[This was originally published in January 2017, when I was failing to write my actual thesis so decided to write a 2000-word blog post about why was hard instead. Nearly three years later, having written the thesis and a book, among other things, I still stand by pretty much all of this.]

I started my PhD with a fair amount of writing experience under my belt. I’d been blogging (semi-regularly) for about five years, including a stint as a regular opinion writer for an online news site which occasionally involved manufacturing an opinion to hit a deadline. I’d written a couple of book chapters for an activist book. About a decade earlier I had produced some pretty decent academic writing during my MA. I had and still have a fair amount of confidence in my writing, academic and otherwise. Still, doing it professionally is a different ballgame entirely, particularly in academia where writing involves getting across some very complex ideas. So here’s a few things I’ve learned about (academic) writing over the last couple of years.

Writing is hard because writing is thinking. For me, this is a crucial difference between blogging and academic writing. Blogging is thinking too, but my blog doesn’t have a deadline, so ideas can just percolate in my head until they’re ready to come out onto the page in a single sitting. Do not try this with your thesis. For one, a thesis, or even a single chapter of one, is too big to hold in your head. For another, the thinking required for a thesis or a journal paper is on a different level to what you can get away with in a blog. But realising (or admitting) that writing is legitimately hard is actually a great move. It’s the move from “I am terrible at writing and will never amount to anything” to “writing is genuinely difficult, it’s ok to struggle with it, and I’m going to find ways to deal with that”.

There are stages to writing. There’s the “descriptive drivel” stage. There’s the “writing three superfluous introductions which you will later cut” stage. There’s the “spending half a day looking up a throwaway reference which you will then cut from the first paragraph” stage. There’s the “spending an afternoon staring at two over-edited paragraphs” stage. There’s even the “I appear to be writing a blog post about writing” stage. Now, you may not experience all of those in your process, or you may find your process involves some different stages. These things vary from person to person but they are basically ways of coping with the fact that writing is hard. Some of these coping mechanisms are more constructive than others. Some are constructive some of the time and really not the rest. Some, you can short-circuit, and some you can actively leverage to help you get through and get better. And again, which ones work for you may be different to those that work for me. I have learned to embrace the “descriptive drivel” stage because it gives me something I build on later. I have also learned to sometimes start with the second sentence or paragraph to avoid the “three superfluous introductions” stage. Working these things out involves a fair amount of reflection and self-awareness, as well as listening to feedback.

What you wrote and what you think you wrote are often not the same thing. One of the most useful pieces of feedback someone can give you on your writing is to play back to you what they understood from it. The thing is, when we try to express complex ideas in our writing, sometimes we make leaps or assumptions that our readers – not resident in our heads as they are – find difficult to follow. So when a supervisor or other friendly reader says something like “I don’t see how X follows from Y here”, or “oh yeah, you mean A” when actually you meant B, that can really help you pinpoint the parts of your writing that need strengthening. The problem is not that the reader isn’t getting it, the problem is that you haven’t explained it well enough.

Structure sometimes helps. And sometimes doesn’t. This is another one of those “suck it an see what works for you in a given moment” things. When I find myself staring at a blank Google doc for too long one of the things that really helps is putting down a structure. Key bullet points of what I’m trying to say often help. On one occasion I switched to a spreadsheet which gave me a structure I could easily fill in. For some reason putting in a few descriptive words in a spreadsheet cell is a lot less intimidating than putting them in that text document. You then take them out of the spreadsheet, put them in the text document and use them as a skeleton to build around. There are other times, though, when structure really doesn’t help because there is no structure yet. You simply don’t know what you’re actually trying to say, and you won’t know until you’ve written it down. I think one of the most helpful things I’ve learned to do in those situations is write from the middle outwards: start with a description of what the data says, then build analysis, theory, introduction and conclusion around that. I’m literally writing my entire thesis this way. I wrote the three data chapters first, and I’m now working on my literature review and discussion chapter side by side, building them around the data. On that note,

Data analysis and writing are (often) not separate tasks. I have a feeling this applies to more fields and methods than you’d think, but I’ll certainly vouch for it in pretty much any kind of qualitative research. There’s a temptation to think of writing and analysis as separate, to draw a line between the end of coding and the start of writing and to tell yourself (very sternly) that the analysis is done, you’re just writing it up, this should be easy. The analysis is not done until it’s down on the page and someone else has confirmed to you that what they read was what you meant to write. (Which is why writing is thinking, which is why it’s hard.) Writing little summaries of your data as you go can both be a really helpful step in analysing it and make you feel like you’ve actually written something. Same goes for writing reflective pieces on your research process and progress, or any practice you’re producing as part of your research.

