.
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And I think for me, some of the things that I found really striking in the past few years are not necessarily some of the instances of racism,
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which, you know, we we we will talk about kind of some of those in a bit, but some of the more structural things and the more subtle things.
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So, for instance AdvanceHE did an equality report a couple of years and it said that
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So you UK professors by ethnic group. Ninety one point two percent of professors in the U.K. are white and Nought.
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Six are black. Less than one percent. Less than one percent.
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And the you know, and we know that there is a black attainment gap.
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We know that at both a level and at degree level.
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And we see, you know, there's some. I'll share in the show notes, some of these statistics.
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And I linked to this information because they've done infographics and I think they're really powerful
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and they've done one that sort of shows the amount of white and BAME students in academia starting at
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undergraduate level and how that changes as you go through kind of into postgraduate research, lectureships
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and professors and the amount of white people goes up and the amount of BAME people goes down.
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And it's really striking because you can just I think in that see that structure.
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Yeah, and how it is. Like you say, it is a white space. Yeah.
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Yeah. So one of the things that we can't really ignore is what the University of Exeter is geographically located.
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Yes. And this is something we've discussed before.
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We are in the south west of England, which is and I think the politest way to put it is not the most multicultural area of this country.
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Was that a consideration for you in coming to study in the south west?
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No, because if I'm honest, I mean, I came from King's College in London.
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And when I first was, you know, just making a trip, I didn't I didn't really know much about Exeter.
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It wasn't really a place I'd considered. I knew of the university had a great reputation, of course.
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But I you know, and I've heard that all is a beautiful part of the world.
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But in terms of, you know, the city itself, I never really had much information on it, on it at first.
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I will be honest, it was not a concern for me.
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But when I did my first week, we got a little cottage somewhere where we were waiting for, you know, getting ready for the new academic uear to start.
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And that was when I was like, oh, OK, this is the Southwest.
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Yeah. You know, I mean, it was just so like I grew up I grew up in South Africa.
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Right. OK. So so, you know, we know everyone knows, you know, the history of of that nation.
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Right. Major racial tensions. So it wouldn't be what would it be anything new to me if I were to experience, you know,
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some form of either kind of injustice, like kind of very subtle injustice or subtle discrimination.
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But when I moved to the Southwest, it was almost like a new can had opened for me.
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It was just.
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Microaggressions, stares, people trying to touch my hair because it was something it was was something I have never experienced.
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I moved down here and it just at first I was just like, very confused.
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The whole thing. I'm like, is it that they actually have never seen a black person before?
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Or that they feel that they've never seen a black person before or that they don't have any interactions?
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Do I look like some kind of museum artefact to them?
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Like, you know, it was just it was just it was just crazy to me.
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Like, I would be you go into the shop and I would genuinely get people genuinely just stopping and staring.
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And, you know. And then it just for me, you know, it's just as kind of I feel that there's a sense that.
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For black people, again, this is kind of I know I don't want to call it ownership but it's almost s like if a black body enters into the room,
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it's like, you know, what's gonna happen next? You know, and even just the whole thing of touching hair, like, you know,
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just going up to someone and touching that a stranger and touching their heads.
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It's the most kind of invasive part of. Incredibly, you know.
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But again, what is it about? I asked that question.
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I like, what is it about black bodies that white people think that that's OK?
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You know, that some white people think that that's OK. To be able to come and just, you know.
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Place your hands on them, say, you know, things like that walking, you know you do, you just so much more aware.
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You know, the conscious ness of it all is very daunting, I think.
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And like we said, I think you were saying, you know. A lot of the racism is not aggressive.
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A lot of it is formed into the subtle ness of it.
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And. And I think that is. Like you said, that is what actually brings a lot of impact because you're just like it's just the everyday.
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The ordinary everyday where these experiences continue to happen because of the colour of your skin.
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And there seems to be a lot in what you're saying about othering.
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Yes. Oh, the other. Yes. Honestly, it's yeah, you're completely right.
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Because I think I don't know. It is just kind of I think it also goes back to year to year.
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If we go back decades ago when this whole thing of, you know, exoticism and like the fetishising of black bodies and all of that.
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I think it all kind of plays into that rhetorically. Right.
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Of the other of this otherness that is actually, you know, it does form from the same system that has, you know,
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used used it as a form of, you know, almost as I don't want to say, you know, like of almost a form of entertainment in a way.
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Absolutely. I mean, I, I see it you see it so often with attitudes to disability as well, like the the kind of othering or the kind of freak show.
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of the early 20th century. Yes, definitely.
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And you can say and I've heard a lot of people talk to me about kind of that again, that fetishisation, I can't say that word.
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Fetishisation of disabled bodies. Yes.
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And and and it it certainly seems to me
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from my perspective on the situation that it is there seems to be the underpinning of the attitude
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of the freak show or of exoticism that just seems to be still so embedded in our culture.
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Yes. Yes. And I I think, like you said, it's those micro aggressions, it's those those subtle forms of racism that we are not.
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When I say we, I mean as myself, as a kind of privileged white person, we don't know.
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We don't see. No, we don't see in the same. Well, we certainly don't see in the same way.
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And there's been lots of discussions in the sector.
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So there's a podcast called WonkHE.
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And there was a really interesting episode where they talked about how they were gonna deal with a level grades and predicted grades and the argument
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And somebody tried to argue that this was gonna be a great leveller for people.
