"To understand how to write in universities, a radical needs first to understand the forces that try to silence her.” (Neale, 2008: 226)

Last Tuesday was the first day of UWS's school of creative and cultural student showcase. Normally these events are used for displaying the best of the taught programs - such as the undergraduate degrees and the taught/practice based masters. This ranges as wide as film and animation screenings, live music and performance. This year there was a research presence, where there was a 3 hour event put on for the school's doctoral community. Our school has a significant practice-based PhD presence, which makes for a rich and vibrant research community, where work ranges from novelists, performance and video production, fine art to sound and music. It is one of these reasons why I am at UWS and not somewhere else - and for the same reason, it is very diverse in terms of what we all actually do. Unlike other departments within the school, much of what we do deliberately draws attention to the processes of 'what a PhD is?' and tends to raises questions around what is expected of a PhD student. What we all have in common is that we must be examines by viva, we must adhere to the code of conduct of the university (in relation to processes towards completing the degree) and that our methodological underpinnings are so vastly explorative, that we still share similar anxieties around the hows and the whys we go about doing what we do.

Graham Jeffery had talked about putting on a event for the PhDs during this time, that allowed for us to start a conversation about these relationships and to work towards strengthening our research community. What UWS has going for it (and what might be its weakness at the same time) is the distance between campuses, which can be up to 50 miles apart in some cases. Secondly, it is not uncommon for PhD students (and researchers), at any university, to register and then go away and do their work elsewhere (a-hem.) - so any event that we did arrange, had to fall at a time where we could ensure that we could have enough people to participate in it. The event also had to act as a catalyst for something else, that is, making sure that we can keep up momentum, whilst thinking of ways in which we could support the PhD community, especially that not everyone couldn't be there at the same time. 

We decided to put on a half day 'thing' on during the showcase week, as this would stand the bigger chance at attracting staff as well. It also meant that we would have a presence of our own, doing something that was a little less formal than a poster event or a full on academic conference. Influenced a little by the purpos/ed /unconference format, we decided to ask people to prepare 3 minute presentations (which could be in any format, in any style) that attempted to respond to the question:

How are you approaching the relationships between practice and research in your work?

After 3 presentations of 3 minutes, there was then an hour to discussion as a group the presentations and the ideas that came from it. Each presentation was also recorded as a podcast which will be online soon. Some of the presentations are already on the Creative Practice/Research blog.

The discussion was some of the best discussions I've had at a 'formal' event dedicated to PhD researchers. It was great to have members of staff present - because I think it is important for that shared experiences and to hear others talk about their own reflections on their research practice. It was also surprising that, despite our varying degrees of 'creative practice' there were some starkly common themes relating to the PhD process in general. Much of the research work concerned an explorative element to the methodology, where much of what is being done has never been done before, in particular reference to the creative practice. Similarly, the personal affect of research on the researcher is often considered as being an isolated experience (the cliche of the PhD) but also the researcher tends to be actively involved in the progress of facilitating the research project - raising a range of different issues. For instance, my PhD colleague Kirsten McLeod is a community film maker, who is working with groups in Govan and her research concerns the participation within this process. I find that I am in a similar position with my ethnographic research, where I could not do my work if I wasn't part of the communities that I am interested in.

Neale (2008) talks about about the conflict between writing as an activist and writing as an academic (from an anthropological perspective), and I thought that this ran true with me (and what I focused on during my three minutes - and that is how I interpreted the question, where I am not an artist but I am active in my research process):

“It is not easy to be both an academic and an activist. The values, the audiences and the constraints are different. Sitting down to write, you can feel yourself pulled in two different ways. The result is often muddled thinking and murky prose.There is too much ranting for an academic audience, and too much gobbledegook for the activists. In many cases, there is no prose at all, only silence and pages crumbled in the wastebasket or erased on the screen.” (Neale, 2008 :217)

I read this the night before the discussion - and I think a lot what Neale spoke about ran true with my frustration with institutions (this was a common theme too - there was a lot of debate about the purpose of the institution when we are to think about creative practice within a PhD framework) One of the shared experiences is thinking about writing and the how to write when you are used to being within different spaces (such as blogging for instance.) Neale, quite critically, says that this feeling can actually muffle and surpress some of the other ideas that could emerge within a university space, where academics, instead of identifying as their disciplines 'I am an ethnographer, I am a historian etc'), they are in fact employs of the University first (a lecturer) so write with this in mind.

I spoke of my conflict about presenting data and research when the people that I have encountered during my research have had a geneiunely transformative effect on me - and that the more I continue down this path, the more I am finding myself becoming politically engaged with the subject area (when in the beginning I was discussing the use of social media data as a singular method of analysis) The enthographic process (and subsequent interaction with the protests and resistance against changes to higher education institutions) have raised more questions than answers (and this is good) - but *how* I present and engage with the academic community is open for debate (when I am finding myself becoming ideologically opposed to some of the dominant ideas of the academy as they adapt to the con-dem government.) I think being able to talk it others who do not feel like this *fit* the PhD structure, and seeing the similar themes and discussions, actually reinstalled some hope that we can get some things done and done in an alternative space from the formal/dominant research/teacher training, poster presentations and classrooms. This was comforting -and sort of helped me get back on the horse after a week of feeling like I wanted to stab-stab-stab. As long as we can keep up/invite ourselves into this spaces - and we know that it is always a shared experiences then there are reasons to stay strong when the the rest of the system is trying to drag you down. 

“If you want to write out of rage and a desire to change the world, write for the social movement. Whilst this must not be confused with writing a thesis, using rage in the right way can give a writer the confidence to write good academic work as well.” (Neale, 2008: 226)