white ants and research education

Posted on April 23, 2024 by pat thomson

So I didn’t blog during my conference at all. I could say that I was out doing social things, which I was, but that really doesn’t account for the lack of posts. It’s actually that I have been pondering.

The conference was a mix of academic and research responsible staff, a combination that you don’t see that often. And this made me wonder why.

Generally when I think about PhD support I think of it as well and truly multiple. There are many people involved in the PhD support and supervision process. We can think of the most obvious – those responsible for guiding the development of the PhDer’s research – supervisor, adviser, committee etc. Then there are those who provide additional doctoral education within the PhDer’s university– methods courses, ethics workshops and so on – such people are often found in grad schools and are often institutionally known as research development staff. These staff may also have a role in supervisor development and in developing frameworks for quality and progression. As well, there may be additional ‘popup’ staff who run occasional courses, workshops and seminars.  

The PhDer may also find in their university a peer network or three, including some peers who work in the same department/lab and others beyond. There are also other people in the university who are often very important – librarians and counsellors for example. And of course, where would any of these people be without the research administrative staff? They not only ensure that that all stages of the candidature proceed smoothly and that space, desks and printers are available but are usually know the answers to all of the questions that no one else can answer. 

But of course support for the PhD goes even further. Outside of the institution sit disciplinary organisations, most of which have some kind of programme which positions PhDers to enter the wider disciplinary community. Specialist research organisations and learned societies also generally offer events and educational activities. And there are organised groups on a variety of social media platforms as well as self- managing networks and connections. And there’s various kinds of advice offered (such as this blog, advice books etc).

So when you add all of this up, you can see that there’s a lot going on for PhDers these days. But we also know that different PhDers have access to different levels and kinds of support – distribution is neither even nor equitable. 

At my conference, some presenters talked about this phenomenon as a village to raise a PhD, others as a community of practice. One keynote talked about building a pack, a metaphor intended perhaps to signify a collaborative group rather than a bunch of isolated or competitive individuals. However this was a metaphor which also raised some hackles, as it also suggested something also rather aggressive. Hunting in packs and all that.

And I’ve come away from the conference with wonderings. Here’s just two.

  • How much do supervisors/advisers know about what support their PhDers take up? Is it mainly left to the PhDer to put together and critically evaluate the various sources of support that they access? How much responsibility does the supervisor have for finding out what else the PhDer is doing outside of their formal interactions? 
  • How is what goes on in supervision and researcher ‘training’ connected? Are there times when the research methods courses are in tension with supervision – and if so is this a problem? What coordination/division of roles is there between research developers and supervisors, how often are the various roles and responsibilities made explicit and are there structured opportunities for conversation between supervisors and research development staff about who does what and why?

As I’ve been thinking about these questions, I’ve come to the conclusion that the notion of distribution might be helpful. We might think about PhDer progress as supported through a distributed practice. But there are loads of different modes of distribution. So, if PhDer learning is distributed, what kind of distribution is it?

Distribution to supermarket chains is from a central point, and to outlets that all have to follow the same rules – from branding to shop layout and weekly specials. So that’s nothing like the kind of distribution we see for PhDers. 

A very different model of distribution can be seen in the white ant colony, where each member of the colony operates for the benefit of the whole, and knowledge-sharing is built into the different roles that colony members have. Together white ants can learn, think and make decisions. Eugene Marais famously argued in his book The soul of the white ant that the white ant colony should be seen as a single organism, a termitary, rather than individualised insects. Perhaps even an organism with a soul.

Well, there’s no way that we could think of a bunch of academics and universities and social media as a single organism. Although we might see it as a complex system, something and somewhere between the supermarket chain and the termite colony. 

But at present, and not even adding in social media, our complex system is more like a river delta, with administrators, developers and supervisors running along in separate streams. Occasionally we come together, as at the conference I have just attended. Or perhaps there is the occasional university where some effort has been put into thinking about how each stream might know more about each other, and how to develop some shared understandings and trust.