Every bit of writing has a function. I talk about “descriptive drivel” a lot, but actually description has a function in your writing: to follow your analysis of your data, your reader first has to have an understanding of what it is you’re analysing. One of the things I struggled with for a while was separating my description from my analysis and signposting what I was doing at any given point. So the same paragraph would describe and attempt to analyse the data while also taking for granted a bunch of assumptions, with the result that the reader couldn’t even tell there was an argument there, let alone follow it. By far the most useful technique I’ve found for dealing with this is deconstructing my writing. This works best when you already have a piece of writing and you’re trying to make it hang together and really get across your argument. Take that piece of writing, and for each paragraph write a one-line description of what it’s doing. Is it describing something? Analysing something? Making a key theoretical point towards your argument? Once you’ve done this for every paragraph, you have a neat little summary of your piece. Read that summary. Is the argument you’re trying to make evident from it? If not, what’s missing? Is there stuff that doesn’t need to be there? Are there paragraphs that are not easily summarised in one line? Those might need breaking up. So for each line, make a note of what you need to do to the corresponding paragraph to make it better. Then go and do the thing.

Feedback can be hard to take. You know that email from your supervisor, with the attachment that’s got your lovely piece of writing, except it’s covered in comments and strikethroughs? Or the equivalent piece of paper covered in red ink? Or the conversation? You know the one. Those are hard. They’re hard because writing is thinking, and therefore writing is personal, and therefore writing makes us vulnerable. Those are my thoughts and ideas on that piece of paper. How dare you take them apart like that! Those are personal reflections and struggles. That’s the bit where I was really brave and tried something I hadn’t done before. That’s the bit I thought was my original contribution! What have you done to it! Feedback can be hard to take, but there are a few tricks to make it easier and make sure you get the most out of it. If it’s a face to face conversation, take notes, ask questions, make sure you understand what your supervisor is saying. You don’t have to agree with it, but make sure you understand it. Regardless of format, thank them for their time and their thoughts, even if all you do is fire off a one-line email. Then put it down. Put it away. Leave it be. If you need to, go find a sympathetic friend to rant to. Explain to them in great detail and at great length how your supervisor doesn’t appreciate your genius. Go do something else for a bit – work on another chunk of your thesis, collect or analyse some data. Wait until thinking about that bit of feedback no longer makes you incandescent with rage or weak with anxiety. Then maybe wait a little while longer. This is the time when things will start percolating. You’ll have learned new things from working on other bits in the meantime. You’ll have gained some distance and perspective. You may still find you disagree with some of the feedback. But chances are a lot of it will be useful. So now you can do back to it, and work on the things you agree with, and justify the things you disagree with. It takes time, and it’s hard. But here’s the thing. That feedback is not aimed at you as a person, at that risk you took, that vulnerability you showed when you wrote. That feedback is there to make your writing better. It’s there to help you figure out what works and what doesn’t; to help you get those personal, clever, original ideas of yours across to your reader in the clearest, most convincing way possible. And it will. And you will.

“You will have days when your entire output is a single paragraph summarising a month of research.” Thus spake one of my supervisors back in my first year. “Never!” I cried. I hate it when they’re right. The trick is to accept that. Research and writing don’t obey the laws of project management. Progress is not linear, it’s difficult to plan, and a lot of the time it may feel like you’re behind. Sometimes you’ll catch up. Sometimes you’ll just find that you need to re-adjust the plan, or throw something half-baked at your supervisor rather than the piece of perfectly polished prose you’d been hoping for. (Throwing half-baked things at supervisors can be really useful actually, as long as they understand that that’s what you’re doing and are ok with it.) For the record, my entire tangible thesis-related output for today was splitting a document into three and making some notes on each section about additional work it needed. I am actually really happy with this output. One of those notes is in all-caps and red because it’s an insight about an incredibly valuable thing that’s a major chunk of my argument. That’s the result of a lot of thinking – and the writing will happen. The flip side of this is…

You can write something every day. I took part in a writing challenge a few months ago, where every work day you had to write something. It didn’t really matter what or how much, you had to write some new words. Most of the days I produced significant new chunks of thesis. Some of the days I wrote a couple of hundred words of “string and glue” – those little paragraphs that link one part of your writing to another and make your entire argument hang together. On a couple of occasions I wrote fanfiction or poems. I learned a few things from that challenge. You don’t need an entire clear day to write something. A string-and-glue paragraph can be pulled together in twenty minutes between meetings. Planning ahead really helped. Sometimes I knew I had a clear day ahead of me and could get lots of writing done. Other times I knew I was travelling, had meetings, needed to take the cat to the vet, so my writing time would be limited. At the end of each day, I’d take a look at my schedule for the next day and set achievable goals and make sure I had the right resources to hit those goals (often just a highlighted paragraph in my working document with a note saying “PUT STRING AND GLUE HERE” – makes a difference). I did find that the external accountability of the challenge (we were doing it in a group of four) helped me focus and do those little things that enabled me to write. I’m looking for ways to implement that kind of accountability to myself through my bullet journal. Even if whatever I produce on a given day isn’t thesis-related, it keeps me in the habit of writing. And even if it’s just one single paragraph summarising a month’s worth research, one paragraph is greater than zero paragraphs. Two hundred words is greater than zero words.

