The following references are mentioned in this 糖心传媒 Podcast discussion between Michael and Kate and may be helpful for listeners in developing their own work on these and related themes and issues.

Bristol Studies in Comparative and International Education : 

 (2008) ,  54( 3-4), p. 319 – 348.

Crossley, M. (2010) Context matters in educational research and international development: Learning from the small states experience. Prospects 40 (4): 421–429. 

Crossley, M. (2014) Global league tables, big data and the international transfer of research modalities. Comparative Education, 50 (1), pp. 15-26.

Crossley, M. (2019) Policy transfer, sustainable development and the contexts of education. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 49 (2), pp.175 – 191.

Crossley, M. (2025) in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Method in Comparative and International Education. Thomas, M. A., jules, T. D., Schweisfurth, M. & Shields, R. (eds.). London: , p. 91-106.

Crossley, M., L. Arthur, and E. McNess (Eds) (2016) Revisiting Insider-Outsider Research in Comparative and International Education. Oxford: Symposium Books.

Crossley, M., and G. Vulliamy (1997) Qualitative Educational Research in Developing Countries. London and New York: Garland Publishing.

Crossley, M., and K. Watson (2003) Comparative and International Research in Education: Globalisation, Context and Difference. Abingdon: Routledge Falmer.

McNess, E., L. Arthur, and M. Crossley (2015) ‘Ethnographic dazzle’ and the construction of the ‘Other’: revisiting dimensions of insider and outsider research for international and comparative education. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 45 (2): 295–316.

Professor Catherine Montgomery: Hello, and Welcome to the Compare Podcast Series!  I am Professor Catherine Montgomery. I am a Professor of Education in the School of Education at the University of Durham in the UK. I’m also the Deputy Executive Dean for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health. And one of the Editors of Compare.

This is the third podcast in the Compare and 糖心传媒 podcast series. And for our third episode, we’ll be talking to – Dr Salome Joy Awidi, Dr Lisnet Mwadzaangati, and Dr Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw – who are the Compare Fellows. Compare Fellowship is a mentorship programme run by journal Compare and 糖心传媒 to support early career academics from the Global South in disseminating their research and scholarship to a global audience. We will talk to Salome, Lisnet, and Jerusalem about their experience of Compare Fellowship. 

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Catherine Montgomery: Welcome to Compare Podcast – Salome, Lisnet, and Jerusalem. Its really great to have a chance to work with you as Compare Fellows and talk to you for this podcast . I just wondered if you could just briefly introduce yourselves if each person could say just something briefly about their context and where they are. So let’s start with Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw: Thank you very much for this chance. I am Jerusalem Yibeltal, and I work at one of the Ethiopian universities, Bahir Dar University. I am an Associate Professor of International and Comparative Education. My research interests include graduate employment, education and employment, higher education and linkages with employability skills, and gender, education and development. 

Catherine Montgomery: Fantastic! Thank you, Jerusalem. Thanks very much, and perhaps Lisnet now. Would you like to tell us very briefly about yourself?

Lisnet Mwadzaangati: Thank you very much, Catherine. I am Lisnet Mwadzaangati. I am an Associate Professor in Mathematics Education at the University of Malawi. Thank you.

Catherine Montgomery: Great, thank you! And Salome?

Salome Joy Awidi: Yes, thank you, Catherine and my colleagues. My name is Salome Awidi. I am based in Uganda. And I have been working in refugee education in Uganda for the last many years, and I’m affiliated with Gulu University. However, I also work with Finn Church Aid, a refugee agency in Uganda. Thank you!

Catherine Montgomery: That’s brilliant! It’s amazing to have three different countries represented this morning. It’s really exciting to have you on the call. So, in today’s conversation, we would love to get to know you and your experiences with the Compare Fellowship. Could you start by sharing how you first heard about the Compare Fellowship and what motivated you to apply, and if you encountered any challenges or surprises along the way? Let’s maybe start with Jerusalem again.

Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw: OK, thank you for this question. The complete Fellowship experience and the mentorship programme were really incredible. I have made submissions to different international journals. I was writing lots of manuscripts with friends and by myself. We also tried our best to publish in different peer-reviewed international journals. We tried our best. I mean, I would say that for the last decade, we have had lots of rejections from those international journals. Of course, some are published. So, what would be the problem? I mean, how can we really improve ourselves to get published in different journals? That was always in our minds, me and my colleagues. So, one of our colleagues – he was a Lecturer here in Bahir Dar University. He is now working at Cambridge University of Cambridge, where he shared different kinds of scholarships just to try. He encourages us to compete for that Compare Fellowship. We are really grateful, and we appreciate his effort, and we tried it out. The first time, I couldn’t get the chance. But for the next time, I tried my best and improved myself, with different kinds of capacity building. And then, I got the chance to be a Compare Fellow. Professor Ricardo is my mentor. Professor Ricardo has the same research interest as me in economics. Yeah, I am very much interested in working with different econometrics methodologies and econometrics tools, and a more specific idea was to work with youth employment and labour market engagements. So, I just focused on gender and how gender is treated in labour markets as my engagements throughout the Fellowship. So, I had engagements with Professor Ricardo for almost a week or two weeks. I really benefited from this mentorship, and, most importantly, when I also came to Cambridge, I saw lots of things I could observe – how a world-class University operates. So the journey is really incredible, I would say.

Catherine Montgomery: That was really interesting, Jerusalem; thank you so much. You’ve answered a couple of the questions there, so that’s really helpful. Let’s move on to Salome. Can you talk to us now?

Salome Joy Awidi: Yes, of course. I was the Compare Fellow for 2022 -2023. At the time, Catherine, I was engaged in a research project here in Uganda at Gulu University and the University of Nottingham – a project called DRIVE. DRIVE is Disabled Refugees’ Included and Visible in Education. So, it was basically a project that looked at educational inclusion and the exclusion of refugee children in Uganda. So, that was kind of my link to the mentor that I eventually got to work with. Through that research project, I also benefited from a British Academy scholarship programme – 2 two-week workshops for young authors, where we had an online engagement with our mentors to learn how to write academic journals and manuscripts. So, two weeks became a very short period to learn and all that I needed to learn, so it was at that point that my mentor introduced and shared with me the call for Compare Fellowship. And I did apply, and I think I put him as one of my referees. And my submission was accepted, and that’s how I got myself to Compare Fellowship. Challenges you asked maybe -at the time, I was excited about the possibility of learning to be an Academy greater myself but also to support other young authors in developing their writing skills. At the time, I was the president of Professional Association of Educators in Uganda, and we were struggling with the lack of data; people lack the skills to write for journals, so I was excited about it. And I must say I thought it was a wonderful opportunity. Thank you. 

Catherine Montgomery: Fantastic! That’s great, Salome. Very interesting! It was really interesting to hear about your project. Lisnet, would you be able to talk to us?

Lisnet Mwadzaangati: Thank you very much. So, I will start with where how I heard about the Fellowship – it was on our mailing list. I just saw that someone just posted that there was this opportunity for the Fellowship. At that time, I was a young researcher who had just finished my PhD. Then, I was looking for a Fellowship to help me improve my academic writing skills and other experiences. So, of course, I saw that it was going to be mainly online, and also I would be doing it while I was waiting. There was also an opportunity for a conference on academic writing. Those are the things that I was looking for. When I saw it, I was motivated to apply. When I applied, I got accepted, and I was allocated a mentor. I was in touch with Yusuf Sayed from the University of Sussex. It was during the pandemic, so this was one of the things that kept me busy. At that time, the university was closed, and we were not teaching. So, I said – let me do this to keep me busy. When I talked with Professor Sayed about my research interests, he was positive about them. But it is something that maybe he was it was not of interest to me because I’m a mathematics education lecturer, and do qualitative research – so the aim is improving our teaching and maybe also improving the quality of our training and in-service features. So, if I have to mention anything as a challenge – that I would mention as a challenge – that our disciplines were quite different. So I needed to do a lot of explaining – which was not a problem – also, our approaches to research were different. He was more quantitative; I am more qualitative. I think the methodology samples – very small sample data and doing in-depth analysis. But still, l could argue and then agree. And I could write something to him. It was a very good learning process, through which I improved my writing. So, what I was doing – like I said, we were under lockdown at some point – and then I could get the views from him, not only that I was writing under his mentorship and other papers that I was writing. So, by the end of that period, I managed to publish, I think, two papers before the Compare paper was published.