Ive been wondering whether, and if so how, more understanding and trust could benefit PhDers who would no longer have to be the conduit between the streams nor have to decide which to follow. And if so, how we might do this without adding in more unwelcome layers of administration!

Image : Satish Nikam on Flickr

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Anticipation

Posted on April 15, 2024 by pat thomson

Patter will be blogging from the QPR – Quality in Postgraduate Research conference later this week. it’s in Adelaide South Australia, and it’s QPRs 30th birthday.

My keynote is done and on a stick, my what-to-wear questions resolved, and my key social events and connections planned. I’ve got the clunky conference app but not selected all the sessions I’ll attend.

Tomorrow is pack and travel day. More to come…

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research as creative practice – possibility thinking

Posted on April 8, 2024 by pat thomson

The late Anna Craft said that possibility thinking is moving from asking what something is, or does, to asking questions about what something might be or do or become. Possibility thinking is wondering, imagining, asking the question What if….?

Possibility thinking is at the heart of creative practice. Possibility thinking is the way that ideas are surfaced. Once surfaced ideas can be played with, tested out, developed and realised. Possibility thinking allows for the something-new-that-wasn’t-there-before to emerge. 

In and as research, possibility thinking opens the door to alternative, different and new ways of thinking about our research problem, design and analysis. That is why it is often possibility thinking, asking the What if question rather than using any specific technique or focus, which makes our research important and enjoyable.  

What if questions are important for researcher reflexivity too, as they allow us to consider what we may have taken for granted, consider whether we have jumped too quickly to conclusions, relied too heavily on a particular text or approach, or worked rather too quickly through something that might have benefitted from slower contemplation. 

There are numerous opportunities to ask What if questions in research. Here are just a few places where the What if question can be used.

Problem posing

A is usually understood as (in the following ways). What if it were not this? What if it were…

I always assumed that… What if this was thought differently? What if…

Designing research

B is usually researched by the following means. What if, instead, I … 

What if rather than looking at B in this setting/with this group, I looked at/used… ?

I have tried generating data this way and it hasn’t produced much. What if ..? What happens when? 

Analysing data

C doesn’t seem to fit the pattern of the other data? What if….

The literatures suggest that the way to group this data is this. But what if….

There seems to be something happening here that is interesting but I cant quite see it… What if I try… What if this is what is going on rather than …

I seem to have a new group of data here. It doesn’t seem to be in the literature and doesn’t yet have a name. What if…  

How might this be connected with this other thing that also is important. What if? 

Writing the text

I have presented my results in the following way. But what if instead…  ? How about … ?  Maybe I could try…?

You get the idea I’m sure. Of course, we aren’t all Jocelyn Bell Burnell and we may not discover pulsars during our PhDs. Or our subsequent research projects. But asking What if, as she did, can certainly pay off for us too. 

Asking What if questions means that you give yourself both permission and time to re-think, to look for other options, to generate ideas, to play and experiment. You can admit what might seem bizarre, eccentric or even im-possible.

And if in the end you decide to stick with what you are doing, you have opened up the possibility that your first formulation is not the only way. You offer yourself choices and you consider what those choices might need and mean and where they might lead. 

My own take on possibility thinking is that it’s a vital part of the research process. Possibility thinking, entertaining the hitherto un-thinkinkable – no matter how small – is key to making our research a contribution.  What if…

Photo by Josh Mills on Unsplash

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research as – is – creative practice

Posted on April 1, 2024 by pat thomson

It’s easy to get the idea that research is all about developing a plan, and then doing what you plan. A bit like this.

Develop. At the start, you read a lot to help you work out your question or hypothesis. Then you decide how you will get an answer – what methods you will use and how you will analyse the material you generate. Once you have done the analysis, you then provide a bit of an explanation, referring back to the literature to show what’s been added.