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And actually, the someone said, well, no.
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Because we know statistically that predicted grades for black students in the UK are much lower than what they actually achieve.
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So this is a system that's gonna work against them.
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Yeah. And and it's those sorts of I think it's those sorts of structural.
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Discriminations are underpinning everything we do. Yeah.
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Yeah. Know you're completely right. It's the thing is, it's it's this is generations like we see what's happening right now.
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This is generations upon generations of trauma.
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I mean, my grandmother would tell me stories of when she was working in London in the 60s of people screaming.
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I heard the N-word actually down the street. And she said there's no way she can raise her children.
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And like, you know, she you know, she is fighting for equality in the 60s.
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Here I am. Her granddaughter is still talking about this today. So this is I mean,
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this is a generational thing of we've hit we've heard the stories of what of our parents or what our grandparents
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have gone through and now their children are still having to face these same battles in our own way.
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And again, you know, like you said, the structure of it needs to be completely broken down.
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But I think it is like you said, you know. priviledge, people that come from a place of privilege.
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Need to be away, and I think what's happening right now with this whole you know,
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with the whole George Floyd we've been the brave movement is that you are seeing thousands and thousands of people and a lot of white people are.
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Recognising, you know, say that, hey, I'm so sorry that I took me this long to recognise my my privilege.
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But, you know, I think I think they've always known that there was a privilege. Right. I mean, I think I think we all are aware of white privilege.
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I think we're all aware of the systems that are put in place that are able to benefit some more than others.
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But when it benefits you, it's easier to it's very easy to ignore. Exactly.
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Exactly. And I think it's in your favour. Exactly.
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And and that has is that's been the story, hasn't it?
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For so long. And it's not even the whole
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You know, this whole inequality of everything is the kind of society we live in.
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Yes. Especially in the UK. I have seen people be abused, racially abused on public transport.
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And nobody no, I mean, it's another person of colour that's having to step in.
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Yes. And, you know, there's nobody is standing up.
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No white person in that bus was, you know, was able to stand up and say, hey, that's not OK.
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So, you know, it's it's just this. I think the the passiveness of it all, I think is actually what?
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What's that way when it starts to arose? We almost become desensitised to the whole
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Yeah. And I saw something Will Smith had actually posted a couple of days ago that said.
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So if there isn't some. It was something like there hasn't been a resurgence of racism.
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It's just being filmed. Yes. Yes, I saw that. Yes, exactly.
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Exactly. I just I find that really powerful, just as a kind of reminder that just because you aren't seeing something.
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Exactly. And if you if you are white and if you are privileged, you're not going to see it.
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Not not that regularly as it occurs. That's so true, that's so true.
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You go, you go, sorry, I was just agreeing with what you said.
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You know, it's it's some. This is not new to black people.
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No. These experiences aren't new to us. We.
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We mean, we know of people this has happened to you. I guess you know of family members who've been detained just because of the colour of their skin.
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We know you know, this is not this is not.
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I've got two brothers that are black men. Yeah.
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And. I even just going to our local shop down the road.
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I have to tell him, take your hoodie off, like, don't wear a hat because you're a black man.
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And they will be watching you. So, you know, it's just things like that that whereas if his white friend, you know, wore a beanie or hoodie,
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you know, no business, no suspicion, you know, or he's going for a walk even when we're in Africa.
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He's going for a walk. And if he's detained because he's black, because he shouldn't be here, it's a white space.
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Why are you here? So, you know, this this these things, these experiences, It's not new to us.
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You know, these stories are not new to black communities in the US.
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They have been they have been going through this for generations, for years.
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But it is finally coming into light.
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And and yet, you know, I think, again, it is it's finally.
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Dawning on people that we have a serious problem.
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And I think a lot of, you know, white people saying we have a serious problem and we are the ones to fix it.
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Because to be honest, they started this problem in the first place.
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If I'm if I'm can be quite frank there. Absolutely. And like you said before, you know.
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And there's a lot of discussion about this at the moment in various different groups,
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that it's the people with the privilege have to speak up and start the change because we're the ones with the power and the privilege.
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This is what you know what this is. I think I literally sent this to my mother yesterday and I said, this is it.
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All this is great. All this change is great. I said, but we need the white people because they are the ones in power.
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They are the ones sitting on those boards. They are the ones making those policies.
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And I said, you know, we need them. To be able to step up and activate, you know, what is started at grassroots.
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And only then can we start to see the dismantling of white supremacy, you know.
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Yeah. And. I've had a lot of people talk as well about the emotional labour that gets put on people from discriminated groups in general,
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where they are the people that have to fight for change. You know, when they're already fighting just for their existence.
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Yeah, yeah. And the the impact of that on mental health and physical health, it's very true.
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And like you say, you know. You go into most, you know, senior boards of senior management of universities across the country.
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It's statistically unlikely to see a woman, let alone a black woman.
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Yes. Yes. And, you know, there's been lots of.
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And I know that the BME network at the university have been saying a lot about actually, you know,
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it's it's our it's our responsibility as white people when we're in a room and we realise
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that our BAME colleagues and students aren't represented to actually speak up and say,
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you know what? This is not good enough. Yeah, I'm definitely.
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I mean, that's what we've been fighting for. We fight to to be in the room.
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Yeah, to be in the room. I mean, there was a time they wouldn't even let us in the building, you know, way in the building.
