Where to begin?

Is it okay to begin in a place that doesn’t feel that good?
I don’t like to come at it from a deficit perspective honestly, but it feels like it might be a necessary part of the process so I can move on to the next stage of this beast. And it honestly feels like a beast at this point.

So let me explain the discomfort, I have spent a lot of my life feeling like I don’t really fit properly in places that are about knowledge or academic achievement. I reflect now on a lifetime of undiagnosed ADHD and the profound impact that had on me. That lifetime of living without an understanding of what my brain was doing which incidentally ended during the course of my PgCert with a diagnosis. Quite far into my little old life, my career and indeed my experience as a ‘teacher’ (you’ll have to scroll back through my older posts to read about my discomfort about the notion of being ‘teacher’ )

But back to the discomfort, I’ve always felt like I was cheating, or scraping by, or not belonging in these spaces. So it does make me laugh slightly that I ended up in this kind of work.
I often times feel like academic spaces are not for me, that research is not for me. That it’s both a mode I can’t work in and in many ways there are lots of things I find problematic and inaccessible about it that make me not want to exist in those spaces. To illustrate my point, right after I typed that I found myself thinking- oh this is the point I’m supposed to go and find a bit of research and cite it here to prove that research can indeed feel selective and closed to many – because my perception, experience and understanding of research has led to me believe that I’m not allowed to just have organic thought and that be enough. That I need someone smarter to verify or back up this notion for it to be credible. If you do want to read a paper on barriers to academic research I found this really interesting: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0222669
even though the barrier is completely different to the many barriers I can identify, it still highlights to me that research has a lot of work to do in terms of funding, accessibility and decolonisation. I know there are pockets of work being done on this. SOAS have been exploring the declonising of research since back in 2019 (and probably before that)

I was involved in a huge cross-institutional research project with a million pound budget, the purpose of which was to explore models of embedding enterprise education into the curriculum.
This 1 million pound research project used 80% of it’s funding for salaries for academics and staff, including in fact part of mine. Which made me feel wildly uncomfortable from an ethical perspective. A fact I only found out very close to the end of the project by virtue of not being involved in the funding application and not being privy to any of the financial aspects of the project. I would love to believe and be able to tell you that it led to groundbreaking outcomes and discoveries that really justified that spending and have led to huge paradigm shifts that really are benefitting students enough to justify that level of money, but unfortunately, it’s not how I feel.

After the completion of this project, or sometime later when I’d stopped feeling a lot of feelings about it, I decided to do something about it. To try a different approach that still does the important research but maybe puts 80% of the spend in students’ pockets. So I took some advice on funding and was essentially told that someone else was exploring similar areas of thought (Embedding enterprise and sharing best practices etc) but not paying students – which I was proposing would be a fundamental part of the research. I was told in no uncertain terms that there wasn’t funding available to work in this way and pay students. But if I didn’t do the paying students part, I’d likely be able to access funding and there was indeed pots of money I could apply for. I was honestly speechless! I think so shocked in fact that I slightly passively aggressively commented that I might apply for some funding to do a research project about why it’s so problematic that this is how it works. That went down even worse than my first proposal, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Even now I can’t comprehend that there is money for all this research that is designed to serve students and their learning, but virtually none of it can be accessed to work collaboratively with students on any large scale and pay them for their participation. If you’re researching into what might serve students, and using this research to design learning for students, why would you not want them to be involved in that research? and if you’re teaching them anything about entrepreneurship and professional practice and employability (the area of my work and proposed research) a big part of what you’re teaching them is around their value!
So how can you on one hand be telling them to understand their value and worth and how to get paid for it, and then on the other hand say to them ‘oh but can you do this project for free?’ ‘can you come to this focus group for free?’ ‘can I just have your insight…. for free’ personally I cannot. Or by virtue of my privilege and positionality, paired with a stubbornness (tenacity if we’re feeling generous) and sense of justice (see ADHD brains and sense of justice) I refuse or choose not to. I choose to not pursue funded research opportunities that don’t value the input from student participants and pay them for it.

So why is this important? Because I think it colours my whole experience and feeling towards research, which I think will impact and play out in the way I approach this ARP.

So I find myself wondering what the important take aways here?

That I don’t want to do something for my ARP about and for students without engaging them in the process! Does it sound obvious? I feel like it happens a lot still.

That I would like to be able to compensate them for their involvement in a way that feels fair.


Bezuidenhout, L. et al. (2019) ‘Economic sanctions and academia: Overlooked impact and long-term consequences’, PLOS ONE, 14(10). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0222669.

Decolonising research initiative (no date) SOAS. Available at: https://www.soas.ac.uk/research/research-and-knowledge-exchange/research-vision-and-strategy/decolonising-research (Accessed: 01 February 2024).