Follow. If you follow the steps you’ve laid out, you’re all done. Bingo. No worries.

That sounds pretty easy. Almost mechanical. Not much to worry about at all. Stick to the plan and all will be well.

Except where the plan doesn’t go according to plan and the researcher needs to do something else. Except where an unexpected twist half way through suggests another route might not only be possible but also necessary.. Except in some forms of data generation and analysis when it is obvious that interpretation is involved. Except in some forms of analysis where researcher choice and decision-making are involved. Except in the writing when it’s clear that there isn’t really a clear cut “answer” or a simple way to present an answer.

So here’s the rub. Research is messy. We do all know that, but many of us are still acquiescent in presenting our research plans as if they are immutable. That’s not illogical BTW, after all which funder is going to take a punt on a plan which recognises and builds in the potential for mess? But many of us are surprised when the mess appears, when we have to make some unanticipated and not necessarily easy decisions. 

I hasten to add that changing research plans to deal with mess is not about abandoning thorough, trustworthy and defensible research. Working your way through mess requires hard thinking and careful attention to all of the possible consequences of deviations from the original. ( Howard Becker wrote about this a long time ago in his book Tricks of the Trade.) So recognising that there is a mess means understanding that plans may change.

But if you don’t think about research as technical and about following the plan no matter what, how do you think of it?

I reckon it’s useful to think of research as a creative process. Of course it’s technical too. Research is about plans and technical matters but is much more. (I am not talking about the use of creative methods here, although they are equally included within my umbrella notion of research as creative practice. )

You can find some very useful stuff in the scholarship around creative practices. For a start, definitions of creativity clearly cover research – see this by the Durham Commission in England – 

Creativity: The capacity to imagine, conceive, express, or make something that was not there before. 

And what is research if it is not about producing something that wasn’t there before – a contribution to knowledge. Your contribution might be a replication or something additional or a challenge or a new interpretation or a new location etc. But the end result, your contribution, wasn’t there before you did your research. 

And look at how the Durham Commission talks about creative thinking – or what I call the hard thinking we do during research. 

Creative thinking: A process through which knowledge, intuition and skills are applied to imagine, express or make something novel or individual in its contexts. 

And that’s what we do when we do research. We bring knowledges and know-how together to conceive of and realise our research. And deal with mess. Sometimes we do have to follow our hunches, wisely and carefully. 

The upshot of understanding research as creative practice, and drawing on the scholarship on  creative practice, is that we also recognise that there isn’t a single way to be creative, to “do creative”. How creativity is exercised in Engineering for example looks different from how it appears in English, or Medicine. But this is not to say that there are not, at a deep level, some similarities across disciplines. Nor that the processes used by engineers (design thinking and design research) could not be of interest to, and help in, other areas. 

So in the interests of sharing some of the creative practice scholarship useful to researchers, I’m going to post next about one of the cornerstones of almost all creative practices, that of “possibility thinking”.

Photo by Dstudio Bcn on Unsplash

Posted in academic writing, creative practice, creativity, research, research as process, research bid writing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

On MAL-attribution

Posted on March 25, 2024 by pat thomson

I was recently reviewing a paper and saw my own work cited. Very nice, you might think. However, I was cited for saying a thing that I didn’t say – a thing that I would never ever say. It was a thing that I have railed against in almost everything I’ve written on the topic.

Now I know that meanings are not fixed. People interpret. And that’s generally good and we writers like to make people think their own thoughts. But we also like our readers to get what we are saying and not be 100% inaccurate.

100% wrong, attributing the opposite of what is actually said is, in my books, mal- attribution not mis – attribution. It’s a bit more than mis. Even if it’s unintended, a mal-attribution has ongoing negative effects, as the text is read by others and taken and used as fact.

It’s par for the course I know. But hey ho, on this occasion I decided to have a little moan to my facebook friends. I knew they would be sympathetic and I was pretty sure most of them had had exactly the same experience. And sure enough they had. But two of them had something more to say.

