led by Professor Jo Ferrie
Doing a PhD is emotional. Doing research is also emotional. We don’t really talk about either. In fact, the university seems to be quite a sterile environment when it comes to acknowledging emotions. This really problematic when your research is emotionally challenging, either because the subject area is difficult, you have a personal link to the issues being explored. To be great researchers who can sustain a career doing difficult research, we have to devise strategies to acknowledge emotional content and use it. Drawing on similar events run in the past and published work, I will consider strategies to safe guard yourself as a key component of researching ethically. We will consider and discuss what a sustainable workload looks like? and just as important, how can we achieve this in institutions that seem to be determined to push us to burnout. We will consider the gaslighting inherent within the neoliberal approach to higher education (that is, the imposing of markets and targets onto learning) and negotiate routes to resistance. At the heart of this event will be a commitment to flourish as social researchers.