In my last post, I mentioned the concept of ‘liminality’ as part of threshold crossing in doctoral study. In this post, I want to focus on this more closely because this is a big part (in my experience) of what doctoral students struggle with as their study progresses from conceptualisation to completion. Understanding what the liminal space is, why it is a necessary part of learning and growth, and how to manage some of the discomfort can hopefully alleviate some of the ‘suffering’ many doctoral students experience, and can help them reframe this in more positive ways. The idea of threshold c ..read more

Lovely husband and I had a debate recently about whether or not doctoral candidates have to ‘suffer’ to get a doctorate. He said ‘yes’, and I said ‘yes, but. What do you mean when you say “suffer”? How much “suffering” are we talking about?’. This question pulls on a few threads related to doing a doctorate that I am going to try and unspool in this post. These threads relate to the transformative potential of study at this level; the purposes of a doctorate; and why we might be doing a doctorate as a life/career choice. The first thread, the transformative potential of a doctorate, is quite a ..read more

Academia is a competitive place, regardless of where you work. The level and intensity of competition depends on the stage of your career (early, mid, late), on your tenure status, and also on who you are (gender, ‘race’, nationality, social class) and what you bring to academia. Academic Twitter has many stories that point explicitly and implicitly to the nature of competition in academia, especially around grants, publications and promotions/tenure. The explicit posts call out the more toxic sides of competition and how bad it can make people feel (and how exhausting the hamster wheel can fe ..read more

It is already April (eep!) and I have three writing deadlines looming. I am making progress on only one of the pieces of writing – slow progress – so I’m starting to properly panic. One of the things that has been slowing me down is having to face and read past drafts of the work I have done on early drafts of these pieces that have had some feedback. I have written quite a bit about feedback over the last few years here: how much it can hurt, how to approach it, how to offer it to others. What I have written less about is how, sometimes, feedback can make you afraid of your own writing, serio ..read more

There is significant buzz on Twitter, in the media and in corridor conversations about AI (artificial intelligence) and the impact new platforms like ChatGPT are having and will have on academic writing, knowledge-making and on research. There’s s a good deal of scare-mongering out there about Large Language Models like ChatGPT that seem to ‘know’ a lot about the world and could, therefore, generate pieces of writing that may be hard to tell from human writing (as in a human wrote it and not an AI). Stories abound online about people using this tool to write children’s books, to assist with le ..read more

Hello, my name is Sherran, and I am afraid of feedback on my writing. There, I said it. I have a mental block, or maybe it’s an emotional sort of block, about feedback. I find it really hard to open feedback and face it, in whatever form it comes. I fear it – it raises my anxiety levels, it makes me feel unsettled and a bit ill sometimes. I always, always *know* it will be bad (read: negative, will make me feel horrible, will tell me I’m actually not a good writer/teacher/assessor/supervisor). So convinced am I of this *fact* that I avoid feedback as long as I possibly can. This is perhaps not ..read more

Hello! I have not written a post here since August 2022. It has been way too long. The truth, though, is that I have really struggled to create new posts. I have many things to write about, but all I really want to say when I sit down to write is that I am having a really hard time writing. And I can’t keep writing about how hard it is to write. So, I have stayed silent, I suppose, waiting for opportunities to create some space to get excited about blogging again, waiting for me to catch up with myself a bit after a couple of hard years, waiting for the words to find me. I have also been doing ..read more

It is summer, at last (at least it is here in England). I have been here almost a year and am slowly getting used to the different rhythms of the academic year and the upside-down seasons. At home – in Cape Town – it is cold and wet. Here – in Nottingham – it is warmer but still quite wet, although climate change is definitely being felt in the warmer and drier weather of late. At any rate, it is officially summer, the undergraduates are all on holiday and the academic year is slowly but surely winding down to the August break. I am most certainly going to be taking some time away from my rese ..read more

Quitting is a dirty word in academia. You’re not really allowed to quit: a paper you are writing, a project you have signed on for, a job, a doctorate. Quitting can be seen as implying weakness, giving up, dropping out, slacking off, flaking out – all things no one wants to be accused of. However, over the last two years especially, I have been reading more and more social media posts by people who have quit, who have said: ‘No, thanks, this is no longer for me’. Many of these posts express sadness and shame, but many also express liberation, relief, joy even. These posters have grappled with ..read more

I am a knitter. I used to mostly knit scarves and blankets made up of squares, and I have a large-ish collection of Outlander-inspired arm warmers. The benefit of knitting these kinds of items is that they knit up quickly. You can make a scarf in a couple of days, and a blanket in a week, depending on the size of the squares. If you use less complex patterns and stitches, you can go even faster because you’re less likely to need to pull out your mistakes and start over (sometimes a few times) before it starts looking like it should. But recently I have challenged myself to start making larger ..read more