The first facebook friend had a little story. I won’t reveal their identity, just know I’m repeating their story with permission. My friend said,

“ I was once challenged in a PhD viva when I told the candidate that I hadn’t written anything on a certain topic which they had claimed I had. They told me that I didn’t know what I was talking about. It’s some years ago but I am still sort of reeling from it.”

Gobsmacking eh for someone to tell their examiner that they knew better about what they had done. In a viva!

Of course there’s two ways to read this story. The first is that the candidate was really stupid or arrogant. The second, kinder explanation is that the candidate was in defensive defence mode and just blurted out the first thing that came to mind to justify their literatures work. If that was the case, I imagine they spent most the next night replaying the scene over and over and thinking of all of the several thousand alternative things they might have said. 

The second facebook friend referred me to a 2010 paper I had forgotten about, Varieties of Ignorance by Andrew Abbott (here, paywalled). Abbott was interested in how to understand and explain ignorance in scholarly work. So he decided to examine how one of his own books had been used and cited. He looked at both Wikipedia and the scholarly literature. 

Well, no prizes for guessing that the Wikipedia entry writer had entirely missed the mark, according to Abbott. The writer had used the old and largely debunked approach that Abbott not only critiqued but also reframed. This is a much bigger example of the kind of citation, what I am calling mal-attribution, that had irritated me. 

But when he got to the scholarly literatures, Abbott found that things were only marginally better. He found 105 articles which had cited his book in the year 2008.  Of these, he judged that 

  • Only 27 actually needed to cite the book because they were building on it in some way. Of these a mere 13 used his work centrally in their arguments. The other 14 cited correctly, but the material was more peripheral to their argument. 
  • About another 20 got Abbott’s argument about right, but could have referenced anybody not him as the point cited was made by many people. 
  • Another 15 cited his work but trivially. 
  • 42 cited Abbott in a list of vastly varied texts and did not differentiate between any of them
  • And 12 papers cited Abbott for something he didn’t say. Abbott concludes that these latter attributions were the result of either careless reading, using someone else’s summaries or just plain old guesswork. 

Abbott weaves this data into an elegant explanation of ignorance which, at its heart, suggests that misattribution and malattribution are rather more commonplace in scholarly work than we might think. 

And really, that’s not acceptable.

Getting your reading of other people’s work wrong is in part about the speed with which many of us have to write – we get careless about reading everything thoroughly and we don’t make time to double check that all of our citations are actually correct. And it may also be a side effect of the unwritten expectation that writers on given topics have to cite particular key books and people. Regardless of relevance to their particular argument.

A further possibility is that some writers weren’t careful enough about noting and summarising and there’s been slippage of some kind  – those who take one position are lumped together with those who critique it. ( I suspect this may have happened in my particular case). And Abbott may well be right in pinpointing careless reading, poor use of summaries  and lack of double checking. 

If any or all of these reasons are true, I do wonder what can be done about  the apparent prevalence of mal and misattribution – yes I know that one paper and a facebook conversation isn’t really enough to make a case. So alright, more research. And certainly more time on referencing and the ethics of citation in methods and writing courses. 

I guess I’d like to think that if everyone could imagine that the writers they cite and use are reading what they have written there might be a bit of a change – although that won’t necessarily change the behaviour of an exceptional and very nervous viva participant.

But I’d also like to think that at some point soon we could all slow down a bit, read and note slowly, read the originals and not rely on summaries …

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a brief word on academic mobility

Posted on March 19, 2024 by pat thomson

My apologies dear Reader. This post is later than expected. I am drowning under boxes of stuff, all part of moving countries – again. 

i shouldn’t moan. Academic mobility is a privilege. You get to see another institution, another country, another culture. You see how the agenda you have been working on stays the same but also changes in a new location. You see new problems. There are different funding and publishing opportunities. You  meet new people and make new connections. These in turn open up new collaborations. This is all exciting and generally rewarding and makes the crap parts of the moving experience worthwhile.  