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You know, now what? Now we're fighting for to be in the room. And I'm not saying that I'm not trying to undermine.
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I don't want to undermine history. You know, I don't undermine, obviously, the impact of what has changed.
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But it's 2020 and we are still fighting for it, you know,
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for against the injustice and discriminations of people because of the colour of their skin.
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And that is baffling and on every level. And I think a lot of people are still finding that baffling, that the colour of my skin is not a weapon.
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And the colour of my skin should not make me more suspicious than my white girlfriend.
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So this kind of. This, you know, these these these retorts that have been kind of passed down, passed down, passed them continue.
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They continue and. Yeah, and I think we're just finally, I think.
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I said, Mom, black people we are tired
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We're tired. We're tired. Enough is enough.
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You know, that's that's and I think that is what is happening right now. I don't think we.
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We're tired. White allies are tired, you know.
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Everyone is tired right now of all of this, and this needs it needs to.
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There needs to be a change. It needs to be a change.
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And I think what you're saying is there's a particular cultural moment that's happening right now.
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And. I want to talk a little bit about how what's going on in the world now, both in terms of the COVID 19 pandemic,
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but also the the events with George Floyd and the incidents in America and the protests
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and the march and how that impacts on your lived experience as a black woman,
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but also as a black and BAME researcher because.
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I know that a lot of these things can seem very distant if they're happening on the other side of the world.
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But that doesn't mean that they don't they don't change things for us.
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Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, the day the day I heard about him, I cried because for me,
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even though I was on the other side of the world, I'm like, this is I felt like my brother.
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Yeah. And I spent I was I was absolutely emotionally distraught and exhausted and.
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And I just kept thinking to myself, like. Why?
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You know, and it and it has an effect on you, because you say, you know, this is someone of.
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This is someone that could have been my uncle, that could have been my cousin.
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And, you know, you really do feel like you genuinely do feel like it's a family member when these things happen.
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And I notice that it's hard to understand, but because you know that this is what's happening to your brothers and sisters across the pond.
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It's just it does make your mental health.
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How you navigate your space. Just a bit more difficult.
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Really. You know, you just.
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You know, you just it's like there's a big target on your back.
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When you're walking through the streets like that is sometimes that is what I've been feeling actually the past couple of days.
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I just feel like there's a massive target on my back.
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And not to say that people haven't been supportive or, y'know, know, my white friends haven't been supportive and,
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you know, and active about, you know, you can only know your own pain.
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Yeah. So, yeah, it's just it just.
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Yeah, sorry. I know I'm feeling as well, I, I am.
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It's interesting what you say about the way that it hits home is something very connected.
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So my nephew is mixed raced. Yeah.
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And I grew up. I do have mixed race cousins actually. But, you know, they live in London and I grew up in Devon.
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So even though we're a close knit family, we we grew up quite separated in terms of those experiences.
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Yeah. And when my nephew was sort of around five,
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there were the sorts that was the start of racist incidents towards him at school because he was the only non-white child in his entire school.
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And I remember at the time. I mean, being so completely furious and devastated and you know that.
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But this had started for him already, but there was and there was a shift, I think,
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in my perception, because all of a sudden it was very personal in a way that I had always.
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You know, although I would never have known this language at the time, but I had always considered myself an ally.
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But my response to it was different. And it has in, you know, over time made me think.
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But that's how angry I need to be. Whenever it happens, whoever has it, not just when it happens to my nephew, when it happens to anybody.
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And I think we do we do respond differently when it's closer to our experience.
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Yes. And therefore. Isn't the answer for us as privileged white people as a homogenous group
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Yeah, to to learn more about the lived experiences of black and BAME people.
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Yeah. And it's just this thing, isn't it, of just human human values.
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Yeah. You know, it is. It is is this past, you know, whether you're black, whether you're white.
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It's human value. And this is why you know.
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You know, this is why we're saying like this is why people say, you know, black lives matter, because they have told us that our lives don't.
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You told us that, you know. Oh, it doesn't. It doesn't it doesn't matter that we have to.
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You know, a black model on a beauty campaign.
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Like, it's fine. We'll just cater for one group, you know, or, you know, they've told us for so long,
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they've told us it doesn't matter that you're not beautiful enough. It doesn't matter that, you know, it does.
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Does it matter like it does? And that is I think that is what has become the shift that, yeah, our lives matter enough to live.
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You know, we matter enough to be treated with respect.
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We matter enough to not just be, you know, fawned over or, you know, just to not be viewed as as the other, but as a fellow human being.
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And I think that kind of again, I've seen a lot on social media about, you know, the notion of Black Lives Matter.
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Doesn't mean that white lives don't matter or lives matter.
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It just means that. Like you say, this is a group of people who have been consistently told throughout history.
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Yes. That their lives don't matter. Yes. And actually and, you know, even though we you know, we I'm not I don't contest that.
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We've made a lot of progress. Yes. But we know that things aren't.
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We know that we're not there yet. And you see that the you know, the thing that springs to mind to me is about representation of.
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Yes. Yes. Kelly. Because.
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You know, I know from my perspective as a woman that I love science fiction and superheroes and all that sort of stuff.
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And it's only sort of in the past five years that we've started to see, you know, things like Star Wars with a strong female lead.
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Yes. Yes. You know Captain Marvel for me.
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Yes. Oh, my gosh. We've got a superhero that's not wearing a tiny skirt.
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And and all of a sudden, you know it.