Look behind the scenes of other people’s writing. I mean this in two ways. Firstly, reading pieces like this and some of the resources below can be helpful, even if all it does is reassure you that it’s not you being bad at writing, writing is legitimately hard. We often compare our own behind-the-scenes footage with other people’s highlight reels, and that can make us feel terribly inadequate. Knowing that behind the scenes others struggle too – because it is genuinely, legitimately a difficult thing to do – can be a great source of comfort. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, read the kind of writing that you aspire to produce and try to work out how it does what it does. How is this person structuring their argument? What are they doing to guide and signpost the reader through it? How are they separating their description from their analysis (or are they perhaps integrating them in interesting ways instead!)? How are they reconciling their personal subjectivity with scholarly detachment? What do you admire about their writing? What do you think they could do better? Now go and try doing those things yourself.

Do. The damn. Writing. Ultimately, the only way to get the writing done and to get better at it is to practise. One paragraph is greater than zero paragraphs. Two hundred words is greater than zero words. It adds up. If all else fails, shut up and write!

If you want some further pointers, here’s a handy list of resources on academic and thesis writing pulled together by Paul Spencer at the UWE Graduate School.

[This was originally published in October 2015.]

So one of the stories I tell about how I ended up quitting a corporate job to go research porn is that it happened by accident. It’s the truth, though not necessarily the whole truth. I went from “Yeah, I kinda still wanna do this, when I retire” to “Fuck this, I’m doing it right now, I’m applying for funding and finding myself a supervisor” in the space of two months. And seeing as I got asked a couple of weeks ago to tell our new PhD students what I’d learned about the process over the last year, I thought it might be a good time to look back on that year in this blog too.

Self-Inflicted Problems

The good news is, I still don’t regret leaving my old job. There are some small things I miss – being on conference calls with people from literally around the world, the business class travel was nice, and I do have to live on less money now. But overall it was the right decision. I think one of the biggest changes has been moving from a job where the majority of problems were externally created (systems, organisational cultures, budgetary restrictions) to doing a project that is entirely mine and all the problems are completely self-inflicted. My data isn’t behaving? Well, it was my choice to look at this data set to start with, so it’s not the data’s fault. It’s very difficult to rant about something when it’s completely self-inflicted. The good news is that my data started behaving again this morning. Or rather, that I took enough of a step back to stop looking for something and start looking at what was there and how to make sense of it. The other good news is that if most of your problems are of your own making, they’re also broadly speaking within your control to fix.

Wrangling Supervisors

I spoke to a lot of people who’d finished their PhDs, and I’d seen at least some of the gory details of two people very close to me going through the process, before I embarked on this journey. And one of the common themes was the importance of the supervisor. So loud and clear was this message that I basically went and interviewed a bunch of potential supervisors before I applied for funding – much to their startlement. In the end, the funding materialised at an institution where I’d barely spoken with anyone, I was assigned a supervisor I’d never met or heard of… and promptly misplaced him on the first day of my PhD as he left for a job at another university. These things happen, and I’m lucky it happened on Day 1 rather than two years in. I’m also lucky – and very happy – with my current supervision team, even though I’m pretty sure I give all of them headaches at times.

So yes, the PhD student-supervisor relationship is a unique one: they’re not your boss, and they’re not your peer, and they’re not your mentor. They’re a bit of all of the above and none at the same time. Learning to manage your supervisor(s) early on in the process is key. Have a conversation about how they see their role and yours – and how you see it. Work out their strengths and their failure modes – leverage the strengths, learn to work around the failure modes.

I have three supervisors, which has upsides and downsides. On the plus side, there’s always someone there. Even if two of them have disappeared off to conferences, there’s always someone I can get hold of if I need something urgent. On the minus side, getting all three of them in the same room has proved impossible. Which is actually ok. I learned early on not to wait for everyone to be available and to meet with people as and when I could or needed to. The other big lesson has been not to go for more than four weeks without speaking to at least one supervisor. I tend to go into phases of thinking I don’t need to speak to anyone and I’m doing ok, and that’s generally a sign that I’m stuck with something, or not making as much progress as I’d like to, or haven’t done something I said I’d do. Having that looming supervisor meeting in the diary is a good motivator to go get things done – or ‘fess up and ask for help.

The other thing about having three supervisors is that I get a lot of very different input and insights that I might otherwise not have access to. The downside is that occasionally they end up all pulling in three different directions. That’s where the bit about your supervisor not being your boss comes in. It’s my research, and I get to decide what input to take on board and how. Occasionally I just have to decide that that thing my supervisor’s really excited about is a squirrel and let it go. It is tempting sometimes to only take on board the good feedback, the praise, the comments I agree with, and ignore the rest. That’s a bad idea. A habit I have got into for anything that my supervisors say that I wildly disagree with is to at the very least work out why I wildly disagree with it. That way, when my external examiner in my final viva inevitably asks why I didn’t do Thing X that Supervisor Y told me to do two years ago, I’ll have a (hopefully) good answer.