Academic mobility is also a challenge, particularly when it involves moving countries. Visas are just one of the very many problems you have to deal with. Moving countries means re-establishing every part of your life – from mobile phones, bank accounts and  credit cards and drivers’ licences to getting access to the health system, taxation system and whatever voting privileges you are able to have. Moving institutions also means a whole gamut of New Things, from how to access technical support and the library, to how to get your salary paid. And I’ve learnt – from leaving home, working somewhere else and then coming back – is that some institutions are better than others at supporting you in your move, but most of the national systems are hard to manage, if not in the same ways. 

Now of course I am writing as someone in a very privileged position. I have all of my paperwork and possessions. And I have an income. I  know people where I’ve left and where I’ve arrived.

I can barely imagine how it must be to move or consider moving under duress, in a situation where you are struggling to stay alive, let alone continue academic work. So in light of my current moving experience, I’ve made some personal decisions about what I need to do.

But one way that some of you may be able to do something, either as an individual or through your institution, is to connect with CARA – the Council for At-Risk Academics. CARA operates throughout Europe and beyond. It supports academics in highly dangerous situations to move and/or to take up a fellowship in another location. You can donate or volunteer your services or organise an event or host a fellow in your university. 

Here is the latest news from CARA.

We have received a number of enquiries from university partner colleagues, asking what we are doing, or hope to do, to help academics in Gaza.

As always, our focus is on the individual academics who need and deserve help, not on the politics. We have for some years been supporting Palestinian Fellows; and we have been following the recent tragic events in and around Gaza with deep concern. As we reported recently, one of our ‘alumni’ has already been killed there. Another is still in Gaza; we have a further placement lined up for him in the UK but almost nobody is able to leave at the moment, so he is having to stay, in very dangerous circumstances.

Some other academics in Gaza have also contacted us in recent weeks, seeking our help to get away. We are keeping in touch with them as best we can, given the very poor internet connectivity there now. Again, they cannot leave at the moment, and even keeping in touch with us can expose them to danger. We understand that, for some people at least, just getting a signal means going out into the open, and on raised ground. We urge them not to take risks.

We very much hope that peace can be restored soon, of course, and we will be ready to help as soon as people can leave. We hope that our university partners will be able to support us in this, with further placement offers, and invite them to contact us if they can.

When it becomes possible to rebuild higher education in the area more generally, we hope to be able to help with this too, using the experience we have gained through our three regional programmes (e.g. our Syria Programme). But we are unable to plan anything specific as long as the present crisis continues.

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Key word – claim

Posted on March 11, 2024 by pat thomson

Claim is a difficult word. Dictionaries offer Meaning One –  claims are assertions that something is true, that something is a fact, but there is no proof or evidence. We just have to take the claim at face value and as being ‘right’, or not. 

Dictionaries also offer Meaning Two. A claim is a statement or action geared to get something to happen. Examples of Meaning Two are the claims made for reimbursement of expenses – pay me don’t ask questions- or the claims that someone might make in court for a particular judgement. Meaning Two claims generally do require some form of substantiation. Receipts. Evidence. This kind of claim is not only about truth, but allows for interpretation and evaluation. Is the evidence adequate?

So there are two meanings of claim on offer, one where the claim is not backed up by anything much, and the other version which usually is. And one which suggests that the claim asserts a right or a truth, and the other that refers to a process of interpretation.

Now in research, claims have quite a specific meaning. A claim has to backed by evidence and argument, and we researchers understand that a claim is always subject to interpretation. However, in some disciplines, a claim might also be a truth claim, well certainly of the this-is-the-best-version-of-truth-we-have-now-but-it-is-always-up-for-change variety. 

