Sprints and slowdowns: staying with the questions

This blog is a reflection on the sprint phase of writing the PhD. It is more of a reflection on the process of engaging with questions through the container of a PhD thesis writeup. And it shares where I am with the work after some time away from at the root.

Since August, I have been in a time of sprint - trying to write as much of the PhD as I can so I can finish, share learnings and move on. In the last four months I have read a lot and written over 50,000 words (just over half the length of the final thing that I need to produce to finish/complete).

In the writing a lot of thinking has been whirring away - trying to understand what those who have gone before me have found out when it comes to how social movements work, the role of emotions in moving people towards (in)action, what happens in racial justice organising , and how have people studied these movements, feelings, actions and orientations.

I’ve been grappling with theory - what do we mean by emotion, how can we understand what we are feeling, what others are feeling? What do we mean by land? By race? By time? These are all concepts I have been working with and the bodies of work of people who have gone before is vast, complex, multiple and varied.

And I’ve been working on methods - what have I done, who have I spoken to, what have they told me, what are we doing in the ‘talk’ of a research interview and how do I analyse what I have been told? There is something in all this as well which makes me ask who am I to analyse, what if I have missed something, what if I have misunderstood, what if my interpretation is deeply flawed - which in some ways it cannot not be.

A lot has also been emerging in relation to my own positionality - the lenses through which I see the world and the work, how I am positioned in relation to the questions I am asking, we are asking, and what this means for what I find out and what I don’t see.

And in these last few months, I have given myself to this work of thinking, reading, writing, grappling. And it has been intense, sometimes exciting and exhilarating, sometimes deeply boring, sometimes very emotionally challenging. I have wanted to finish, to ‘get it done’.

This has meant hibernating away from my life, mostly saving time for rest, retreating from social life and friends / family, and focusing on the work. It has meant I have neglected a lot of loved ones and become somewhat tunnel visioned in this hyper focused phase. Sprints seem to ask this of us - to get on with just this one thing, but at what cost?

And now as we move into mid-winter, I realise I am far from finishing.

Partly for financial reasons, and partly because an opportunity arose that was too good to pass by - I am going to be starting in a new job at the end of January - this will be three days a week, doing research on land justice hopefully with those engaged in the land justice movement.

This means the sprint phase of the PhD, and the chance of finishing it soon, is ending. And I will need to transition back into a slow and steady pace to keep writing, thinking and reading, alongside other work. And alongside life, relationships, love, community and other interests and projects. This change in orientation, this shift to slowness brings up a lot.

There is grief that I didn’t ‘finish’ already, and that I won’t finish soon. Partly because I want to have something to show for these years and years of work, to share with those who have been involved in the process and been alongside me in the work, partly to justify what I have given up along the way, partly because these questions are hard and ask a lot and in some ways I want to put them down / move into a different relationship with them that is not the rigour/rigidity of a PhD container.

And yet, I think what I need to find is a way to relate to the work differently - these are life time questions for me - how to be in racial justice organising as a white person, what happens in relationship across difference when we try to organise for reparations and land justice, how to hold the contradictions of being both someone who longs for a more just world and someone who is deeply complicit in injustice, how to understand how land ownership and separation from the more than human is a core wound in all this, how to find other ways to relate to land as animate and living, to relate to myself as soulful and part of spirit, and to find ways to relate to other living beings (human and otherwise) in different ways.

These are questions that will stay with me whenever I may (or may not) finish the PhD - at the moment I am grappling with them through the process of writing this strange thing - a thesis. And slowly now, will keep the window open onto that process a day or two a week. I will re-open my practice of sharing thinking and feeling, findings and reflections here on this blog. and this shall be my record and my sharing. The thesis and ‘final’ findings may be a long time coming. What is here is staying with the trouble of the questions and finding what ways I can to engage with them.