The Deep Hole of Knowledge

A big challenge for most PhD researchers is isolation. Regardless of whether – like me – you’re working by yourself on a project you designed from start to finish or you’re part of a team in a lab, that tiny little piece of new knowledge you’re creating is unique. No one else is doing anything quite like it. You are – to borrow a phrase from my supervisor – digging yourself into a deep hole of knowledge.

The trouble with digging yourself into a deep hole of knowledge is that the deeper you go, the easier it is to forget how to talk to people – both about your research, but also about things like what you want for dinner and who’s supposed to clean the cat litter. This is a bad thing. You may be a misanthrope like me and be fine with the latter, but the former is vital to your PhD. See, what they don’t tell you in the doctoral descriptors is that producing that shiny bit of new knowledge isn’t quite enough: you have to convince your examiners that it is indeed shiny and new. Which you need to do by… talking about research. So in order to not forget how to do that while digging ourselves into that hole, community is hugely important, and I would argue community comes in at least two flavours. (There are actually more but this post is already huge.)

Meeting people who are broadly going (or have gone) through the same experience as you – regardless of whether they’re in engineering, linguistics or practice-based performance art – can help with a lot of things. They’re the people you can go to and say things like “My supervisor’s doing my head in.” They’re the people who can provide comfort and understanding when your data’s not behaving, when you hit second-year slump, or when the output of an entire day’s worth of work is a single paragraph which is somehow supposed to encompass a month of research. Postgraduate societies, training sessions, and departmental events (with free lunch!) is where to find these people. Once you’ve found them, don’t let them go! Exchange email addresses. Meet up for coffee. Join a faculty PhD student meet-up. If there isn’t one, start one – that’s what I did.

The second flavour of community are your peers in your specific field. They’re the people in the deep hole of knowledge next to yours. They’re the people you can take your misbehaving data to and go “WTactualF?” and they might be able to help you make sense of it; or throw some useful reading at you; or ask you that one question that somehow you hadn’t considered. They’re the people who will end up on the Acknowledgements page of your thesis followed by words like “fruitful discussions”, “useful comments”, “invaluable insight”.

Where, then, does one find one’s peers (except masquerading as Reviewer 2 once you start submitting papers to journals)? A few of them might be in your department; most will not. So you may have to venture out. Go to conferences. Join mailing lists. Check out academic networks and associations in your field. Or, if you’re feeling particularly brave, you can even lure your peers to you. I’m currently organising a conference pretty much with the sole purpose of meeting other postgraduate researchers in my field and seeing what they’re working on.

And Next?

Some people start a PhD with a very clear goal in mind for what they want to do afterwards. (I want to stay in academia.) Others are just glad that they’ve got money and something to keep them busy and out of trouble for another three years. Regardless of which group you’re in, I’d say it makes sense to at least think about your options fairly early on. That way, you can make sure that as you go through your PhD you acquire the skills and experience you’ll need for the next stage.

Now here’s a neat trick for those who do want to stay in academia. You will hear things like “publish or perish” quite a lot. And frankly, they’re true. If you’re in the UK, having four published papers when you start knocking on doors and asking for a postdoc place will make it a lot easier for institutions to employ you because of the Dark Art that is the REF. (If you don’t know how the REF works, find out. It’s a system you can game to an extent, and it’s well worth learning how to do that.)

So how do you produce a thesis and four papers and go to conferences and do outreach and and and? From personal experience, here’s a thing not to do: spam five conferences with abstracts in your second month, in the hope that one of them will say yes. The reason not to do it? All five of them will say yes, and you will be very busy and (depending on your institution’s budget) very broke for a few months. Also, you might give your supervisor a headache. (I thoroughly enjoyed all five of those conferences though.)

What I have found really helpful is to use conferences and journal publications as a way of breaking down the massive amorphous thing that is a PhD into smaller manageable chunks with clear scope and deadlines. This means only doing papers that will somehow contribute to your thesis. They may not end up being chapters (and depending on your university regs, you might not be allowed to straight up use your publications in your thesis anyway), but they might help you get your head around a particular chunk of your data, a particular methodology, or some especially tricky part of the theory in your field. One of the papers I’m currently writing will actually end up as a significant chunk of a thesis chapter further down the line. Another will give me the chance to practise auto-ethnography (of which I’m terrified), plus it’s a paper obviously missing in its field and I happen to be in a position to write it.

So this is all of my “end of Year 1” wisdom. Here’s to Second-Year Slump, Reviewer 2, misbehaving data, and the Deep Hole of Knowledge. May we emerge from it blinking victoriously into the sunlight.

[This was originally published in October 2015 under the title “What I learned from running a conference about writing abstracts”.]

Bethan and I have just sent our acceptances and rejections of abstracts for #PopSex15, and I’ve been thinking about what the process of organising a conference has taught me about pitching to one. So here are a few tips on writing abstracts for academic conferences.