Catherine Montgomery: that’s great! All three were really interesting experiences. I think all of you have highlighted the importance of the mentor there and your relationship with your mentor. Lisnet, even though you didn’t have the same kind of match for research interests, it was not perfect. I think that it was probably still a positive relationship, as you’ve just said. So it’s really good to hear about how that mentor relationship is really key to the Fellowship, and all of your experiences. They’re really interesting. You’ve all mentioned publications there; we all know that the publication landscape in higher education and the global landscape is very unfair. It is very, very difficult for early career scholars to break into. I wondered if you have publication plans from now and perhaps could say a little bit about that. Jerusalem, do you have any plans for publications?

Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw: Oh yes, as I told you, some of the manuscripts articles these days I am extracting from my dissertation – data from my dissertation as like baseline assessment, as it informed me to see some future engagements of women in the labour market. So I collected data from the online secondary data secondary sources of data. So, I saw data from the ILO – International Labour Organisation – and the Ministry of Education. You know, in Ethiopia, most of the time, what was the problem when I was writing my dissertation? We didn’t have data, well-organised data online. You could not find employment data or graduates’ enrolment data. Even ILO didn’t do something with the data – doing something about the issues related to the workers and the issue of the labour market. But it didn’t give us data online, in an organised manner. So when I was doing my PhD, what was the problem was finding data and finding those graduates – I mean, how could I find the graduates from different scattered places? So, I took data from these two universities – the 1st generation universities – and a bit of data from the archives. At Bahir Dar University, it was well-organised data, which surprised me, but at different universities in my nation, I couldn’t find that kind of well-organised data, so I chose these two universities for comparative purposes. Finding data was very challenging, and it is still challenging to get organised data. So, these days, what surprised me was that I saw data from the ILO employment – the time series data of the people in the labour market. I got that, and I put that in EViews – most of the time, I used that for an econometric analysis list to predict the future labour market opportunities of women in Ethiopia. So, I tried to draft my manuscript on how these graduates have future labour market engagement. I did this analysis when I saw their engagement. It still remains constant – the disparities between men and women – it continues to be constant. I mean, the disparities for the coming seven years – I started using the ARIMA model – the autoregressive integrated moving average – so I used the model, so when I saw disparities in their engagement or opportunities of women – it seemed similar – I mean, the disparity will continue. I drafted that paper for the upcoming publication. I also submitted another manuscript, which we were working on with Ricardo – where I really learned a lot of things, I mean in terms of statistics, in terms of methodology, and in terms of analysis, citations – all those kinds of things. And I’m really glad that I got lots of articles from Compare – that was free access for me as a Compare Fellow – that was a great opportunity. I got lots of articles; I read some of them and highlighted some of them to support my study.

Catherine Montgomery: that’s really interesting! You highlight a really interesting point there about access to data, publications, and journals that might be kind of behind the paywalls. So, thank you very much for that. And I just wondered about the others – maybe Salome. Would you like to come in and tell us a bit about – what your publication plans are?

Salome Joy Awidi: Yes, of course! So we’ve been working on this… first of all, maybe to share that – coming out of the UKFIET conference last year – I was able to do a blog on the piece that I was working on. Yeah, so Elizabeth Walton – my mentor, and I have been working on this article – I know it has dragged, but it’s almost ready; I’m working on the referencing now. And we should be able to submit that soon. But maybe I should also note that although the Compare journal articles have been delayed from the time that we started the membership to now, I have, I think, put out three different publications relating to inclusive education and livelihood for refugees. I think to summarise, I think my technical skills and experience in academic writing have really improved. I have gained quite a bit of confidence in the way that I write. And I must say- that the last three or four articles that I have written are less traumatic compared to those that I wrote at my PhD – out of my PhD thesis. So yes, I think I have a bit more experience. But, of course, I am still learning.

