To PhD or not to PhD that is the question, the process and the answer?

So many people do not tell their own stories, paint their own pictures, dance or sing to their own tunes, that it is hard, but not impossible, I hope, to separate the authentic from the empty rhetoric.

Her-story was effectively omitted from his-story. The Bible was written, interpreted and skewed by men, supposedly men of substance, to suit their own ends. The media is owned and wielded by moguls who are the arbiters of power and political influence.

White people tell the stories of Black people ignoring colonialism and imperialism and the privilege of their own ‘whiteness’ in the process. It has been duly noted that within the ‘science’ of psychology, that even the rat was white. The focus on the accumulation of knowledge (yet more stories) in the academy, which has often done violence to the community, in both word and deed, cannot be lightly dismissed. This is truer for psychology than any other discipline. In fact, as psychology has shown, there is no aspect of life that has not been influenced and shaped by someone else’s agenda.

As a feminist for me the personal is political, therefore it follows that it is not possible that the people telling these ‘stories’, who are so wholly unconnected to me, have my interests at heart. Or indeed the interests of the people, places and spaces, with whom I am connected.

The irony of this is that I sit here, as a white woman preparing to tell the ‘story’ of what we, a group of diverse people did together. I know this is only one version, it is my version and should be read as just that.

I am aware however that at each cycle of this journey I have had to face myself, my own inadequacies and at times my strengths and always my feelings and my thoughts. It has and continues to be a journey. One in which I have returned to where I started and as I have so many times already, I am yet again, re-cycling.

As I push my sinistral pencil across the many pages I have read, writing questions in the margins of papers and books, asking why, far more than I ever did before, I already know that I will probably not be part of the academy. So where will I be? What is my space and place? Does the space and place, I want to imagine, even exist?

Some of the places and spaces, we shared as a group on the journey to writing this thesis, have included the sort of people, places and spaces, I would like to find myself with and in again. However this process has culminated in my doing something, which I am now, in theory at least, committed to undertaking in isolation, namely the writing up of my thesis. What I do know is that to do so in isolation, goes against the ethos by which participatory action research, is meant to be conducted and therein lays one of the first problems, I will aim to discuss. Why fit the round peg of a participatory action research cycle, into the square hole offered within a PhD thesis?

There are other problems associated with this process, that warrant further exploration, in relation to the privileging of the texts used, to support the arguments I will propose, related to what we did, how we did it and most importantly, why we did, what we did, in the way, that we did.

This whole narration process is one of looking back, re-member-ing and expressing in order to attempt to transform the reality, that is my present, into one that incorporates the learning, insights, wisdom, failures, triumphs, thoughts, feelings and experiences that have brought me to where I think and feel I am now. Yet how is this story to be told?

Not simply the format but also the language order, to be used. Added to this are the details of the language in relation to my desire to use words and terms that are inclusive and that recognise the people I am connected to and to whom I feel I belong. I also want to include my feelings in this process, as well as my thoughts and my actions and not to give privilege to one aspect of the who and how I am, over another.

Related to this are the responsibilities I feel toward the people I undertook the research with, in that I wanted to be able to walk the walk and not simply talk the talk, so whatever and however I do this, I needs to be respectful of our collective lived experience, our space and place / position, which for many of us, myself included, is at times a precarious one. So how much do I include and exclude about my own lived experiences and our collective journey(s)?

Whilst I recognise that it is important to locate and position myself within this research, to be ‘up front’ about where I am coming from on a whole range of issues, directly involved in the ‘why’ of who and how I am, as these have a bearing on the reason for undertaking this participatory action research process. The how of doing this is the problematic part. How to be true to myself and my experiences, especially those that have shaped who and how I am, without inviting the reader to view me in a ‘victim’ role? How to reveal sufficient information, for the person(s) who read this document, to have an understanding of why I choose to live my life with people on the margins and edges and not to remain in the centre as I could? (Well at least potentially anyway if I changed the habits of a lifetime and kept my mouth shut and my eyes from rolling!)

I also do not want to get into a competition with myself or anyone else. There can sometimes be a competitive element within certain spaces and places, in which people with lived experiences, can be viewed as ‘less than’, following their disclosure(s) and I do not want this to happen to me or anyone else for that matter.

Undertaking the process of thinking and feeling my way through this, has certainly increased my empathy and understanding of the process that people, with whom I undertook the research, may have gone through, when telling and sharing their stories with me and with each other. I have no doubt I am not the only person to have had this experience. Which is one of many reasons why it would have been better, to have undertaken the thesis writing part of the process, as a shared and not an isolated experience. At least then I would not have had to ‘bend the ear’ of every person I have tried to discuss this with, in order to be able to process my thoughts and feelings, to some extent, prior to actually being able and willing, to write this all down. Indeed, writing this down is itself a process in which all of the above, becomes more real to me and therefore this has heightened the ‘potency’ of the problems for me upon which I need to act. I have no problem with telling anyone, anything about my life and my experience face to face. It is doing so, in such a way that I don’t know and cannot gauge the response of the other person that I have a problem with. It is not the telling, as I think we all have a responsibility to be open and then it would not be so hard for other people, to do the same. It really should be no big deal but it still is.

Lastly, I feel a responsibility to other people I would implicate in my ‘telling’ who have not chosen to be part of this process but who would be implicated and affected by my doing so, such as my parents, my extended family and to some extent my daughters. Though to a lesser extent my daughters, given that they are all familiar with my story and are ok with this. Though this may in itself be a test of how ok they are, with my telling it in such a public way.

