This piece is about my personal experience. It reflects only my viewpoint and my experience as I do not seek to speak for my (wonderful) teammates and colleagues.
When I started my PhD, I felt unsure and alone a lot. Most of those feelings stemmed from not being a ‘typical’ British PhD student/researcher. My 20s are a distant memory. I’m a parent to three young children (as discussed in another post). I’m a woman and I’m an ‘ethnic’ or racial minority in the UK. In addition the ‘reearch gap’ I am exploring is specific to the Welsh context for which not a great deal of research has been done before.
PhD students are told a lot that doing a PhD can be a lonely experience in which you can feel isolated. I quickly realised that sense of isolation could disproportionately affect me. I did not like that feeling. I like to talk, discuss, and debate both my research ideas and also the challenges I face as a researcher. Talking helps me process. It helps me feel connected with others. I was surrounded by fantastic peers, some of whom I hope will be friends and colleagues for a long time to come. However, I continued to feel alone.
I felt sure I could not be the only person feeling the way I did. In fact, I knew I wasn’t. One of my fellow students is from a similar racial background to me. She is who I could discuss race, migration, Black Feminism, Intersectionality, etc. with in depth. I knew how lonely I’d feel if she wasn’t there. I’d also had fantastic support from an ex-PhD student whose thesis had been in a similar topic to mine. I wondered who there might be in other schools at the university (or at our school but we had not met) who also felt alone or as though they didn’t quite fit in, for similar reasons. I wondered how many of those individuals might not have been as lucky as I had been. So I started to take some small steps.
I had joined a number of mailing lists for research groups and events at the university. I began reading their communications more carefully. If there was someone doing research in an area at all related to mine, then I’d contact that person and ask if they’d like to meet and talk. I did this, even if I wasn’t able to attend the group seminars and events themselves. As a parent, I did not have the time to do that and some events clashed with school runs. So I was trying to find another way. I found the first few people I reached out to responded really favourably. I started meeting them for coffee.
Over coffee, we’d talk about our work – ideas, challenges, opportunities, and more. It felt great to talk to people who truly ‘got it’ when it came to my work. It was also wonderful to discuss topics that were not necessarily directly related to my work but were hugely interesting to me. It wasn’t always the same people who met each time, but there was a little group of about half a dozen of us who would meet two, three, or four at a time. On every ocassion, someone would express the view that the informal chats were fantastic. Those further along the PhD/academic road than me might say how they wish they’d had something like these coffee sessions earlier. We all knew of others who would like to part of what we were doing, even if they hadn’t been able to join us so far. We talked about the existing formal research groups at the university and agreed it was a shame there wasn’t something that quite fitted with what we needed and were doing informally.
After a few months of this, I spoke to my supervisors about the situation. I told them how much I was benefiting from these chats over coffee, the people I’d met, and the indication that there was a definite gap at the university. I also discussed with them my concerns that it was very hard to know if any other researchers were working with the same organisations as me. When I’d approached my gate-keepers, I had no idea if I was the sole request for help they’d received or one of many. That didn’t seem right to me. My supervisors, as always, were supportive. We discussed formal research groups and I expressed my (strong) views on the gap that needed filling. One of my supervisors offered to add to her workload by being the staff convenor that is needed to have a formal research group at the university. That supervision meeting proved to be truly significant!
I almost danced out of that meeting. I spoke to the friend I mention above – the one with whom I’d discuss Black Feminism. I spoke to the others who I’d been meeting with for coffee and one was keen to help and felt she had the time. And so, the Migration, Ethnicity, Race & Diversity Researc Group (MEAD) Core Team was born. We continued to talk with my other coffee mates and we got planning and working. We knew that we needed to reach more people at the university if we were to make a research group actually work. We all also agreed that we wanted to do something a little different from other research groups; we wanted to invite people outside academia into our world. There is a lot of benefit to be gained, for all, from researchers, policy makers, case workers, etc communicating in a research-focused space together. We decided the best way to reach everyone we wanted to reach was to have a formal launch, inviting as many people as we could and sharing our vision with them. In December 2019, we did just that and MEAD was born.
MEAD has been running for just over a year now and what a year it has been. Yes, we’ve had a global pandemic to contend with (as everyone and every group has). But we’ve managed to go from strength to strength. In October, we held a virtual event for which over 300 people registered and over 120 attended. We have 300 members from universities, public sector and thrid sector organisations from the UK and other countries. We’ve been asked to work with the Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP), part of the Economic Social Research Council. I’ve personally, been asked for support by researchers in the third sector and have had some virtual meetings with those individuals that remind me of the coffees I’d had with others months before. Little did I know, when I discussed challenges of researcher positionality over coffee and cake where it would lead me.
I thank my fellow MEAD team members for being awesome women with a shared vision. And I thank those who responded so positively to by emails suggesting a coffee, back at the start of my PhD journey. MEAD is something of which we should all be proud. I started my PhD feeling alone and disadvantaged. I am now in my final funded year and have a wonderful community around me.
Research Stories 