We researchers make claims about what our research means, what it might lead to, where it fits in the literatures and so on, on the basis of the analysed material generated by and through our research. These are our results, and because of these we can claim something – this works, this way of thinking needs changing, this policy is problematic, this approach to teaching is better, people need, kangaroos behave this way and not that… and so on. 

You’ve got where this is going right? The claims we make are usually the answers to our research question(s). We claim that we have this answer to the question/problem/puzzle we posed at the start of our research.  We deal with our thesis. We claim we now know something that we didn’t know before. We are less ignorant. 

But claiming doesn’t stop there. Once we have our claims sorted out, we have a basis for saying that we have made a contribution, and that things might happen as a result of our work. So the claim is an important little step between concluding what the results of the research might be and cause to happen. 

But wait there’s more. Research claims generally sits on a spectrum of “strong to weak’, depending on the evidence and depending how explicit the wording of the claims is. And of course,  strength and weakness are strongly tied to questions of validity/reliability and/or trustworthiness, depending on your research tradition. So claim also connects with bigger questions about research design, process and paradigm. (I get to keyword them later.)

We also claim significance for our research. We say that our research question-answer is important and we give reasons.  And our reasoning relies on our reading of literatures, and perhaps policy and practice. 

Oh, and before I forget, it is important that researchers don’t over or underclaim what they’ve done. The veracity of our claims are reliant on the evidence we’ve produced and how well we’ve argued what can be concluded from research of this type, scale, location and so on. Oh yes. It gets more complicated by the minute. Research claims are tangled up in other parts of the research process. But not so much that we can’t talk about them separately. 

Well. So far so good. That was pretty straightforward after all! 

Yeah/nah. 

There’s just a little bit more to say about claim. ‘Claiming’ comes from the act of staking a claim. Staking a claim in relation to knowledge simply means that as scholars, we are saying this is ours, we did this research, we want the credit and the citation thankyou very much. Oh. Cue all manner of subsequent worries about academic careers, who gets to claim and who doesn’t, and of course the nasty business of claiming other people’s work as your own. 

And a further concern. Staking a claim is not a  neutral metaphor. The derivation of staking a claim comes from those who drove a stake into the ground. Miners do exactly this, they stake a claim to a piece of ground that they are going to dig up. Gardeners use stakes to hold up plants. Vampire hunters also have use for stakes. But countries and empires have also and still do stake claims, not only to land, but also to entire peoples over whom they claim sovereignty. 

We can conclude from this that the term claim comes from an extended family with a very chequered geneaology.  And this is something to think about, as well as work on what we can claim from our research and how. 

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Posted in argument, claim, claims, evidence, interpretation, keywords | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

key words – contribution

Posted on March 4, 2024 by pat thomson

The dictionary definitions of contribution are:

  1. A gift or payment
  2. The part played by a person or thing in bringing about a result or helping something to advance and
  3. A piece of writing submitted for publication in a journal or book

When scholars talk about contribution it might be 3. A contribution might be a piece we have submitted to an edited collection, a text book, an anthology of cases or an encyclopaedia.

But the most usual scholarly formulation of contribution is as a “contribution to knowledge”. 

Contribution to knowledge is an apparently simple idea, but in reality it’s pretty slippery. So here’s few thoughts about how to make sense of it, just to start with. 

A contribution to knowledge is more like dictionary definition 2. Your research and/or writing helps to advance understandings about a topic.  People know a little or a lot more about a topic because they’ve engaged with your work, read what you’ve written. And you’ve been able to explain to readers that the work adds up to a contribution – it takes the field somewhere – through

  • a defensible and well-designed inquiry, investigation, exploration, interrogation, deconstruction, experimentation, testing out, bringing things together that were previously apart and so on
  • a thorough analysis which is explained and available for scrutiny 
  • the development of a credible and clearly ordered argument that explains the results, which leads to 
  • a conclusion about the specific place of the results within the existing research on the topic – and how it complements, contradicts, adds something new, challenges, questions, confirms, reframes etc what is already known. 
  • pointers for further development in policy or practice or further research. 