Catherine Montgomery: That’s fantastic, Salome! and I think you make an excellent point there about confidence and you know the relationship between experience and confidence – you know really helps in publication, doesn’t it? And in your research and moving forward. How about you, Lisnet? 

Lisnet Mwadzaangati: Yes, I do. I think my Compare article was published in December 2023, and from that time or since that time I was after submitting the article and during the process of peer review, I was also still writing or still applying the skills that I learned through during this mentorship and Fellowship – to other paper that I was writing. Because as an academician – there is no way I can stop publishing… it’s a must. Like Salome, I also would like to echo the same to say that the experience is just a bit different. I know there is so much funding that has to be done when you have the data. But sometimes it was difficult to say then what should I focus on, and where do I should start from, how do I write? so it could take you months while I was thinking about – how I could maybe approach the data or how I could start writing something from the data and where I would start writing. so through this Fellowship – and maybe also because of how I was learning through my mentor – then kind of a bit different approach – I know we use different approaches, but they weren’t bad – I think what I learned from Professor Yusuf was very important because at first, I used to think – let me right to the introduction, let me the write the literature review, and then I would go maybe to write the findings and the discussions… But during the process – one of the things that I learned from Professor Yusuf was that – maybe you could start from the findings, read it through several times – to see what story you wanted to tell from the findings, then you can maybe when you have done that then you can be thinking of the other sections – that would maybe link with the other sections. Because my problem or my challenge – in most of the review feedback that I get from reviewers was maybe a lack of linking – maybe the introduction, the literature review and the findings – they were not speaking to each other – not telling maybe the same story. But then, when I started this approach of starting with the data itself – engaging with the data – seeing what you can argue from the data – what you can write and derive – this process is a bit shorter for me – maybe to come up with the paper. I am working very hard, and if I have time, then within maybe months, I can be able to produce something without much stress and maybe with confidence as well. To answer your question, yes, I’m still doing… I do have papers which I have already submitted to other journals, and I’m still continuing to do that. But like I said, that is my experience. Maybe you correct me, or maybe not, but I was still asking myself if I could submit another paper to Compare Journal. Would it be accepted? So I was asking myself that question because I saw when I read the papers – most of them, I think, and like I said – they are large volumes of data, and also size in terms of sample – so I try to look for general journals which are kind of I think it also may be balancing between similar size examples or maybe qualitative approaches and quantitative approaches, and the like. So, if I were to submit to Compare – I would ask myself a question – I know that’s what you are, not what you ask me. Because the limitation was that one…one of the things that I kept on arguing with my mentor – he wanted me to move out of that box and then start thinking about a larger volume of data, and also large samples, maybe. But it is not my interest because I’m interested in improving the quality they practise while teaching – by maybe observing the data instead, and maybe also me doing the teaching. Yeah, that’s it, Catherine.

Catherine Montgomery: That’s great, Lisnet! That’s really interesting! And what’s what it’s great to hear in what all of you said is how it’s not just that the article in Compare but going through that process obviously has a knock-on effect to other publications, and you know increases your confidence, increases your experience. And, now I feel a feel like all of you are talking about the importance of data, the importance of kind of ways of writing – so that is really fantastic to hear. And it kind of leads on to the sort of the final questions that we’ve got – which really just maybe quite briefly, if you just let us know how being a Compare Fellow has shaped your future aspirations for research or collaboration – either within your own country or within the academic community globally. Shall we start again with Jerusalem? Would you like to say something here?

Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw: When Compare Fellowship – it’s already known that how it increases your confidence – even to think, to write, and even to present something in different public gatherings outside – for instance, last time there was – I think that might be that the part of the Compare Fellowship, I don’t know or the British Academy – again they have the project here Bahar Dar University – it’s a collaboration between our university and East London University – their project was working in solidarity with Ethiopian research universities – and its about the issue of mentoring, mentorship. So, where I got the invitation to share my experience with the PhD students and early career researchers – where I had very good interaction with people and also continued to be selected as a mentor – you might have information about that, and that might be – I told that this is the impact of the Fellowship that the Compare – it gives me a great confidence to show my experience in a very creative and critical manner. 

Professor Catherine Montgomery: That’s wonderful, Jerusalem. It’s really good to know! And how about you, Salome?

Salome Joy Awidi: Yes, certainly! It did shape my career and my progress as a young researcher from the Global South. I did observe earlier – that I actually Compare Fellowship, I was able to attend the UKFIET conference from which I made quite a number of networks – I noticed that there were so many researchers that were working in refugee education in Uganda that in the country had not noticed. So definitely, my networks have grown, and since then, I have ventured into impact evaluation – there is a research institution in Nairobi – at my organisation, I became the coordinator for research projects, so I think in many ways it has shaped my career development, and I have a feeling it will continue to do so for a while.

Catherine Montgomery: That’s fantastic, thank you, Salome! And Lisnet – how about you? what do you feel the impact of the Fellowship has been?

Lisnet Mwadzaangati: I think I would be repeating this same in terms of – if we have to talk about the impact. For me, mainly the writing part – I did not attend attend the UKFIET conference – because by visa was not arriving when the conference was starting. So I presented my work to a group of people, during a seminar at the University of Cambridge. So, yeah, I got feedback and I got motivation to continue the research. Yeah, that’s what I would like to say as an impact for my future or my academic progress. Yeah, I think I could stop there. 

Catherine Montgomery: that’s great! thank you! And I remember that presentation at Cambridge; it was really good! and it was a good atmosphere there. So, that’s great! And finally, we’ve just got one more question to ask, which was – what advice or tips would you offer to future Compare Fellows or maybe people who are thinking about applying to the Fellowship – would you have any advice for them? Jerusalem. let’s begin with you, if that’s OK.

Jerusalem Yibeltal Yizengaw: So my advice to the future Compare Fellows – I mean they don’t ignore any kinds of details – I mean that was one because of the challenges that I faced when I was a mentee in Cambridge. They should record everything, quite deep quantitative data – especially the qualitative data – recording is everything – every detail is very important. When they are working with their mentor – they have to try different kinds of I mean methodologies and have to fit in different technological and the current engagements of the world – through different algorithms. That was also one of the problems when I was working with my mentor, and it was sometimes a problem for my mentor. When I was challenged with some technological or methodological issue, So, they had to use different opportunities that I got, … they had to use all these opportunities that they got from Compare Fellowship. From the process, they have to entertain all those challenges –treat challenges as a lesson and try for the future. So, it might be great if they get the chance to be Compare Fellows – of course, it demands lots of things – hard work that the mentorship expects of us – but that might give them the drive to research, and different kinds of networking opportunities,  

Catherine Montgomery: That’s great. thank you so much, Jerusalem, thanks! And Salome, do you have any advice, on top of what Jerusalem said?

Salome Joy Awidi: Yes, of course. I think the Fellowship offers such a great opportunity for networking. But also access to resources…working with my mentor gave me access to the whole library, which I have been able to use even for my other interests outside the Fellowship. So, I think it’s a very rich platform. It’s a huge opportunity – gatherings of like-minded people that should be taken advantage of… for the advancement of research interest and for access to relevant, up-to-date material. 

Catherine Montgomery: That’s great. Thank you, Solome! Lisnet, any advice?

