Reconciling With the Personal in PhD Research
Last night Russia launched its 4th mass drone attack on Kyiv this month. 1300 miles away I am writing about gender and forced migration for my PhD’s literature review. I read the news (Instagram) at 5am, my looming deadline making me an early riser, and try to reconcile the sterility of my academic prose with the images of bombed apartment buildings.
My PhD research looks at the experiences of Ukrainian refugees in the UK. I’m researching the lived experiences of Ukrainians under the Ukraine Visa Schemes, situated within the context of British asylum and refugee policy, austerity and the retreating state. My research looks at concepts of gender, home, hospitality and deservingness. But what do these words actually mean? As soon as I try to describe my PhD topic it comes out as word salad. So instead of writing about it in academic terms, I’m going to talk about where the idea came from, what motivated me to do this research, and how my relationship to my research topic has evolved since I began my PhD.
My academic background has nothing to do with Ukraine or refugees. I have an undergraduate degree in Film & Television Studies, and a Master’s degree in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. During my Master’s I primarily learned about Russia and the Soviet Union, and wrote my dissertation on Estonia. During that year, I had one hour of classes on Ukraine, in a Russian Foreign Policy module. I graduated from my Master’s in November 2021, three months before Russia launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The “expertise” I had spent a year developing became outdated and irrelevant overnight, and the interest I had once had in Russia felt wrong. I spent the next year reading about Ukraine — about the war, about Ukrainian history and literature, and about refugees. I read about horrific war crimes every day for months, and any residual interest in Russia was replaced with a moral commitment to redirect my research interests towards Ukraine. During this time, I read Sara Ahmed’s Living A Feminist Life, and the pieces began to click into place. Ahmed writes about the backlash women and marginalised people face when they raise complaints within workplaces or academic institutions. By drawing attention to the problem, they become the problem. The more I read about Ukrainian refugees, the more I saw this pattern repeated. If they spoke up about the struggles they faced, they were told to stop complaining because other refugees had it worse. In Glasgow, where I lived at the time, I frequently encountered people who believed Ukraine didn’t deserve support because it was a white, European country allied with the US and Europe. Often these were people who couldn’t point out Ukraine on a map and viewed the Soviet Union as the paradigm of political freedom.
The Ukraine Visa Schemes are more benevolent than the “hostile environment” that has dominated British refugee policy in recent years. This is undeniable. But the Ukraine Visa Schemes were designed to be temporary. Under these visa schemes, Ukrainians have the right to work and receive welfare, etc, but they are not eligible for refugee status. The visa schemes were designed to last three years. Those three years are now up, but the war continues. The majority of Ukrainians entering the UK came under the Homes for Ukraine scheme, where private hosts sponsor Ukrainian refugees in their homes. This is a world away from asylum processing centres and poor-quality refugee housing, but it comes with its own safeguarding issues. The government does not pair refugees with hosts, and there have been cases of single men trying to host Ukrainian women to take advantage of them. Whilst there is some government oversight, there is not enough.
My research takes it as a starting point that Ukrainians receive different, and often more benevolent, support than other groups of asylum seekers and refugees. But my research asks: what does that support actually look like? Which aspects of these policies could be used to create a better system for caring for refugees of any nationality? Likewise, my research asks what harm is being caused, and which groups of people are more likely to slip through the cracks of care? How does gender, age, race, sexual orientation, etc, impact the kind of support that Ukrainians receive? And if Ukrainians receive more support than other groups, who else is falling through the cracks?
My initial plan was to conduct research through interviews with Ukrainian refugees. I have now decided to augment this with ethnographic research in Ukrainian spaces around London. By the end of this PhD, I will be a social scientist by trade, but I am a storyteller at heart. I always wanted my research to be a space where Ukrainians could tell their own stories. Lately I have been reckoning with my role in this as a researcher.
In theory, a PhD is meant to take three years. During the first year, you are mostly reading and writing, familiarising yourself with what your academic forebears have written, and delineating where your own research fits in. The second year is for data collection — in my case, interviews and ethnographic research. The third year is for writing up your research findings. I am currently nine months into my first year. Where the majority of this year has been spent reading and writing in a humid library room, next year is all about people. I will teach undergraduate classes; I will interview refugees. I will go from fumbling in the darkness trying to figure out what on earth I’m doing, to being in a position of authority.
My relationship to my research has changed over the past couple of weeks. When you’re deep in the literature review stage, the themes you’re writing about can feel distant from your research topic. In this stage, it’s easy to become caught up in ego. Every challenge becomes about you as an individual, rather than the thing you’re researching. I realised lately that I don’t really talk about my research topic. I talk about my frustrations with my literature review. I talk about the challenges and occasional joys of academic life. But I have spent very little of the past nine months talking about my actual research topic.