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And I've had, you know, male friends say to me, but, you know, Captain Marvel is my one of my favourites of all time.
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And they go, but it's not it's not the most amazing film. Why do you love it?
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And it's because it's it it feels like it represents and speaks to ,e.
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Yes. And my experience and I've heard a lot of people talking recently in my own kind of quest to educate myself,
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somebody that operates in a position of privilege. And about the you know, we've we've come quite a long way with that.
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Yes. We've got a long way to go. But, you know, in terms of.
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BAME stories and narratives.
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We're so woefully behind. Yeah, yeah.
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There has been I mean. You want to take it right into every spectrum, right?
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I can go to. You can go to our education system.
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You can go to, you know, on television, just like there has been this almost like a ratio of black stories and.
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In the case that even black people don't even know we don't even know our own stories, you know, because because there is no platform,
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there is no representation for us to be able to express these stories and say, hey, like there is this is another side of things.
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You know, there is this you know, this is, you know, how black people have contributed to science.
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That. Yeah, I did, too. Medicine and technology and, you know, you know, in the arts.
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And these stories are so, so diminished. And, you know, it's we need to start shining a light on these stories, shining a light on modern black stories.
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You know, our own stories. Yes. As black people living now. And who knows?
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And representation. You know, seeing a representation is key.
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And I think I think it's it's great now. I mean, I knew when I was growing up, there wasn't that many black dolls for little girls to play with.
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Yeah. And it's great that, again, like you said, we've made some progress that, you know,
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little little black girls are able to play with like those if they want to have, they can.
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You know, just having the option, I think has been has been the biggest thing.
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I mean, honestly, I could walk into boots and I will not have an option and I'll just walk straight back out.
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You know, it's just things like that which kind of represent a society.
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In fact, whether they like the fact that they aren't aware of it, I think is part of the problem.
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That doesn't say that they are not you know, that doesn't say to, oh, you did.
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This group of people are racist. But the fact that they are just so unaware is part of the problem.
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The fact that they are so unaware that, oh, there is a part of the demographic of people that might not all be one team needed.
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I remember there was a whole thing a couple of years ago, right on nude and what that meant.
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And nude basically just meant white skin. Yeah. Yeah.
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And we were just like, yeah. Hi,
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Remember me? I exist. Yeah. Like, you know, we exist too, you know.
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So I think, you know, I think, you know, we're starting to see I think I remember a couple months ago I was in it with
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Tesco bringing out kind of shades of new plasters and all those things.
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I think, you know, it's it's a long mountain to climb.
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But I. I don't want to be pessimistic about it.
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I think there's hope. I think that there's enough people who are starting to recognise what is going on and care enough to be liked.
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Yeah, we need to be able to, you know, highlight highlight these stories and let them because, you know.
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Yeah, I'm remembering as you're talking, I think we did.
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I think we had a conversation on Twitter actually about noughts and crosses. Yes.
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Oh yes. Oh, I love that show. I know. Yes.
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Yeah. So the thing that's the thing that really struck me as we're talking.
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I mean, so this was a TV show that was on the BBC a couple of months ago.
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Yeah, I think it was on BBC two, though, which in and of itself is an interesting thing worth noting.
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Yes. But I, I actually read that book when the the first one of the series when it came out and I just Googled it now and it came out in 2001.
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Wow. How was it taken. And it was funny. It was fabulous. And I loved it the first time I read it.
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And, you know, as same as happens with so much in our lives, you know, those kind of fictions and stories are educational.
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Definitely. And how was that taken? 20 years. Yeah.
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To be made for television. I mean, irrespective of the ways that it problem arises and challenges the sections of race and.
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Yeah, and the way that our society is structured. Yes.
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Just an amazing story. Yes. But it didn't get made.
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Yeah. Yeah. And I think Mallory Blackamn, who writes it.
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She wrote an episode of Doctor Who. A couple of years ago.
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And I think I've I think and I will double check this and correct myself in the show notes, if I'm wrong,
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that she was the first black woman to ever write an episode of Doctor Who in a show that's been running for over 50 years.
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Wow. This is the thing. It is the thing. We're still hearing of black firsts.
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Yes. And it's twenty twenty. Yes.
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We're still hearing of first that passage to see this first.
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I mean, up until last night, first black mayor in Ferguson, first black female mayor in Ferguson last night.
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So, you know, it's it's. You know. It is. It is.
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Yeah, it's you know, it's amazing and how. Yeah.
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Society has just kind of set that up, isn't it? And just really.
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It becomes so blatant now, I think. To draws to a close.
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I wonder what. Thinking of the right way to phrase.
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So, you know, thinking about coming back to higher education and the structural inequalities that we know exist.
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The you know, the things that you've said about walking into a conference paper or a seminar and being the only BAME person in the room.
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What what do we need to do, as you know? I'm talking about that homogenous group of white people again.
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What do we need to do? If we've got the power and we've got the privilege, what do we as white people and H.E. need to do?
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To help change this. For your perspective.
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So I know I'm asking you as a black person for the answer, I'm aware of that in my question.
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Yeah. I always say education, education, education, and educating yourself doesn't just mean reading off lots of books about that people.
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Yeah. Also means actually speaking to black people or, you know, and actually accepting them.
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And I know and I mean and I always just said, like just me be genuine about wanting to accept them into the room.
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You know, it's not a front. It's not a thing that, you know, we're just trying to tick a box or anything.