In English language/Western traditions of research your readers/examiners/reviewers expect you to spell the contribution out to them in detail. ( This is not always the case in other cultural traditions.)

Readers/examiners/reviewers always expect to see the particulars of where the research fits and sits in relation to published literatures. In some disciplines, there is also a strong expectation that you’ll make connections to policy and professional practice. 

And, justifying and explaining your contribution in relation to the field and extant literatures may well be an integral part of your viva or defense.

That’s not all to contribution of course. Most university guidelines still refer to contribution as ‘original’. Original doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been done before; in some disciplines re-doing what has been done before is very important. And original in the context of contribution doesn’t mean that the researcher has made a ground-breaking discovery – although that is very occasionally the case. Nor does original mean that the research is all your own work, although that is always a requirement and, perhaps in the light of AI, this meaning of original will come to matter much more . 

No, what is meant by original is very clearly definition 2. Your research has taken you somewhere new. At the end of your research you know much more about your topic than you did at the start. Even if some if it is what not to do or think. 

But the research also takes the field somewhere, it sets a line of thinking or does more to an established line of thinking, it offers well argued and evidenced results which others can build on.

And this is of course how contribution relates to significance. The field won’t move forward and/or no one will bother with the research if it isn’t of some value. A contribution generally isn’t just something that wasn’t there before (ie it fills a gap)  but something that, like a contribution to a conversation, supports thinking and talking in the field to go somewhere.   

In this sense, an original contribution is also definition 1. A gift. A gift to the scholarly community which colleagues can use to help build their own contribution.  A (re)payment for the work of others that you used to build your own. A down payment on the work of others you will use in the future. 

Making a contribution to knowledge is the essence of what scholarship is about. Taking a field and its thinking forward, even if only a little. 

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research key words – significance

Posted on February 26, 2024 by pat thomson

We all want to do research that matters. Right? Surely no one out there wants to spend a load of time and energy doing research that is of no value, that nobody will take any notice of and that won’t make an iota of difference to anyone anywhere? Why do that?

Of course, there is a road between the research results and having it taken up. So rather than making a difference, research has to have real potential to do something – stimulate other work, bring about a change in a field, explore something because it could be of vital concern, point out issues that require discussion, raise questions about policy, point the ways to changes in practice. And so on. 

But what about blue skies research I hear you ask? Well, people who do curiosity driven research which has no immediate application still choose topics which they think are worthwhile. Out of all of the things that they could do, they choose to investigate an area that they can justify in terms of its value. 

When we talk about research having potential and being worthwhile, we are talking about significance. We are talking about choosing some research because we think it is important. What’s more, we can make a sound case for why we think the topic and our research results are important.  

And in most kinds of research, importance is not simply about the fact that there is a gap, or a dispute, or several ways of thinking about something, or it’s a few years since anyone looked at it, or no one has used this approach. Generally, we decide something is important because of the possible actions that might arise from it. 

Doctoral researchers focus on significance at the start of their programme. They have to justify to someone, or several people, that their proposed research is important. Doctoral researchers also focus on significance as they are writing their thesis text, or papers that come from their research. They not only have to justify and explain their topic at the outset, they also have to say at the end why their results matter, to whom, how and when.

Establishing the relevance of a topic and final results is usually integral to talking about significance. It is an expected aspect of introductions and conclusions, particularly in Western and English language research approaches and genres. 

It’s not surprising then that examiners want to hear  (viva) and read a statement (thesis, paper) about the importance of the research in question – and they might ask for it to be added in into a text if it’s not there. 

It’s not just doctoral researchers who have to take significance seriously. Pretty well all researchers have to focus on significance. Attending to significance is crucial in funding applications, book proposals, conference presentations, keynotes and the like. 