At the same time, it is worth acknowledging, that there exists a poverty of documented experience, directly related to living within a patriarchal and indeed kyriarchal world from the perspective of the people who are most affected by it. Without this narration of lived experience, it could be harder to imagine, what an ideological place, would look like. This is assuming, we were able to find a place outside of ourselves, and the context in which we are embedded, for just a few moments, long enough, to get a ‘sense’ of where we are and how we could be. I mean ‘sense’ in terms of our sensuality and all that we are, our feelings, our spirituality, our ecology, our diversity, our needs, our thoughts, our cultures, our herstory, our history, our actions, or lack of them and our intentions both conscious and unconscious.

When I reflect upon people living in poverty and how they make do, mend, recycle, upcycle and the ‘how to’ of the process I am in, in relation to the writing of this thesis. How this so easily, could be a process in which I have to ‘make do’ with what exists in the establishment and institutions, that directly influence the context and content, of this process. Then I compare this with the ways in which feminists have mended, recycled and upcycled those theories and processes upon which the foundations of kyriarchy are based in their attempts to adapt and make them their own. I find myself wondering, if it is not better to operate outside of these structures, in order to be able to reduce the impact they have and the power they hold over this process?

The process of deciding the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of writing this thesis is reminiscent of the labour endured during the birthing process (which is not surprising, given that I have laboured a lot during my life). I have had to locate the pain in my belly, in order to begin opening up. I am writing now, not because of this feeling, well maybe a little, but also ‘in spite’, of it. My energy and clarity in my writing and thinking, is directly related to how frustrated I feel when I finally find time to read and then what I read, is not what I wanted to read, in its entirety. It’s also about the delight I experience when I find a paper or a book, a talk, in fact any form of communication that I can understand, comprehend and have a conversation with, even if it is, as now, on my own. Something that speaks directly to me in my search for further understanding of what was, is and I hope will be. The papers that relate to the latter, sadly are often too thin on the ground, by comparison to the glut of produce, to be sifted through, to get to the concepts, arguments and feelings that often lie, half hidden below the surface that contain within them the seeds of possibility.

I also have some questions about where and what I do from here in relation to the ‘how’ of disseminating and sharing the knowledge that may have been gained. I support free-cycling based on the ethic that what is given, should not be sold, but remains free at the point of delivery (Like the NHS if you ignore the car parking charges and the charges for your own media control in the form of streamed television that is). Academia in its current form, within England, is based upon a capitalist model, with very little being free at the point of delivery, so I would not want to add to this problem by ‘buying’ into something that puts a price on the knowledge gained.

All is not doom and gloom though; I am heartened by my identity as a feminist, a lesbian and as a community and social psychologist. I am thankful that there are sisters, and some brothers, out there in the wider world, who have sown seeds in this soil before me and have documented their thoughts and thankfully on occasion their feelings, about how this thesis writing process can be achieved, in an authentic, integrated and meaningful way for both self and other(s), including, but not limited to an imagined audience.

It is from the need that I feel, not to be alone, but to be in connection, that a lot of my searching, responding and resonating was and is being done. Relationship is all. Our relationship to ourselves, to each other, to each other’s others’ however, whoever and wherever we and they are. Together we are a force to organic-ise and to be reckoned with, as we organically feed and water ourselves and each other, to grow what we want, instead of passively waiting for this to happen.

I therefore will take a risk and join with those people who have and continue to use their energy and all their senses in being with people, to foster social change together.

For what it’s worth, this is what I feel and think makes sense for us to do in order to bring about social and ecological justice. Together we need to practice the art of perma-culture on ourselves through cultivating our grassroots individuals, and groups to occupy the spaces, places and organisations we need in order to effect change. We could use the no dig method, where we don’t turn over and expose the perma of the earth to the ravages of the wind and sun, which dry the earth out and cause her to break down and become dust. We could apply moisture and substance to the fibres of the earth so it fastens together as we dig it over. We can water and sustain the plants currently growing at the edges, even if they might look like weeds to begin with. We need to plant ourselves on ground that we can replenish, feed and sustain. We need to compost and grow in any medium available, including cow muck and manure. We need to plant at different layers, so we can reap the greatest yields, within smaller spaces, so we have plenty of land left to share with the other plants and animals that were here before we were.

We need to share our harvests, our land, and our senses. The tasks we need to perform are growing all the time, in the face of kyriarchy and the neoliberalist, capitalist, ableist, racist, genderist, heterosexist, white, classist, supremacist spaces and places that proliferate throughout our world.  We need to remember that other forms of oppression are always waiting in the wings, under our plant pots, to eat our greens, just as the new shoots are growing and the roots are being sent down into the soil in the hope of anchoring themselves, before the winter arrives. Winter is coming. It is only during winter, that winter is not coming, because then it has already arrived. We need to recognise our spring, summer and autumn and to know that other spaces and places have seasons we in our western world don’t even begin to recognise, which do not form linear patterns of time but are configured to parallel the world around them, forming spirals that turn back on themselves and grow in different directions. We need to support our new shoots and off shoots as well. We need to learn from and understand each other’s experiences, differences and diversities and to do so in a respectful, humanistic, sense-itive and iterative manner.

We also need to think about know-ledge differently, to take our know-ing down from the ledges upon which it has been placed. We pack up our senses, in our memories, herstories, histories, ledgers and books. On shelves in libraries, on internet pages and the www, for those of us, who are privileged enough to be able to read, to see, to hear and to pay for the internet server and equipment to see, hear and read this know-ing. We need to unbind and unbound our knowing, so we can foster a feminist force to be reckoned with, with which to fuck the system, fulsome in our art-is-try, in order to free up ourselves, our spaces, our places and our planet.

If this thesis is responsible for even one change, in either myself, or another person, space or place, however small, as a result of it having being written and freely given, then in my opinion, it will be energy wisely spent.