Last night I read an article about Refugee Studies as an academic discipline (Refugees as a Particular Form of Transnational Migrations and Social Transformations: Socioanthropological and Gender Aspects by Susanne Binder and Jelena Tošić, for anyone looking for some light reading), and I was struck by the line “the issue of [researching] flight implies commitment, empathy, and a personal confrontation with human suffering”. I think it goes without saying that I care about my research topic, and I care deeply about Ukraine. I would not be doing this research otherwise. But I’ve realised this week that I have held myself back from feeling the full weight of what it means to care. As I prepare for the next stage of my research, I need to spend time in Ukrainian spaces, I need to immerse myself in the language, and I need to talk to Ukrainians. I tell myself I have been doing this. I show up to the protests and solidarity rallies, I go to a Ukrainian café every so often. But am I actually interacting with people? Not really.
I went to a protest at the start of June, and I saw a Ukrainian acquaintance there and couldn’t bring myself to go and speak to her. I made myself a whole bunch of excuses as to why I didn’t go and say hello, but ultimately it was social anxiety and nothing deeper. I wouldn’t have known what to say. As I slipped away into the crowded streets of Westminster, I told myself firmly: when it comes to my research, there is no place for anxiety. My research is not about me. My research is not about my ego or insecurities. I need to be able to talk to people about my research, that is a non-negotiable of academia. So when I don’t know what to say, it’s time to learn.
Summer is conference season, so I have spent a considerable part of this month talking about my research topic to strangers. I’ve pushed myself out of my comfort zone, proven to myself that I do actually know what I’m talking about, and realised that taking action is the only remedy for anxiety. Last week I went to a Ukrainian language event, and I began to see my research in a different light. I listened to Ukrainians talking about how much it means to them when British people learn their language, or support Ukraine in any way. I realised that the reason I don’t talk about my research, and the reason why I have been less active in Ukrainian spaces than I probably should have at this point in my research, is because I look at my research and focus too much on my own role in it. I expect Ukrainians to look at me and think: why is this random English woman qualified to do this work? But my research is not about me as an individual. I am a resource, a skillset, and in order to do this work effectively I must leave my own insecurities at the door.
I stumbled through the language practice part of the event, tripping over my words, cursing myself for joining the intermediate group instead of the beginner one. I am not a beginner; I’ve been learning Ukrainian since October 2022. But I haven’t had a Ukrainian lesson since March and even my last exam was a couple of months ago now. The language was gone from my brain and I was deeply embarrassed. But I stuck around for the networking portion of the event, because I made a promise to myself. A Ukrainian woman came up to me. She didn’t speak much English, so I did what I had struggled to before: I spoke Ukrainian. If there is one thing my teacher drilled into me, it was how to talk about my research. I tell her: Я аспірантка в факультету Східноєвропейських Наук. Моє докторське дослідження про досвід українських біженців у Великобританії. We converse in broken English and Ukrainian, and she adds me to a telegram channel for Ukrainian women in London. I successfully networked in a language I barely speak, and now have access to a wide pool of potential research participants. For the first time in my PhD, I felt like I’d done something right.
At this stage of my PhD, it’s easy to get lost in the books and articles and theory, and forget that I’m doing this because I care about people. People I’ve never met, people whose suffering I have read about but not heard firsthand. I’m doing this PhD because I want to be useful, I want to do good in the world, and this is my small way of trying. I am learning to separate the experience of being a PhD student from the practice of being a PhD researcher. Being a PhD student is my daily life, but my research is my work. I can be self-centred and anxious and dramatic in my daily life, I am human. But when it comes to my research, I am learning to switch those parts of myself off.
I do that by focusing on the people. I think of every time I’ve spoken to a Ukrainian about my research, how touched they were that I—random English woman—have chosen to do this work. I think back to November, when I met the woman I was too anxious to say hello to at the start of this month. I remember telling her about my research, I remember the emotion in her eyes and the way she touched my arm. It takes me another couple of days to message her, but I do it. Deeply out of character for me, but perhaps my character is changing.
I thought I needed to separate my human self from my researcher self, and somehow the opposite has happened. After pushing my anxiety aside and making an effort to connect with Ukrainians this week, the way I relate to my research has changed. The walls I had put up around my heart have given way, and I feel everything so much deeper. I read articles about Ukrainian refugees, and I see the faces of people I know. It’s no longer abstract, no longer hypothetical. I realise now why I created this distance between myself and my research, because I feel everything so deeply. I read the news about Russian attacks on Kyiv and Odesa, and I think about the Ukrainians I know. I still haven’t learned what the appropriate thing is to say to someone when their country is being repeatedly bombed. Maybe there is nothing to say, but I wish I had the words. Instead, I write my literature review, and the frustration I once directed towards writer’s block turns into a frustration with the impersonal nature of academia. I alternate between writing about academic theories of gender and forced migration, checking Instagram and seeing reels of Kyiv’s apartment blocks reduced to rubble, and picturing the blurry faces of people I barely know.
I ask myself: what would my research look like if I make it personal? What kind of researcher would I be if I let myself feel it all? A better one, I believe. When I care, I care with everything I have. I think of all the energy I’ve wasted this year on one-sided friendships and dumb crushes, and imagine where I would be if I took all that passion and poured it into my research, if I let myself feel the rage and frustration and let myself be consumed by the desire to do something to make the world better (if such a thing is possible). This week, without intending, I let myself care with a depth I had resisted thus far. I let myself make it personal.