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It's just genuinely treating them with.
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You know, with the same honour and dignity as anyone else, and I think, again, you know, like you said, a lot people are kind of, you know,
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recognising their privilege, recognising, you know, the steps, the extra steps that have been put in place or the less obstacles they have.
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And that's great. But I think. The main thing that we all say needs to do is just.
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Have an ear to listen. I guess, I mean, you know, the people that are in power need to get BAME researchers into the room and listen.
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They need to get BAME researches into the room and let them voice out their story.
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Let them voice out their concern and just be genuine in.
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Listening. Be genuine in wanting to help.
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Because they are in a position of power and privilege. And those are the things that, you know, I think we can start to at least see that,
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you know, the people that are making these policies, the people that are.
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You know. Kind of in in those positions are the ones to really stop to make that change.
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To be honest. Yeah. And I think that's a really an important and powerful note to end on.
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Actually, I love that phrase. Just have an ear to listen. Yeah, and actually the simplicity.
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Of that as an act. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about.
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I didn't think about just something about incredibly emotional.
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I've felt it. As we've discussed it from my own experiences with my family.
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But just hearing your lived experience and confronting my own biases and assumptions with that is is really important to me as an individual,
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but also to everybody else working in this sector and being a human being on this earth.
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So thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you.
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Hey, thanks. Thank you, Victoria, for a difficult, emotional and truly illuminating conversation.
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I'm making a commitment now to make sure that I do have an ear to listen.
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Like many white people, I believe in equality and condemn racism wholeheartedly.
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But I am the product of white privilege and my perspective on the world is embedded with unconscious bias.
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I recognise that it's not the job of black people to educate white people about racism and about the lived experience.
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And so I recognise and thank Victoria for taking the time to talk to me today.
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I'm going to include some links in the show notes, to different things that Victoria and I have discussed.
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But if there is anything you think is conspicuously absent from that or other stories or
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other research about BAME experiences in higher education that you think needs adding,
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please do let me know. And that's it for this episode. Don't forget to, like, rate and subscribe and join me.
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Next time where I'll be talking to somebody else about researchers development and everything in between.
Wednesday May 27, 2020
Wednesday May 27, 2020
In this episode I talk to Dr. Caitlin Kight, Senior Academic Developer and SciComm expert, about storytelling in research communication. We specifically discussion the chapter ‘Explanation’ in the book TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, which introduces a range of rhetorical devices to engage your audience and explain tough concepts. During the podcast we discuss:
- TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson
- My audio recording of the chapter ‘Explanation’, available to University of Exeter staff and students
- The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr
- The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall
You can find Caitlin on twitter @specialagentCK, and on YouTube for lots of online learning contact about research communication.
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Podcast transcript
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Hello and welcome to R, D and the In betweens
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I'm your host, Kelly Preece, and every fortnight I talk to a different guest about researchers development and everything in between.
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Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode. It's Kelly here.
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And I'm delighted today to be joined by my colleague, Dr. Caitlin Kight, who is an academic, developer and science communication expert.
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And today we're going to talk about research, communication and storytelling, but specifically a chapter from the book.
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Ted Talks by Chris Anderson, which is all about explaining tough concepts.
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So, Caitlin, you happy to introduce yourself? I am Dr. Caitlin Kight from the academic development team.
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And I am someone who has been involved with communication and education for pretty much my whole life.
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So I have been in the area of science communication.
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Perhaps most recently I've written books and magazine articles and done public speaking.
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So I have a general interest in communicating to non academic audiences.
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So to start off with, Caitlin and I are going to give our key takeaways or key summaries of the extract,
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which was the chapter on explanation and what we think are the really important things to take forward as a researcher.
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So I'll give I'll start us off. So for me, even though the chapter is good,
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explanation is really about storytelling and storytelling is one of those things that I talk about all the time in relation to every form of research,
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communication, whether it's tweeting about your research or blogging or podcasting or writing up a thesis chapter or giving a conference presentation.
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It's all about storytelling, because when we're communicating our research, we are constructing it for an audience in some shape or form.
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For me, one of the things that I was thinking about was having a bit of a flashback where there's quite a lot of discussion about the very clever
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techniques that people employed and how they had done something in order to leave the audience thinking a thing or wondering a thing,
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and then how that was brought to a close or built upon.
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And I was thinking about how when I studied English quite extensively.
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So my mom was an English teacher and for a long time I thought I was going to also go into literature.
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So I did a lot of English study. And when you're doing literary analysis and interpretation, I think you become convinced that what you are seeing,
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the patterns that you're finding are things that the author deliberately put in place.
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There's some really deep meaning and some metaphor in it all. Isn't that clever?
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And then actually, you find out later on that the person never intended that.
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And we do, in fact, have authors that are still living who said, nope, that is not what I meant in that place.
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And I think that we do that with a lot of stuff.
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We find our own meanings and lots of things.
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And so when I was listening to all the descriptions of the very clever stuff that these speakers were doing,
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I thought, how much of that is really intentional? How deliberate are all of these decisions?
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And I do think that often when you are preparing communication, that there are some deliberate choices and there always should be deliberate choices.
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But I also think that a lot of people have a sort of an intuition.
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And I have a friend who works in the press and public relations,
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and he often talks about how everyone is good at storytelling because we do it when
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we're kids grow up telling stories and we often stop doing it as we get older.