The job of a researcher is to tell a reader or listener how we understand our topic, why we’ve chosen it and why it matters. We help our reader/listener to understand this too. We write a compelling and persuasive text. We make an authoritative and well evidenced pitch. We start our presentations and papers with a succinct and judiciously crafted rationale. We connect our topic and our results with wider conversations in the field.

So getting clear about significance is a significant aspect of the research process. Now, significance is of course related to claims and contribution. It’s hard to talk about significance without mentioning either of these. They’re coming up next.

Notę: The term significance is also used in statistical analyses, it’s showing that result numbers are more than could be possible through sheer chance: this is crucial for the claims made. Confusing eh.

Posted in conclusion, introduction, keywords, research, research as process, research bid writing, research decisions, significance | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

a thesis is not just a display

Posted on February 20, 2024 by pat thomson

It’s tempting to think that the PhD thesis is the place you get to display every single thing you’ve read. To peacock-like spread out a significant dazzle of texts. Look how much I’ve done. See how well I can summarise it all. Just imagine how good my notes are and how impressive my (Endnote, Zotero etc) must be.

But that would be a mistake. 

Doctoral research is all about knowledge transformation. The PhDer does not read in order to regurgitate, but rather, to do something with their reading.  To understand what this means, it might help to consider the difference between knowledge transformation and knowledge display.

Knowledge display. Undergraduate and postgraduate coursework generally demands students show that they understand a field. The way to show coverage and comprehension is usually via an extended essay. In the essay the writer demonstrates that that they have a grip on both the depth and breadth of a topic. So when the essay is assessed, the marker first of all looks to see that the  student gets the key concepts, standard debates and important developments in understandings. Students can generally garner higher scores by having a point of view, and covering more than has been given to them in lectures, readings and reference lists.

Knowledge transformation, or knowledge mobilisation as it is sometimes called, assumes that the writer has all of that – a grip on the breadth and depth of a topic, a point of view, and has done a lot of independent reading. But they then go further. The PhDer has all of the material necessary to do display – but doesn’t.

The PhDer does have to know the field in great detail. That is necessary, but not sufficient. Instead of laying it all out on the page, they do something with their knowledge. They put it to work. This might be  devising a research problem, designing a study, making sense of analysed data or simply re-reading the field in a novel way. To put it differently – knowledge transformers do something other than simply repeat, no matter how elegantly or cleverly, what they have read. And the doctoral researcher-writer does not simply tell the reader about a topic by writing an essay. They write an argument, not an essay, justifying their particular transformation – what, why and how and how it matters. 

Now, understanding the difference between display and transformation helps you to think about the role of literatures in the thesis. It helps you to understand that there is no point in simply throwing in a few references to something important to show that you know it exists. If a reading actually doesn’t contribute to the larger work you are doing, don’t bother with it. Anything you reference has to help you to build your case and argument. 

Understanding the difference between display and transformation also helps you to understand why it is not acceptable in a thesis to simply summarise huge amounts of a body of literature or to write as if you were explaining the whole field to someone who knows nothing. Readers of doctoral theses want to know how you have put the existing body of knowledge to work in your current project.

And yes, putting texts to work means you have to evaluate and select from everything you’ve read, and argue on the basis of that selection. Of course it’s painful if you’ve steadfastly plodded through a really difficult bit of Continental philosophy and it turns out to be useless for this particular topic and you have to leave it out. But you know you have it now, and it will probably be helpful in the future as well as contributing to your general scholarly knowledge.

Do you get punished for display? Well maybe, maybe not.

The consequences of too much display may not be drastic. Readers can however get pretty bored with loads of essay like summary and/or frivolous bits of name-dropping and get impatient to find out how the material contributes to the study. Who knows where that impatience will go? Maybe nowhere…

But examiners may well ask for details about which literatures were actually important and used. And perhaps they will require some rewriting, so that display becomes less of a focus, and transformation takes centre stage. You can avoid that if you keep transformation at the forefront of your mind.

Posted in argument, essay, knowledge mobilisation, knowledge production, Literatures | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment