It is no secret that the university sector in the UK is experiencing a massive financial crisis. I guess this is why I’m getting new requests to work for universities for nothing. I wrote a post about this 11 years ago, after which the situation got a lot better for a while. I’m not suggesting my post caused that: there was a lot of chat about the issue on Twitter and Facebook, which were useful platforms in those days, and sympathetic academics helped to make the change. But now it’s happening again.

One recent request was from a Russell Group university which made a post-tax surplus of £35m in 2025. This was a lot lower than its 2024 surplus, and I do understand that businesses have to be careful with their money. But it is still THIRTY-FIVE MILLION POUNDS. My own most recent post-tax surplus is £14,545. So what makes it OK for that big and profitable business to ask me to contribute my expertise, which is based on 27 years of research experience and 15 years of scholarly experience, for free?

Of course it’s not actually a university asking me, it’s a person. I don’t blame individuals for trying to find good opportunities for their students, events, colleagues etc. But it is the university which would be paying me (or not, as the case may be). And people in universities need to remember that they represent an organisation which is often, despite its protestations, very wealthy.

If I am invited to work in a university, that means there is nobody on that university’s payroll who can do whatever it is I am being invited to do. The same, no doubt, applies to plumbers, roofers, landscapers, and so on. Do universities ask those professionals to work for nothing? Of course they don’t. So why is it somehow, apparently, once again OK to ask external knowledge professionals to work for nothing?

Fortunately there are still universities which are paying me to work for them. So far this year I have worked for Dublin City University, Nottingham Trent University, Bath Spa University, Ulster University (twice), and Queens University Belfast. I have had an enquiry about my availability for 2026-27 from Birmingham City University, where I have worked every year since 2016, and Brunel University invited me to work there but unfortunately that was on a date I couldn’t do.

Also, I get good feedback. Here are some examples from a creative academic writing workshop I ran at Ulster University in April (I have permission to share them):

Very useful for writers – but also just that the speaker was brilliant and inclusive.

This has been the most beneficial workshop / event I’ve been to since I started in September – it was as if Helen was able to climb inside my head and activate the ‘WRITE’ lever!

I’ve really struggled to get the creative & the academic writing as I couldn’t separate them – and yesterday really was a golden pathway that showed how I write IS good enough. I wrote more yesterday than I have from when I started my PhD in September.

Would appreciate taking points from Helen on how to make workshops more inclusive/accessible. She elegantly addresses them without disrupting the flow of the class nor does it feel like she has to do them out of training.

So it’s not just me saying my work has value.

I will and do work for nothing, but I reserve that for (a) user-led groups with no funding and (b) my own passion projects: the International Creative Research Methods Conference, the Journal of Creative Research Methods, and the Independent Research Ethics Committee.

It seems important to highlight this, not only for my own sake, but also for the sake of the increasing number of independent researchers and scholars. Expertise has value. This means we need to set sensible prices for our own expertise, and – where necessary – fight for our expertise to be valued equally by others.

I have written four previous posts on this topic, with different examples of creative theses and dissertations. Here are the first, second, third, and fourth of those posts.

Today I am showcasing: a thesis written in two different styles throughout; another which takes a multi-media approach; and a third which has been self-published as an open access comic. As a bonus, I will share a creative recording of a doctoral dissertation and its defence.

The thesis written in two different styles is by Anne Collis whose doctorate was in social policy and inclusion, with a focus on how to include people with learning disabilities in policy-making in Wales. Anne’s thesis is written in a reasonably conventional way, except that she also writes an ‘Alongsider Thesis’. This is a plain English version which is presented in the PDF of the thesis alongside the academic version. Close to the start of the Alongsider Thesis, Anne says:

“This thesis has two versions alongside each other.

• The right hand pages are written in Academic language.
• The left hand pages are written in Everyday language.

You can read just the Everyday pages to get an idea of what is in the thesis. You can start with the Everyday pages and then look across to get more details any time you want.

If you read Academic, you can read just the Academic pages. You can use the Everyday pages to make it quicker to read any parts of the thesis you aren’t so interested in. I hope some academics will get ideas by looking at the Everyday pages for ways they can try to share what they know.”

As Anne’s thesis is all about inclusivity, this creative approach makes perfect sense.

The multi-media thesis is by Elona Hoover whose doctorate was in Human Geography with a focus on urban ‘commoning projects’ in London and Paris. Elona is a musician; she plays the cello. Her thesis includes an experimentally written document, punctuated by five ‘samples’ and accompanied by a soundtrack. The written document uses a variety of fonts for different purposes: one for an ethnographic narrative, another for text taken directly from fieldnotes, a third for excerpts from documents, a fourth for quotes from interviews, and a fifth for notes for the reader, among others. The ‘samples’ are audio samples: sampling is a compositional technique that can be ironic, inclusive, and playful, among other things. And the soundtrack includes material from field recordings, Elona’s cello, people reading poems, and the sounds of turning on and off the microphone. In the PDF of the thesis, the soundtrack and samples are embedded audio files. There are invitations to the reader with each audio file, either to stop reading while listening or to listen while continuing to read. The author uses this multifaceted approach to reflect the complexity of communing with all its interpersonal, political, and conceptual interactions.

The thesis which was self-published as a comic is by Omar Bah, which is a pseudonym. The author is an African anthropologist who studied international development with a focus on expatriate aid workers who are known in some African languages as Mzungus. Omar’s PhD ‘tells stories of Mzungus and goals that were never reached’ and apparently no academic journal agreed to publish any part of it (Omar, if you’re reading this, please try the new Journal of Creative Research Methods). So Omar decided to self-publish his thesis – as an online comic, in two parts: first and second. It is a great read: insightful, uncomfortable, educational, funny, and worth the investment of time.

Vanessa Santos did a PhD in tourism with a focus on sustainability. She produced a video called ‘My Doctoral Viva’ which presents her doctoral dissertation through autoethnotheatre. In the associated text she describes her research as advocating “for context-sensitive, adaptive, experimental policymaking that balances economic growth with social sustainability, emphasizing a human-centered approach to tourism development”. The video is compelling to watch, and I’m delighted that Vanessa is coming to this year’s International Creative Research Methods Conference to present and discuss her work.

We know from social media that the immediate impact of the International Creative Research Methods Conference is always very positive. You can see some recent examples on the website (scroll down) with links to their sources for verification. But now that the conference is in its fourth year, we are beginning to see some of the longer-term impacts.

At our first conference, in 2023, academic Heather Bullen met artist Jean McEwan and they generated an idea for a collaborative zine-making project for women asylum seekers and refugees in Liverpool. They got funding from Research England via the University of Liverpool. Through local charity Asylum Link Merseyside (ALM), they gathered a group of women, focused on them as artists, and helped them to use their artwork to build resilience. ALM launched the zine on 27 June 2024 and it was reported in the Liverpool Echo.

Independent researchers Rowena Hay and Fran Harkness met at the second conference in 2024. That autumn they set up the Mighty Mini Research Collective, a peer support group for independent researchers which is going from strength to strength. They have an active group on LinkedIn with 200 members, and this year they are holding their first event, an unconference in Stockport, Manchester, on 16 June 2026. All independent researchers are welcome and tickets are available until 5 June.

Our third conference in 2025 was attended by Anita Barrand who is a Community Engagement Officer in the Centre for Ethnic Health Research at the University of Leicester. Although she is based in a university centre, Anita is not an academic herself, she is a creative professional and a researcher. She told me that the conference inspired ideas for her work on a study investigating ways to empower care home and home care staff through research. This study is part of the National Institutes for Health Research Applied Research Collaboration in the East Midlands. Anita’s study is called Living Labs for Care (LiLaC) and has tested creative research methods in two care homes. Fabric printmaking was used with international care home staff, and cultural food and recipes were used with staff at an Asian-led care home, to explain the stages of research. These creative methods helped to connect a diverse group of people with the research process.

The Binks Hub is a network of academics, community members, artists and policy-makers, based at the University of Edinburgh, who use creativity and the arts to co-create research for social change. In 2024 The Binks Hub was a sponsor of ICRMC, and several of their members attended the conference: Jimmy Turner (Binks Hub Research Fellow), artist and doctoral student Rhiannon Bull, comedian and writer Susan Morrison, and artist Jean McEwan (who we have already met earlier in this post). They ran a workshop to share some working drafts of a book they were creating: A Field Guide to Artist-Researcher Collaborations. That book was published open access in March 2026 and I cannot recommend it highly enough. There is also a booklet of activities you can download. Jimmy told me,

“The opportunity to workshop some work-in-progress material for our book at the 2024 International Creative Research Methods Conference was invaluable. We had just completed the workshops we had run with the artists who would become our co-authors, so for the conference workshop we drafted up some plans of chapters and creative activities to share with our participants. Sharing at a conference like this, which brings together experienced creative methods researchers, artists, and folk who were taking their first steps into creative methods research, meant we were able to identify any gaps and assess whether the approach we were developing would be helpful.”

Then of course there is the Journal of Creative Research Methods. Sadly this is not fully open access at present, as the publisher has not yet been able to secure funding for that, but some articles are open access and we hope that in time we will be able to find funding to make it all OA. The journal and the conference are closely linked. The existence and popularity of the conference helped Bristol University Press decide to take on the journal. Many of the articles in the first two issues were created by people who had been to the conference. The journal was launched at the conference in 2025 (there were cupcakes!) and is now receiving a steady stream of submissions. And the journal editors and board members scrutinise the conference programme for potential article creators. (I say ‘creators’ rather than ‘writers’ because we welcome conventional formats with creative elements, such as a research article including illustrative sketches or audio files, as well as creative formats, such as a research article produced as a video or written as a comic.)

I’m sure there is lots of other impact I don’t know about. If you have stories, please share! I didn’t see this coming – I didn’t think so far ahead – I just knew the creative research methods community needed a place to come together. So it is truly heartening for the organising team to see the conference having such a positive impact.

If you are a writer, or any other kind of arts practitioner, no doubt you will have had submissions rejected. Probably many, many submissions. Actors fail auditions; painters have submissions rejected by exhibitions; writers’ work is rejected by journal editors, reviewers, publishers, literary agents etc; and so on. We talk a lot about the pain of being rejected and how to deal with that. Some people compile a ‘shadow CV’ listing their rejections, others print out their rejections and stick them to a wall, and some take a more personal approach. I know one fiction writer who, every time she receives a rejection, buys herself a new piece of good quality underwear. She still doesn’t have a novel published but her knicker drawer is in great shape.

There is plenty of advice online for managing rejection, but I haven’t seen much about the difficulty of turning people’s hard work down. I have rejected journal articles, book proposals, research methods case studies, book chapter proposals, conference submissions, and probably other things as well. I try to do this with compassion and care, though on at least one occasion I cringe to remember (and no doubt more besides) I have not lived up to the high standards I aim for.

As so often with us humans, emotions can get in the way. These may include:

• Disappointment – an intriguing title or premise, and/or a known and respected author, can raise expectations which are not always met.
• Anxiety – for an anonymous author, what if my rejection of their work harms their mental health? For a known author, will my rejection of their work harm my relationship with them? Could they ruin my professional relationship in turn?
• Frustration – this can be generated by a good submission which either doesn’t follow the guidelines, or is not quite as good as a better submission on the same topic, and so has to be rejected. Or by a submission so bad you wonder what the author was thinking.
• Stress – when life feels as if demands are coming at you from all sides, it can be hard to muster the care and compassion needed to produce a kind rejection.

Another thing that can get in the way is time pressure. Care and compassion, for ourselves and for others, takes time. And we need to practice care and compassion for ourselves before we can practice it for others. We need time to process our emotions – our disappointment, anxiety, frustration and stress. Do you allow yourself that time? Or do you eat/drink/smoke/shop your feelings into submission and carry on chasing deadlines?

In today’s super-speedy world, it can be difficult to prioritise ourselves. But if we don’t prioritise ourselves, others are less likely to prioritise us, and we are less likely to prioritise others. This leads to a vicious circle of increasing emotional scarcity which is not healthy for anyone. My Australian colleague Narelle Lemon edits a solution-focused book series on Wellbeing and Self-care in Higher Education which contains a wealth of advice and support for anyone struggling with this, or just wanting to do it better.

So when you’re reviewing something that is going to need rejecting, deal with your own feelings first, because it does take a toll. Give yourself the time and space you need to process those feelings. Then think about how to frame the rejection in a careful, compassionate way. Are there any aspects of the work you can praise? Where improvements are needed, can you offer advice on how to make those improvements? Do you know of any useful references you could recommend? Can you add some encouragement for the future? The answer to one or more of these questions may be a straightforward ‘no’, and that is understandable; I’m certainly not suggesting you should invent praise, advice etc. But these are questions I ask myself when I’m reviewing, and where possible I aim to answer them in my review, even if it is a rejection.

I received a truly delightful rejection recently. I was seeking sponsorship for the International Creative Research Methods Conference, and I thought an organisation I have worked with several times might be interested, so I emailed my main contact. The response came from someone else who I didn’t know. They wrote:

Dear Helen,

Thank you so much for getting in touch. It’s impressive to see the breadth of your contributions to [organisation] over the years: your commitment and dedication to creative research methods is clearly deep-rooted and inspiring.

The International Creative Research Methods Conference sounds like a brilliant and much-needed space for methods enthusiasts! While we’re unfortunately not in a position to offer sponsorship at this time, we really do appreciate that you thought of [organisation] as a potential sponsor.

We wish you every success with next year’s event!

With best wishes, and the very best of luck,

[name]

There is a saying that goes “in a world where you can be anything, be kind” which I think makes a lot of sense. That rejection was so kindly written that it barely even stung. I think it’s exemplary, and from now on I’m going to try to inject more kindness into the rejections I need to make.

I have a new book out! At least, I’m co-editor… The book is Using Documents In Research: When, Where, Why And How. The lead editor is Dr Aimee Grant who is a joy to work with. And our contributors are an absolutely stellar bunch!

We are holding two online book launches on Thursday 19 March, at 10 am and 5 pm GMT. They are open to all and free to attend, and each will include presentations by three of our contributors.

The first event, at 10 am GMT on 19 March, will feature:

Helen Abnett, Research Fellow in public health and social policy at the University of Hertfordshire, who will present her research on using data from charity annual reports to consider questions of representation.

Max Perry, a post-doctoral sociologist at the University of Edinburgh, who will discuss what can be gained by reading medical records as documents of practice.

Abigail Winter, an independent researcher (yay!) who will introduce her work using public documents in arts-based research and knowledge translation.

You can register for that event here.

The second event, at 5 pm GMT on 19 March, will feature:

José Ragas, Assistant Professor of History at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile, who will showcase his work on using historical ethnographic techniques to research identity documents.

Kate Carruthers Thomas, transdisciplinary Associate Professor at Birmingham City University, who will tell us about creating an illustrated digital archive from diary and interview data.

Órla Meadhbh Murray, Assistant Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University, will talk about using institutional ethnographic techniques to conduct feminist research with audit documents from UK universities.

You can register for that event here.

And those are only half of the contributors to the book! We would have liked to include them all, but that wasn’t feasible. However, I can tell you about them here. The other lead contributors, in alphabetical order of first name, are:

Anna J. Davis, an expert on foreign policy, international identity and nuclear cooperation based in Washington, DC, who offers a gripping account of the challenges of obtaining documents on nuclear policy in Armenia, Belarus and Ukraine during times of political turbulence.

Ella Houston, Senior Lecturer in Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University, who studies representations of disability in advertisements.

George Jennings, Senior Lecturer in sport sociology at Cardiff Metropolitan University, who uses a variety of books to theorise Asian martial arts folklore.

Katarzyna Niziołek, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Białystok in Poland, who explains the research method of documentary theatre.

Rosemary Golding, Professor of Music at the Open University, who finds evidence of both music and silences in texts about Victorian asylums.

Victoria Pagan, Senior Lecturer in the Business School at Newcastle University, who uses government inquiry documents to research non-disclosure agreements, and outlines how she analyses her data abductively using a framework of epistemic injustice.

This brief summary shows how documents can be useful in research on a wide variety of topics across many disciplines. It also signals that researchers can use a vast number of theoretical and methodological options when working with documents. In ethical terms, we should all be using secondary data first, because there is so much of it now which is readily available. And documents form a big part of that.

So I hope to see you at one or other of the launches, which promise to be both informative and entertaining. Or, of course, you could just buy the book! (Word to the wise: if you sign up for the publisher’s e-newsletter, via the banner at the top of the webpage, you get a huge 25% discount on this and any other books of theirs that take your fancy.)

I am planning this new book with Dr Derek Ong, quant supremo at the University of Hertfordshire (OK that’s not his official job title but it is what he is). And I’m so, so happy about it. I feel as if my scholarly life has come full circle, because my first degree was in social psychology in the early 1980s when psychology was an entirely quantitative subject, at least at undergraduate level. I’m also super excited because I know there is a whole load of fascinating creative work being done by quant researchers, and I’m really looking forward to showcasing the best of it in this book. I know the book is needed, too, because the few people I’ve mentioned it to have been very positive, making comments like “Hurry up, I want to read it”!

Our call for chapter proposals is online here with a link to download the call as a PDF. Bristol University Press are interested in publishing our book, and the deadline for proposals is 15 May 2026. Please share the call far and wide, and/or with anyone you think might be interested. Thank you!

I get a request for an online chat several times a week, mostly from people I don’t know and have had no contact with before. The request might come via my website form, a private message on LinkedIn or BlueSky, straight into my inbox – I haven’t had one by carrier pigeon yet but the way things are going that will probably happen soon.

Some people want to talk about me working for them, but if we have had no prior contact that doesn’t usually work out well. I had a request recently from a university in Asia for a half-hour meeting to discuss how I could develop some research methods modules for them. I didn’t have time to spare even for a short meeting, so I asked them to email me the information – and I was glad I had, because it took me about three minutes to work out that I couldn’t help them and two minutes to write a polite email back explaining why. They wanted modules on very positivist-type research, mostly quantitative and including outmoded concepts like neutrality and objectivity, which is about as far from the work I do as it’s possible to get within the field of research methods.

Some people want to talk about collaborating with me. Mostly this means they want me to write with them on a topic of their choosing and help them get that published. When I explain how much writing and publishing work I’m already doing, they realise I don’t have enough spare time to work with them. At the time of writing I am waiting for manuscript review of a new edition of one of my books and scheduling work on a new edition of another one; co-editing two further books; co-editing one book series and editing another. My writing/publishing workload is usually like this.

From time to time, wanting to collaborate with me means someone wants to write a chapter for a book I’m editing or co-editing, or contribute to my conference, or propose a book for one of the series I edit or co-edit. Those discussions are welcome as part of my ongoing work.

Some people ask if I can give them voluntary work or an internship. This may be because I work through a limited company, which might give people the impression that I have a big office and lots of staff, or it may just be because of my profile. Either way I work on my own, in an office in my garden, and I don’t have the capacity to take on a volunteer or an intern, let alone any actual work to offer them.

Mostly people want to tell me about their own work with creative research methods. For sure that is something I’m interested in and enjoy hearing about when I meet someone in person. But – and this is so often the problem – I have to earn a living. Understandably, nobody offers to pay me for online chats and, to be honest, even if they did I probably wouldn’t be keen, because small jobs involve a disproportionate amount of admin. Sometimes people just send me links to their work and ask for my feedback, and this can be a lot – I have had requests to read a whole book, listen to a series of hour-long podcasts, watch a full-length film, and visit an extensive online exhibition, among others. These are clearly people who are passionate about their work, and want to share, which is lovely, but there are already more books I know I want to read than I can find time for in what remains of my life.

There are people who automatically get a ‘yes’ to the question ‘can I have a chat with you?’ These include people who have paid me for work in the past or are going to pay me for work I am currently doing, and people who have collaborated, or do collaborate, with me on research, writing, or other projects. There is another key difference between these people and my cold-callers. This is that people who work with me know how busy I am and approach me with respect and care, and I do the same for them. We might ask each other for favours, but they will be favours requiring only a small amount of time, such as casting an eye over a book proposal or giving advice on a funding bid or career move. In summer 2022, when I was thinking about setting up the International Creative Research Methods Conference, I sought advice from several key people in my networks, asking each one for ten minutes of their time, often tacked onto a meeting we were already having about something else.

I wish I could help all the people who ask for my help. That is one reason I spend a lot of unpaid time creating resources for the research community: this blog, my YouTube channel, setting up the conference, founding the Journal of Creative Research Methods, co-founding the Independent Research Ethics Committee, writing and editing books and book series (for which I do get small amounts of royalties, but nowhere near an actual income).

A few years ago I wrote a post on here about how to get the best out of a busy person. That led to follow-on posts on three Whisperer blogs: Thesis Whisperer, Research Whisperer, and Wellbeing Whisperer; all are worth reading. They all emphasise the need for respect and care during the asking process. So, essentially, if you contact me out of the blue and ask me to read, listen to, watch, or help with your work, that is all about you and shows no respect or care for me.

The moral of this story is: if you want a chat with someone who doesn’t know you, consider how you can show respect and care for that person.

Once again this conference was a great success. The keynote presentations are on YouTube: one from Jacqueline Priego Hernández, plus the launch of the Journal of Creative Research Methods, and one from Amanda Beswick-Taylor. Around 140 people came and shared hugs and ideas across sectors and disciplines, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. People described it as a well organised and structured, smoothly run, and professionally managed event. They praised the supportive, safe, positive space fostering connection and creativity. Delegates found it to be a friendly, inclusive, collegial, and intellectually stimulating environment. Terms frequently used in the feedback included “outstanding,” “fantastic,” “excellent,” “best-organised,” and “inspiring.”

Of course it wasn’t perfect; no conference ever could be. The most common complaint was about presenters over-running because we don’t use session chairs. We will change this next year. There were two main reasons for not using session chairs: first, we thought people would be able to manage their own time, and second, we don’t have the administrative capacity to organise session chairs. There were some helpful suggestions in the feedback, such as asking presenters to act as chairs for each other within sessions, or asking for a volunteer chair or timekeeper from the audience. We will discuss all of the suggestions and come up with a better plan for 2026.

Most people thought the ticket prices were fair for the quality of the conference and the venue. Some people asked for bursaries, which we would love to provide, but we are reliant on sponsorship for these. The National Centre for Research Methods kindly sponsored bursaries in 2023 and 2024, but they were not able to do this again in 2025 and we could only secure sponsorship for two bursaries this year. We are continuing to explore sponsorship opportunities for bursaries in 2026; we do have one potential sponsor, but haven’t had confirmation from them yet. (If you want to sponsor some bursaries, please get in touch!)

There were also a few calls for more transparency about where the money goes. Most of the money goes to pay for the venue. Every autumn I sign a contract with the venue for a five-figure sum, which I must pay the following year whether or not the conference goes ahead, whether or not we sell enough tickets to cover the cost. We also pay the people who manage the online conference for us, because none of us have the skills to do that ourselves. They are very skilled and experienced, and were complimented in this year’s feedback. Most of the organising team help with the conference as part of their salaried jobs, so we don’t have to pay them from the conference takings (which is just as well because we couldn’t function otherwise). All of this means the conference is in quite a precarious financial position.

In 2023 the conference only just covered its costs; in 2024 and 2025 it made a small surplus. For the last four years two of us have been working entirely unpaid: me, and Nik who does the tech support at the conference and last year spent a couple of weeks writing a bespoke online booking system which means we no longer have to pay to use someone else’s system. We intend to continue building the surplus to enable us to (a) pay ourselves a reasonable rate for the work we do and (b) create a financial cushion big enough to protect us from loss if we had a year where we sold few tickets or the conference had to be cancelled because of an unforeseen event such as another global pandemic. We may also need to pay a part-time conference administrator at some point in the future. And if we ever have enough money to offer bursaries ourselves, we certainly will.

One thing that came through strongly in the feedback was that one person’s compliment is another person’s complaint.

“Loved all the vegan options.”

“Too much of the food was vegan.”

“Wonderfully inclusive!”

“Babies are disruptive.”

“Great to have so much space for conversations.”

“Too much informal chat time, can we have more structured sessions please?”

And so on.

We are never going to get everything right for everyone, but we do aim to get as much right for as many people as possible. So we will continue to record, read, analyse, and consider all the feedback we receive, to try to make this conference better year on year.

The unsolicited feedback on social media was heartwarming. Two people who attended, Kate Hawkins and Shahreen Chowdhury from Pamoja Communications, even made a short animation reflecting on their experiences at the conference, which you can see here.

We have two terrific keynote speakers lined up for 2026, and the call for proposals is out now; deadline midnight GMT on 30 November. Also we have a new initiative this year: One Slide Five Minutes, which we hope will make up for our inability to have posters (there is nowhere to put them in the venue unless we hire an extra room, and that would push ticket prices up). Information about OSFM is available here.

Hope to see you in Manchester next September!

I have known Lucy Pickering for a long time. I first met her almost 30 years ago through a mutual friend, and I got to know her well some years later when we were doing our PhDs at the same time. We talked a lot about ethics and methods and writing, as doctoral students will, and discovered we could work well together in the same physical space; there are not many people I can do that with.

A few years after we graduated, Lucy was ethics lead for the Association of Social Anthropologists when I was ethics lead for the Social Research Association. Our conversations continued and during that period we published our first co-written journal article, about the ethics of presentation, which has now had over 150 citations.

Eight years later we published our second co-written journal article. We began thinking about, talking about, and working on this article in 2019, but we couldn’t quite find our way, then the pandemic intervened. We returned to our ideas in early 2024, the article came together quickly this time, and we submitted our first draft in June of that year. Over the next 14 months it went through three sets of very helpful revisions and a tortuous production process, and was finally published at the end of July 2025. The title is ‘How can we reform research ethics management to make it fit for purpose?’ and we are both astonished and delighted by the number of downloads: over 750 in the first six weeks.

While we were working on it, we were struck by how few accounts we could find of firsthand accounts of going through ethical review processes, and as we were finishing work on this article, we came up with the idea for an edited collection on people’s experiences with research ethics committees, institutional review boards and equivalent bodies. We talked to Bristol University Press about this and they were enthusiastic, so we have put out a call for chapter proposals. The deadline is midnight GMT on Sunday 30 November 2025, and we are excited to see what we get. Perhaps you would like to contribute a proposal, or you know someone who would, or you would be willing to share the call on social media – any of those would be a great help. Thank you.

Writing is difficult, whether it is academic or other writing. Writing is difficult for novices and difficult for experienced writers. If you find writing difficult, that is not because you’re stupid or you can’t do it, it is because writing IS difficult.

Though, to be fair, writing is not always difficult. Writing stutters and stops, starts again, goes round in circles, frustrates and annoys, then one day it starts to flow. Maybe for a sentence or two, a paragraph or two, a page or two; maybe for hours, even days, you are in the zone and writing pours out of you. It feels GREAT.

Then the flow stops. This can feel really horrible, like being forced to leave in the middle of a party you were really enjoying, or a power cut just as you were about to make a level-up move in a video game. People have used all sorts of metaphors to describe the feeling of loss, from “my muse has left me” to “I have writer’s block”.

But – and I cannot stress this enough – This. Is. Just. How. Writing. Works. A piece of writing is like a fish in a river. It hatches upstream, close to the river’s source, and wants to swim downstream to the sea. There are shallow rocky parts where the little fish has to negotiate lots of obstacles in its path. There are shallow smooth parts where the little fish can swim though the water never reaches any depth. There are meanders where the water goes a long way round before it gets back on track, which is tiring for the fish. There are weirs where the river can reach a considerable depth behind the weir but only a little of the water can flow over at a time; this means the growing fish can spend time feeding in the deep areas before heading over the weir and back into the flow. There are dams which create great lakes that don’t look like rivers at all and through which the growing fish has to swim a long distance and then find its way through or over the dam and, again, back into the flow. And then there are estuaries, where the fresh water of writing meets the salt water ocean of publications.

The shallow rocky parts of the river are like the start of writing a new piece of work: it’s rocky and full of obstacles. The shallow smooth parts are like initial short patches of flow: quicker but without much depth. The meanders are what happen when we’re writing our way into a piece. The weirs are the places where some flow has been happening and then the fish gets stuck for a while, and the dams are the places where more flow has been happening and then the fish gets stuck again, perhaps for a longer time. Some fish see other fish swimming past them. But determined fish know that being stuck is temporary, that if they keep trying to find a way they will eventually get back into the flow and closer to the ocean they crave.

The estuary is also a difficult place to be. The tides of rejection and acceptance, of useful and unhelpful peer reviews, of tortuous production processes, of favourable and critical reactions, come in and out, in and out. Even though the fish is quite big now, water flowing in different directions is a new experience, and the fish can feel buffeted by the changing tides. Some fish don’t make it through the estuary, many don’t make it through unscathed, but most of those who do make it through learn useful lessons from the experience about how to survive in the great ocean of publication.

The mass movement of ideas from human brains to publications is similar to the movement of fish born in rivers far inland who migrate down those rivers to the sea. When ideas are moving towards the sea, they are all going in the same direction so they don’t have much chance to notice each other. When they are in the open sea they can swim in all directions and so find other ideas with which to make new ideas.

I suspect I may have extended this metaphor as far as it can reasonably go, and that introducing, say, sharks, or chips/fries, would not be helpful. But I do think it’s a metaphor that may be useful for some people. Writing is also – and this is not a metaphor – a job, and a job is something you have to do whether you feel like it or not.

I don’t believe in ‘writer’s block’. I think it’s an excuse which appeals because it shifts the problem from the writer to the ‘block’. I think it’s much more likely that a writer doesn’t, or feels they can’t, write because they are bored with the writing they are doing, or they fear failure (or success), or they are sabotaging themselves, or too much of a perfectionist, and so on. If you think of your writing as a migrating fish, that fish will keep on going regardless of what might get in its way, until it reaches the sea or dies in the attempt. Dying in the attempt does happen to some pieces of writing, for all sorts of reasons, such as poorly articulated ideas, broken collaborations, or simply a writer running out of steam. Some people conceptualise experiences like this as failures, but I think they are more useful when conceptualised as learning opportunities, because what we learn from our experiences of pieces of work dying, as well as from experiences of our work being published, can all help us to write better the next time.