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But actually, we do all have this kind of latent untapped potential, even if we aren't using it.
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And so perhaps some of the time we get in our own way and actually we just need to kind of let go and let those creative juices flow.
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And I certainly find that I do this when I'm writing. Often I think I'm going to start off with a certain goal.
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Here's my certain structure and then something else entirely comes out. And I actually really like that.
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And so all of this is to say that I think. All of what you said about the structure is really important in those techniques.
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It's really important to be aware of those possibilities,
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but also to kind of set certain expectations aside when you approach your own communication and just.
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Go with the flow and see what comes out.
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And then your mind will pull the right ones out to the right techniques, the right methods when you need them,
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and something new and different might emerge and you just never know when you start.
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I think that's really important. And like you say, it's not about kind of it's not a tick list of if you've got a metaphore and you've got an example
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and you've got this you've got a great you've got a great explanation or great form communication.
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And it's about figuring out what works for a particular topic.
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And particularly, you know, the thing that I liked about this chapter, even though,
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you know, it's for TED talks, which aren't always research based talk. It's talking about kind of explaining difficult concepts,
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which I know when we talk about research communication and we talk about some of these things about storytelling,
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people who say to me, oh, yeah, but, you know, I can't oversimplify it.
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And it it's not about oversimplification. It's about actually that fundamental thing, which is in the chapter.
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And I've been listening as an audio book, too, will storr's the science of storytelling.
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And it really emphasises what you're saying,
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that actually storytelling is such a fundamental part of the way we've developed and evolved as human beings.
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You know, it's a very particular part or capability of our brains.
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And we do it in all aspects of our life, but we don't necessarily think that that's what we're doing.
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Well, I think that that that links to another element that really stood out for me.
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And I forget exactly how it was phrased in the passage that you read, but it reminded me of a similar sentiment that I saw at some point online.
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It's one of those things where you come across it on Twitter or something and you save it because you think all that's a really good point.
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And this person was basically saying that the whole point of going out and and giving a public lecture,
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let's say a lot of a lot of people who do that,
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there is a bit of an ego trip involved and they want to make sure that when they're standing up there in front of everyone,
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that they sound smart and that they look smart and that they do a good job so they can walk away feeling like everyone admires me now.
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And actually, what's what's more important and I think teachers do this as well,
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like it's inevitable that you do kind of it's hard to shut out your ego if for no other reason.
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They just don't want to make a fool of yourself.
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But what you really want to be up there doing is completely not thinking about yourself and in fact, thinking and the opposite,
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thinking of the audience and trying to get the audience to walk away, thinking, man, I am brilliant.
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And and the whole thing is that you can stand up there and say super fancy words that nobody
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gets or you can find a really clever way of saying something that everyone understands.
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But that understanding is something that like opens up the universe to people and suddenly they
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see all these connections and it changes the way they perceive life and they feel amazing.
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And I think that when you walk out of there feeling amazing because you've had a mental connection,
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you are at the same time feeling extremely grateful to the person that helped you get that.
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And so I think that inevitably the one will kind of allow the other to follow.
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But it really is about helping other people to make those connections rather than trying to elevate yourself in some fashion.
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Yeah, I agree. And I think when I talk about academic writing and, you know,
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when I teach about literature reviews or reading and we have these kind of very honest conversations of actually reading,
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academic work can be really tough sometimes because there was certainly this historical
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tradition where we articulate ourselves in the most complicated way possible,
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using as much jargon as possible to look as clever as possible.
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And thankfully, we are sort of slowly shifting away from that and writing in a way that's more accessible to everybody, because the reality is.
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Actually, even if we are schooled in that discipline,
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we can read journal articles in it and still not understand or have to read a paragraph several times to really understand what it means.
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And it's just not good communication. It's not like you say that's about our ego and about making ourselves sound clever rather than.
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Actually communicating and actually promoting understanding in others.
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And you're not going to have any impact with your research. Unless you're doing that.
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Absolutely. And I think that I think that some of that ties in with the broad category of rhetorical techniques.
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So these things that you mentioned already, for example, the use of metaphors,
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I think some people think that, you know, they're going to cheapen something.
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If if they do have to liken A to B rather than talking about A directly.
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And it's that kind of dumbing down that you mentioned earlier.
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But actually, I think that there's something really satisfying in learning a variety of rhetorical techniques
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and having that little bank of things in your brain and then figuring out just the right one.
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You know, is it that I'm going to start off this talk by asking a question?
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Is it that I'm going to start off by telling people that they don't know anything and I'm going to tell them everything now and like, you know,
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up in their expectations and all those things that you mentioned in the passage where it was about kind of leaving people in a cliff-hanger.
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Confusing them deliberately so that you get everything back up, so it's all those things.
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I don't think we're really taught that so much in school anymore. And, you know, we used to be taught rhetoric in the classroom.
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And that doesn't really happen. And so those were things where you do have to undertake that kind of literary analysis that I mentioned earlier.
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You do have to deliberately look for those things and find them. And then you have to think, when are these going to be actually applicable?
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When are they going to help?
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And then you have to not be afraid of using them, because then it's in a sense, I think some people think, well, that's a bit manipulative.
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It's like showmanship. It's not really genuine. It's not really, you know, researched.
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It's not really teaching. I'm getting up there and I'm kind of performing a little bit. But actually, that's that is a part of communicating.
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That's often a part of storytelling as well. It's setting the stage.