Be very clear what your paper’s contribution is. The argument you’re making and the evidence you’re using should be obvious from your abstract. There are different ways to do this. I tend to structure my abstracts in three paragraphs. The first goes a bit like this: “In this paper I will [show/argue X] using [data set Y] and [methodology Z].” The second gives some context appropriate to the audience I’m pitching to. So if I’m pitching to a gender & sexuality conference and talking about fanfiction, I might explain what fanfiction is. If I’m pitching to a fan studies conference, I might explain why I’m using fanfiction to study sexual consent. The third paragraph then expands on the first while building on the context I’ve provided in the second to give more detail of exactly what my paper will do and how, and maybe why this is interesting. You can provide the context first but the conference organiser may turn out to be familiar with it, in which case you might bore them. You can provide some bullet points titled “Key Points”. Whatever you do, don’t get too bogged down in detail: be clear (and brave) with your argument.

Pitch to the Call for Papers. The CfP will tell you a lot about what the organisers are interested in. Specific keywords and topics, participants at a particular stage of their career (e.g. postgraduates, early-career researchers), types of content and modes of presentation. Do try to work the keywords into your abstract (if your work really is relevant!). Do make sure you’re eligible to present at that particular conference. Do include a sentence along the lines of “My paper fits with conference themes A, B and C”. The more you can help the organiser figure out how your work fits in with their priorities, the better. There is honestly nothing more heartbreaking than having to reject what looks like an awesome paper that I really want to see because it doesn’t quite fit with the conference themes.

Things that are not 20-minute presentations: The standard conference format – for better or for worse – is a 20-minute paper. Having said that, there are conference organisers who would love to loosen things up a bit. If the CfP explicitly encourages proposals for discussion groups, pecha kucha, workshops, posters, practice showcase, or other formats, take the opportunity to experiment! You’ll make the organiser’s day. There are a few things to consider if you do this though:

• As a rule of thumb, be careful about proposing things that would take more time than the standard 20-minute paper. If I’m going to give you a larger share of time, I expect to get more value from it, and you may need to convince me that that’s the case. If you offer me a workshop or discussion, I’m much more likely to give you the extra time than if you just want another ten minutes for what’s basically a standard paper. And do consider the context when asking for more time: you’re less likely to get it in a one-day symposium than in a four-day conference.
• If you can offer me options (“I can do this as a paper or a discussion group”), that’s amazing and gives me flexibility to fit you around other content.
• Be prepared for the organiser to come back and ask you for a different format. I pitched a poster to a conference once (which had explicitly asked for posters among other things) but it turned out I was the only one. The organisers were kind enough to give me the opportunity to present a paper instead.
• If you are pitching anything other than a 20-minute paper, make that clear right from the start. Even before you get into “In this paper I argue…” say “This is a proposal for [a poster/a discussion session/an interpretive dance performance].” This makes it much more likely that the organiser will notice you’re proposing something different, and much less likely that you’ll turn up expecting to lead a discussion when the organiser expects a paper.

Stick in the organiser’s mind. As an organiser I have to process a large number of 300-word abstracts, many of which have titles that wouldn’t fit in a tweet. What I found myself doing very quickly was giving papers nicknames: The Tumblr Paper; The Bucky Barnes Paper; The Asexuality Paper. (These are made up, but you get the gist.) The way I pick these nicknames is by latching on to something that is either familiar or interesting/unexpected. Your paper is now forever tied to those one or two concepts in my mind. And yes, there are other bits of processing I’ll do (what media are you talking about, what are the key themes, how might it fit with other papers), but that nickname is still very powerful. It may have an impact on whether your paper gets accepted. It almost certainly will have an impact on what other papers you end up grouped with in a panel, which in turn will have an impact on the quality of questions and engagement you get after you’ve presented.

Now, you don’t know me and therefore it’s very difficult for you to predict what my brain will latch on to in giving your paper its nickname. What you can do is deliberately give me ideas for nicknames. Think about what other papers you would want to be grouped with, and what the key themes and keywords might be that organisers will pick up on for that kind of grouping. Try to think of a catchy nickname that fits with those themes. Now write an abstract that can be easily summed up with that nickname. So if your (totally made up) paper is about how Tumblr as a platform shapes the kind of community that lives on it, and you want to be on a panel with other people talking about different platforms and communities, then The Tumblr Paper is actually quite a good nickname to aim for. If your (still made up, but I kinda wanna write both of these) paper is based on a data set from Tumblr but actually talks about porn gifs and how they differ from the porn videos they’re taken from, then I’d suggest aiming for The Porn Gif Paper instead. That’s much more likely to get you on a porn panel, if that’s where you want to go.

Granted, this feels a bit like stabbing in the dark, and there are many other considerations that go into what panel you end up on, but it’s something I intend to try in order to fix some of my own “I wish they’d put me on that other panel instead” woes.

Oh, and the basics.

• Stick to the word count. Particularly in the abstract, don’t go over (annoys the organisers), and try not to go significantly under (makes me think there isn’t quite enough substance to your paper). Going under is less of an issue in the bio, but again, try not to go over.
• Check exactly what the CfP asks for. Abstract and bio? Abstract and CV? Full paper and six academic references? Submit what you’re asked for.
• Don’t forget to give your paper a title. (I say this as someone who habitually does this, so, you know, do what I say, not what I do.) The absence of title is unlikely to be a deciding factor in acceptance/rejection of a paper, but it will get you a follow-up email from the organisers.

[I’m porting across a handful of posts from my academic blog. This was originally published in September 2015.]

I spent the tail-end of last week in a workshop for PhD students on research impact within the creative economy , run by REACT. I was an activist before I was a researcher, so impact – in the creative economy and elsewhere – is something I care a lot about. This two-day session gave me the time, space and opportunity to think of different ways I could make an impact with my research, as well as to talk to a hugely diverse group of other PhD students and appreciate their different perspectives both in research and with regards to impact. Here are a few things that stuck with me from the workshop.

The Impact Agenda

If you’ve spent any time in or around higher education or research over the last few years, you will know that it’s all taken a rather neoliberal turn. Universities are now for most intents and purposes private institutions, and most public funding awarded for research comes with a huge emphasis on being able to demonstrate impact. With very few exceptions, “blue skies research” is out, impact is in.

Many of us are rightly mistrustful of the “impact agenda”. It affects the kinds of questions we can and can’t ask as researchers, and shifts our focus and our values to the easily monetisable. At the same time, many of us also got into research because we want to make a difference – we want to have an impact. The impact agenda can therefore be seen as an opportunity for those of us who are not content with a thesis gathering dust on a library shelf somewhere. It’s not necessarily a comfortable space to occupy politically, and there is a certain amount of playing into the neoliberal discourse involved, but as a pragmatic choice under imperfect conditions, working with the impact agenda to achieve your own ends is an ok place to be. I need that reminder once in a while.

Something that had been a worry for me personally for some time is that the kind of impact I want to have with my research isn’t necessarily a government priority, and that as a result funding for future projects may be difficult to come by. The current (and previous) government may pay lip service to issues of sexual violence but their funding and legislative choices tell a lot more about how they really feel. One of the things the workshop helped me figure out is that the impact agenda may be a strange sort of ally here. Producing high-quality research and then finding a range of routes to impact for it may help tick enough administrative boxes to qualify for funding, even if the research area itself may not be an overall priority.

The Different Kinds of Impact

The REACT workshop was focused on impact within the “creative economy”, but even just within that space, the different kinds of impact, the different routes to impact, and the huge variety of potential beneficiaries and stakeholders was striking. This was an insight furthered by the diversity of the group, which featured both practice-based and more “traditional” kinds of research in areas ranging from moving image and digital craft to public engagement and French literature. Some of us had very clear potential partners in the creative industries. Others were looking at working with charities, the private sector outside of the creative industries, make interventions in education, or even influence public policy. The skills and ways of thinking covered in the workshop would work just as well for these areas as they would for the creative economy.

One question I found useful when trying to work out what the potential impact of a particular piece of research was, was “Why are you doing it? What is your particular passion, the story that led you to doing this research?” We found that approaching the world critically (“This thing doesn’t work. This could be better.”) is the first seed of impactful research.

Another key insight for me was that your beneficiaries – the people who will get the most out of your research – are not necessarily the people with the money, or the people you can work with directly. This is where being creative about different routes to impact is hugely important. Change happens slowly, and in many different ways. Looking at the chain of things that lead to the specific piece you’re trying to change and identifying points where you can easily intervene is a useful exercise.

Some Thoughts on Collaboration

By its very nature, impact involves working with others. Your ideas, sitting in your own head or on that dusty library shelf, aren’t going to achieve much on their own. It’s only when they come into contact with other people that they become impactful. There are different ways of getting your ideas out there, and they’re useful for different things. Dissemination through academic conferences and journals will help build your reputation with your peers within the academy. Outreach and engagement exercises may draw in the general public or key stakeholders you’re trying to work with. How you talk to these different audiences needs to vary hugely to ensure you’re understood. My presentations to academic conferences sound very different to those I do to fandom audiences, which are in turn different to how I frame things when I pitch for funding, even if they all cover broadly similar content.

True collaboration, true exchange, may build on dissemination and engagement but goes well beyond both. For me, it’s also the slightly scary bit. When I’m presenting or making a sales pitch, I have quite a lot of control over my work. When truly collaborating with someone, I have to let go of a lot of that control. This is something I would like to get better at. Involving potential collaborators earlier in a project is something I’d like to try. Often I will work on something in isolation until I feel it’s ready to meet the world – but by that point I am too invested, too inflexible, and closed to input. So here’s to throwing more half-baked ideas at people.

The final thought on collaboration that stuck with me is that it is often mutually exploitative – and that’s okay. The important thing is to try to work out early on what all parties involved are getting from it – and how those benefits can be maximised during the project. And sometimes it’ll turn out that the benefit for the other party isn’t enough to keep them interested. That’s fine too – on to the next half-baked idea.

Some Final Thoughts

Two images stuck with me from the two days that I’m still processing in some ways. The first, courtesy of REACT Director Jon Dovey, is of the researcher who should be allowed to dig themselves into a “deep hole of knowledge” before emerging and being able to engage, collaborate and make a difference. There seem to me to be two sides to this. On the one hand, it is easy to get either distracted or intimidated by the impact agenda, especially as a PhD student or early career researcher. So this is a reminder that high-quality research and that elusive “new knowledge” we’re supposed to be creating is the foundation of impact – we can’t do it without that. On the other hand it’s also a reminder of the process and necessity of emerging from that deep hole. It’s something I still struggle with on occasion. There are things I know about my research area that, at this stage practically by definition, no-one else knows. Trying to develop accessible languages to talk about these things to difference audiences is part of the challenge.

The second image, courtesy of Pervasive Media Studio Producer Verity McIntosh, is that of oil and water: things that we don’t expect to mix. Verity asked us all what the “oil and water” in our own research were, and I found it to be a really useful way to articulate some of the challenges I’ve been struggling with. I found it even more useful, however, as a reminder that while making some of these elements work together is challenging, it is not impossible; and I found it useful to see how my peers were approaching their own “oil and water” moments in their practice, their research, and their path to impact.

As you may or may not have noticed, over the last two years or so, a lot of my writing output has migrated to Twitter and Patreon. This trend is likely to continue, and those are probably the best places to keep up to date with what I’m up to. Patreon supporters also get a monthly newsletter with my relevant Twitter content, other things I’ve been doing, and some patron-exclusive or early-access content. So please do consider supporting me over there.

As to this blog, I’ll be porting across a handful of posts from my academic blog to here soon. After that… we’ll see.

So we are to have a general election while the main opposition party continues to be a trashcan on fire, and due to the vagaries of the electoral system no other opposition party stands a chance. And the reason given?

“The country is coming together but Westminster is not.”

Let me enumerate for you the ways in which this is a bald-faced lie. The country is absolutely not coming together, no matter the stories the Mail and Express feed you on a daily basis. The country is as divided as it was ten months ago, and there is in no way a clear mandate for Brexit, let alone the kind of Brexit that’s being forced through. And every time yet another predicted negative consequence of Brexit becomes reality, rather than accepting that this is a colossal act of self-harm, the British establishment seeks to point the finger elsewhere. “The EU is punishing us!” No, they are not, they are giving you exactly what you asked for, within the letter and the spirit of the law. The racist Brexit camp falls for this hook, line and sinker, the rest of us despair. Unity this is not.

Meanwhile Westminster has done a remarkable job of coming together. Where Labour hasn’t waved Brexit through, it has enthusiastically supported it. The Greens and Lib Dems may try to make noise about this but they don’t have enough seats or media coverage to meaningfully influence anything. The SNP… The SNP is doing its best to protect Scotland from this epic clusterfuck. May’s claim that there is any kind of meaningful opposition to Brexit in Westminster is a lie.

So both halves of the above statement are lies, but they are lies with a purpose. My friend Kathryn summed it up nicely.

In other words, "Shut up, Remoaners, we won the referendum" becomes "Shut up, leftwhingers, we won the election."

— artsyhonker/Kathryn (@artsyhonker) April 18, 2017

Here’s the thing: this entire government, Brexit, Article 50, it’s built on a pile of lies upon lies. Everything the Brexit campaign promised was a lie. “The people have spoken.” A lie. The country is united for Brexit. A lie. There is opposition to Brexit in Westminster. A lie. And “we won the election, we have a mandate” is going to be the next big lie.

Even leaving aside the fact that Labour is a trashcan on fire, they do not oppose Brexit. So under FPTP, the 48% who didn’t vote for Brexit (and those who didn’t vote in the referendum but have since woken up) literally have no-one to vote for in most constituencies. A (pretty much inevitable) Tory victory will be spun as a second, stronger mandate for Brexit, which given these circumstances it absolutely cannot be.

If May was truly worried about the legitimacy and backing for her actions, she would call another EU referendum, not a general election. But no, this is a discursive power grab, and it will be used to legitimise this country’s further descent into outright fascism, all under the guise of unity and stability.

So what do we do? We make it blindingly obvious that the country has not come together, that we do not buy the lies. We call her out every time she opens her mouth. We march, we make noise. We fight back.

I spent several hours today at the One Day Without Us stall in Bath. For those just tuning in, the basic idea behind this is that it’s a strike – immigrants withdrawing our labour in protest at the vile racism spewed at us constantly from the British government, opposition, press, and pretty much every other social institution in this country. What my morning actually turned into was a game of respectability politics and racism bingo. Here are some of the high(low?)lights…

The organisers of the Bath event seemed to all be white and British. A few other Western European migrants joined us later, but the core group was white and British. Not only that, but the message track they were going with was “Valuing the contribution of immigrants”. They even had templates for people to write “messages of support” and what they valued about immigrants in this country. Not so much a protest, then, as a neo-liberal love-fest.

(For the Migration Issues 101 crowd at the back, here’s what’s wrong with this message track. “Valuing” migrants for our “contribution” implies that those who are unable to contribute are worthless. Regardless of how nice you think you’re being by pointing to migrants’ work in the NHS or declaring that without us this place would be “boring” and “colourless”, the “contribution” discourse is a disposability discourse. My value – my humanity – should not be conditional on my work, or on you finding entertainment value in me.)

Then there was of course the popular “we are all immigrants” refrain. Sorry to break it to you guys, but no, we are not all immigrants. Frankly, even any Western Europeans under the age of 50 living in the UK don’t have half the lived experience of being immigrants that those of us who remember a time before free movement (let alone those to whom free movement doesn’t apply) have. For British people living in Britain to declare that “we are all immigrants” is insulting.

There were the attempts to make us more palatable to the Daily-Mail-reading public by dividing and conquering. “Oh, we’re not about refugees, we’re about immigrants.” Uh, guys, one is a subset of the other, I even brought a physicist who could teach you basic set theory. “Oh we’re not about opening the doors and having more immigration. We just want to celebrate the ones who are already here.” Yeah, thanks. With friends like you who needs enemies?

Backhanded compliments on my English are kinda par for the course for me, but there was also the fun of being exoticised by other (Western European) immigrants. “Oh you’re Bulgarian! I’ve always wanted to go there and see the rose harvest. I love the Eastern European flair, and the music, and…”

Several people also complained that there weren’t more migrants there. “Why won’t the Romanian workers at Primark come out? Why is the Polish sign holder from up the street not here?” You know why? Because they’re all working (sub)minimum-wage jobs. They can’t afford to lose a day’s pay to make your pet project more “colourful”. They can’t afford to lose their shitty jobs if their boss sees them at a protest. That’s why.

All of this was even before contact with the general public who kindly let me tick racist bingo squares ranging from dirty looks to “no mass immigration”, “radicalised refugees” and best of all of course “I’m not racist but”. Yeah hon, you are. I also approached a couple of Community Support Officers (oh come on, like you didn’t know that I’m a massive troll) who explained that they weren’t allowed to be “politically correct” on the job. That one gets the Freudian Slip of the Day award.

But the Worst Human Being of the Day award goes to a parent. Fairly early on in the day I approached a family who turned out to be a Spanish mother, a British father and their two daughters who looked about 11 or 12. The mother shared with me the frustrations of living as an immigrant in the UK right now and took one of my stickers. The father, when prompted to write a “message of support” looked at it blankly for about a minute before he decided he couldn’t do it. But by far the worst was when I offered the kids some stickers and he told me to not “politicise the children”.

Honey, I hate to break it to you, but your children’s mere existence is a political statement, and they know it. If you think those kids haven’t been on the receiving end of racism at the very least since Brexit but probably also before, you haven’t been paying attention. If you think they’re not worried about whether Mummy will be allowed to stay in the country, you are completely ignorant of the reality of your children’s lives. This officially qualifies you for Worst Human Being of the Day.

So I made a somewhat ill-advised flippant comment about Iain Duncan Smith’s latest commentary on the Article 50 court case on Twitter this morning and it’s made me think.

Make him take the Life in the UK test! https://t.co/YMM2TmFeBr

— Milena (@elmyra) December 7, 2016

(IDS’s piece is linked from one of the embedded tweets in there, but don’t click, it’s Daily Mail.)

My tweet, as well as most other commentary I have seen on this article frames IDS’s comments about the courts and their relationship with the legislative and executive arms of the state as ignorance. Didn’t he learn in school about separation of powers? Well, of course he did. And as a former cabinet minister whose department got taken to court repeatedly for the harmful, discriminatory, and unlawful nature of his policies, he has intimate personal experience with separation of powers, and how in a democracy the judiciary is the people’s last line of defense from a malicious executive. As does Duncan Smith’s boss Theresa May.

IDS’s comments are not born of ignorance or misunderstanding. They are a deliberate attempt to undermine the judiciary, one that is fully sanctioned by this government. This has, of course, been going on for some time. The way it has previously manifested is through Brexit. “We don’t want European judges to tell us what to do! They might safeguard some immigrant scum’s human rights!” But as Brexit is becoming a reality, the government, helped along by the fascist gutter press, is seizing the opportunity to further undermine British courts too. The Supreme Court has been labelled undemocratic because unelected (a feature of the system), biased (untrue), and – worst of all apparently – dull (a court is not reality television). IDS’s comments are simply the sequel to the Daily Mail declaring the High Court “enemies of the people”. Except now it’s not just the fascist gutter press spouting, well, fascism, it’s a sitting government MP and former cabinet minister.

So let’s be clear: seeking to deliberately undermine the judiciary in order to increase the power of the executive is a feature of fascism. Let’s not minimise this as ignorance, dismiss it with jokes, or hope it will go away. We must call it by its name, and we must resist it and fight it. We must treat it as the clear threat to democratic institutions that it is.