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There is a bit of theatricality and I don't see anything wrong with that.
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It doesn't cheapen anything. And at the end of the day, if people are therefore understanding.
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Well, I was just going to say that I think when we talk about stories, often people feel uncomfortable with the word story.
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Right. It sounds like fiction. It sounds like it's not the truth. But really, when we're talking about stories, we're talking about narratives.
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And the word narrative just indicates this is there's a temporal progression here.
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You know, there are things that are happening in a certain order.
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And really, if there are all sorts of things that we've been doing with narrative over time,
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you mentioned will storr's book the science of storytelling?
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And there's another one that I'd recommend called the Storytelling Animal, which which is by Jonathan Gottschall.
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And books like that talk a lot about how our brains perceive and store information in narrative form for obvious evolutionary reasons.
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We need to we need to know what prompted the lion to jump out of the bush at us so that we cannot do that again or whatever the situation was.
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So this these are things we pay attention to. We remember them really well. And so for thousands of years, that's how we learnt.
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We told stories. And if you think about things like fables and myths, you know, we had these stories that were specifically designed to.
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Add a whole lot of information together and tie it up in little packets so that we could keep all of our human knowledge.
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The sum total of everything we knew as a culture in our brains.
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And that is a really important thing to do.
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And obviously you need to pass that information on.
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And really, these are these fables and myths and these memorable stories.
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These are things that are fundamentally really important in an all of the tasks that we do.
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And I think it's all about. Relating various lessons to our own lives and who we are as people to what we want to achieve, to how we can do that.
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Either working alone or as a community.
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And so something suddenly that starts off sounding like entertainment becomes kind of essentially basic and a baseline,
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really foundational part of just being a person and being alive in society.
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And I think that that's part of the thing that does help connect all of our research to our
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everyday lives is that actually there are lessons to be drawn out of every single thing.
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And we can use those lessons in unexpected ways.
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And we've been doing that for thousands of years. To me, that feels really exciting, like you're actually a part of the kind of human continuum.
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If you engage in this exchange of knowledge in this way. Exactly.
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And I mean, things like you say about, you know, there's almost a sort of looking down on a sense of performativity and showmanship in it.
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And this notion of entertainment. But actually, you know, let's look at our modern world and let's look at how we learn.
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We learn through entertainment. I mean, how many people watch Blue Planet?
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How many people have changed their habits and the amount of plastic they use as a result of Blue Planet,
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which some of our researchers at Exeter were involved in? I remember seeing a really interesting article once about the Sunday night drama,
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Call the Midwife, where they had an episode about female genital mutilation.
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And it actually showed that there were more Google searches and people finding out more information about FGM as a result
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of it being featured on an episode of call The Midwife than when the BBC ran a documentary specifically about it.
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And it was a really interesting thing that said, actually,
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it's the important thing here was the medium through which the message got through and the medium was,
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you know, Sunday night entertainment essentially. But all of our entertainment is embedded with those kind of.
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Messages, whether they're about history, whether about morality.
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I mean, that's how you know, how we're taught the difference between good and bad as the kids.
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those fairy tales and those myths and fables, you know, you go all the way back to Aesop's Fables.
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And all of the messages about the ways in which we act in the world that are embedded.
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Within those simple, really simple stories. And so I think, yeah, I agree, it's sometimes we.
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We look down on the notion of performing and the notion of entertainment,
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whereas actually we forget how much we learn through that medium and we're socially conditioned for that aren't we.
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I want to come back to this idea of the curse of knowledge because. It's that I think this is where the real challenge lies is.
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OK. We've got all of these tools that we can use to promote understanding. But we are left with knowledge.
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And how do how do we take that step back?
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How do we begin thinking from our audiences perspective rather than ours, to kind of break down what we're trying to say?
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The different concepts we're articulating and creating those. What Chris Anderson calls in the TED talks, book the building blocks.
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That get people to a central idea. And for me, in my own experience.
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But that really is where the challenge lies, because once I once I can take a step back from that and I know what I need to say.
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We have these range of tools. That can be adopted to say it, but how how do you get past that kind of knowledge?
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Whenever you got to that point in the passage? My immediate reaction was, oh, well, I don't have this problem.
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I'm actually really good at this. And as soon as I had that thought, I thought, wow, what am I just you know, I've just convinced myself.
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And that's exactly what everyone does, right? They convince themselves that, you know what they're doing.
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But what it made me think of was an element that I recently added to a communications workshop that I run where I was trying to get people to think
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about the different sorts of audiences that they talked to and how just kind of intuitively they often I think most people do to some extent,
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they will often start adapting how they're describing their resources that are talking to these different audiences.
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So my research was as a scientist, which is what I used for my example in the workshop, it was really interdisciplinary.
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And so I would often find myself talking to different researchers from different disciplines as I was asking about different subjects.
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And for each of those researchers, I had to describe my work in a completely different way so that I could extract the knowledge that I needed
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from them while not confusing them with all the extra stuff that had nothing to do with their field.
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And then at some point, I kind of noticed that I was doing that. And then I realised that it was the same sort of thing I was doing when I would
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talk to peers in my programme who weren't necessarily doing my research.
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But, you know, they're kind of generally in the same field.
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And it was the same thing I was doing when I would talk to my parents or to people I might meet at a conference and so on.
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And once I became aware of the different choices that I was making,
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it suddenly became actually much easier to know how to actively make those choices on purpose in the future.
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So there were certain phrases that I might use or not use, or if I use them, I would immediately define them.
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There were certain elements that I just wouldn't even talk about or others that I would emphasise much more.
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So it's really, you know, what's there, what's not there. How are you describing it?
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How are you balancing out? What what is it exactly that story that you're telling?
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And I think it's really all about just not necessarily being empathetic,
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but just being really mindful of what it is that people are getting confused about what it is they're asking you to clarify.
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When are they squinting and throwing their brow? And, you know, we probably won't get it right the first time, but we do this lots of times.
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And so it's really paying attention over all of those different iterations and collecting
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all those little techniques so that you can use them on purpose next time around.
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It it it's kind of responding to the fact that that's not really working for that person,
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obviously that's a very clear dialogue, but it's what we do in a teaching room.
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You know, it's what makes people good teachers is you're observing your.
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Audience or your classroom, and you you can tell from those furrowed brow.
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But from body language and from, you know, more ephemeral things like kind of energy and atmosphere,
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how things are going down and whether or not you're bringing in bringing the class with you, holding their hand or whether you've let them go.
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And you do change that and switch that up in the moment and find different ways to articulate things in different ways to explain things.
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Yeah. I agree, and I think that's actually one of the things I was considering as you were reading that passage was
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how important it is where we can to actively get a bit of information about our audience in advance.
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And this is not always possible. Absolutely.
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If you're doing a public event and it's just, you know, whoever is walking by is going to come over and listen.
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You don't know what they already know. You have to take a stab in the dark or kind of go for a lowest common denominator or whatever the cases.
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But there are often times where we do have the ability to send out a little survey or
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at the very beginning of a talk to ask for a show of hands or something like that.
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And even just a couple of those little opportunities can make a huge difference because suddenly, you know, there are a set example in the bit.
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You read about the the writer who didn't know what natural selection was.
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So you can really easily you can say show of hands.
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Who has heard of this or does everyone feel that they can, you know, apply that knowledge or define it for me?
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And just knowing that little bit would make a huge difference,
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because you could either assume some understanding of evolution or you would take a step back and and go through the description of it.
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And having that to orient you at the very beginning can be really helpful.
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And this is why when I'm giving talks where possible and again, if you're doing a TED style thing, this might not work.
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But I like to have hidden slides, whether that's kind of as I go or at the very end that I can pull up if I need to.
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So that if there is a particular concept that's a stumbling block either in the middle of things or after when I'm being when I'm answering questions,
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I can pull that up and say, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't cover it before, but here it is now.
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I think that's really important. And that really brings us back to that notion of what the building blocks are.
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Yes. And I think we can we can use our own experience with as well as a source of inspiration.
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And this perhaps kind of relates to the the other theme of the chapter, which was thinking about simplification.
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But I was thinking about how if if you can be empathetic to your audience and place yourself in their shoes and think,
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what was it like when I first started learning this thing, you know, what?
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What were my stumbling blocks? What were the terms? I didn't understand.
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What was the threshold concept, if you like?
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What was the thing that I learnt that suddenly opened my eyes and allowed me to access everything else that linchpin.
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So I think that when you can try to. Just reverse the clock a little bit and see through early your eyes.
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Then that can help you to then think about how to pitch it for your audience.
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And I think that one of the things that's really interesting about that, well,
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especially in science, I'm not sure the extent to which this happens in other disciplines.
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But when we're taught about things in science, often we get something that's incredibly watered down because the truth is insanely complex.
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And so when we learn about replication, for example, you know,
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with this this really simple concept of, oh, yes, the cell is one cell and then it becomes two cells.
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And that keeps going until you have a whole human body and that, you know, that's it.
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And then suddenly you start finding out about mitosis versus meiosis and then you find out about t RNA and MRSA.
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Your mind is blown and you think, well, why wasn't I told all of these things before?
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Because each time I'm having to completely break apart my knowledge and reassemble it, it's very confusing.
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Like, why didn't you just dive straight into that really complex thing,
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but you can't dive straight into that complex thing because it's too many parts and it will overwhelm people.
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So it is really important to think about how do people learn,
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what are the bits that they need at certain times and then just to focus on those things.
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And if they want more, they can go find more or they can talk to you later.
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But no one is going to take all of that in. They might hear it, but they're not going to learn it.
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Yeah, and I think that that's one of the really important things about thinking about the difference between a presentation and,
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you know, a journal article or something we communicate in writing is the level of detail and complexity that we can represent.
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It's very different because people are taking them in completely differently.
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You know, you can read something and you can pause and you can, you know, look a word up or look a term up or a theory or you can take it,
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you know, take a break and let a mull over an idea whereas in a presentation.
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It's all got to come right now. It's now or never.
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Thank you so much, Caitlin, for a fascinating and illuminating conversation, all about storytelling and explaining tough concepts.
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I'm going to put links in the show, notes to all the resources Caitlin and I shared in this episode, as well as where you can find Caitlin online.
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And that's it for this episode. Don't forget to, like, rate and subscribe and join me next where I'll be talking to someone else about researchers, development, and everything in between
Friday May 22, 2020
Friday May 22, 2020
Welcome to the teaser trailer for the new podcast R, D & the In-betweens, with your host Kelly Preece from the University of Exeter Doctoral College! In this trailer Kelly will be introducing the podcast covering researchers, development...and everything in-between!
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/