Lisnet Mwadzaangati: Yeah, I think I would advise them to go ahead… it’s a rewarding experience. I remember I also motivated one of our colleagues to apply – I don’t know if he applied or not; he did not update me on the feedback anyway. But I am sure, maybe he applied. I told him about the benefits – that he would be given a mentor and then would be assisted. Yeah, of course, I know that – it is also a gamble because it also all depends on the mentor – the relationship between you and the mentor, and how the mentor is committed to doing that type of work. I’m saying this because maybe for me, maybe we took too long – maybe because I was waiting, maybe I could not submit my paper before I attended when I came to the UK. So, it took a long time, and we could spend more time without meeting in between. Sometimes, the feedback was not that supportive or motivating to keep you going. But maybe I know that maybe it’s taken almost two years, instead of one year – due to COVID and the likes – so maybe we spent a long time together and we got used to each other, and the progress maybe started to stagnate a little bit. So yeah, I would advise them to apply… I would motivate them. I always motivate them – I always submit/circulate when I see the advert, and I also tell them to be open-minded.

Catherine Montgomery: That’s great, Listnet! Thank you so much! And thank you to all of you for all of those fantastic insights into the Fellowship.

Subscribe to the Compare Podcast Series. Share its content with friends and colleagues. And feel free to use it as learning material in your teaching and professional context.

Yizengaw, J. Y. (2025). From university to the world of work: education and labour market experiences of women in STEM subjects in Ethiopia. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1–19.

Mwadzaangati, L. (2023). Malawian teachers’ agency in using teaching and learning resources: a product of quality teaching, learning resources and teacher education. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1–19.

Mwadzaangati, L., & Kazima, M. (2019). An Exploration of Teaching for Understanding the Problem for Geometric Proof Development: The Case of Two Secondary School Mathematics Teachers. African Journal of Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, 23(3), 298–308. Mwadzaangati, L., Adler, J., & Kazima, M. (2022). Mathematics Mediational Means and Learner Centredness: Insights from ‘traditional’ Malawian Secondary School Geometry Lessons. African Journal of Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, 26(1), 1–12.

Professor Catherine Montgomery: Hello, and Welcome to the Compare Podcast Series! The Compare Podcast Series brings you interviews with internationally recognised scholars in the field of international and comparative education. The podcast aims to disseminate in a non-academic language search insights published by the journal Compare for educators, students, policymakers, and the wider global education community. Compare is the journal of 糖心传媒 – the British Association of International and Comparative Education. 糖心传媒 promotes teaching research policy and development in all aspects of international comparative education and is a diverse professional association composed of academics, researchers, policy makers, and members of governmental and non-governmental organisations.

I am Professor Catherine Montgomery. I am a Professor of Education in the School of education at the University of Durham in the UK. I’m also the Deputy Executive Dean for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health. And most importantly, one of the Editors of Compare.

This is the second podcast in the Compare and 糖心传媒 podcasts.  And for our second episode, we’ll be talking to Professor Tejendra Pherali. Professor Tejendra Pherali is the Professor of Education, Conflict and Peace at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. His research focuses on educational issues in low and middle-income contexts and the politics of International Development, with a particular interest in education policies and practices in forced displacement and post-war settings, as well as its role in peacebuilding. He currently chairs 糖心传媒 and the Compare Editorial Board.

Professor Catherine Montgomery:  Welcome Professor Tejendra Pherali to today’s 糖心传媒 Compare podcast. Its really great to have a chance to talk to you, Tejendra. In today’s conversation, we would really like to get to know you and your research a little better. Can you share a little bit with us about your academic journey and how you got involved in educational research?

Professor Tejendra Pherali: Thank you, Catherine, for having me on the Compare 糖心传媒 podcast. It’s an honour to have been invited. My work primarily focuses on education in conflict-affected contexts. And I teach various courses relating to this field, and also carry out research internationally in conflict-affected contexts – this informs my teaching, so that I’m able to engage with postgraduate students with the research that I do, and that I’m committed to building a community of researchers and practitioners who have the critical and reflective knowledge about education in these challenging circumstances.

Professor Catherine Montgomery: That’s great, Tejendra! I just wondered how you originally got involved in that research and what what sparked your interest in that from the outset?

Professor Tejendra Pherali: I come from Nepal a country that was affected by Maoist insurgency and political instabilities for several decades. In 1996, violent conflict erupted in Nepal and I was working as a school teacher during that time. And I saw schools, teachers and children being caught in the violent conflict – and I always wondered why education was targeted for violent attacks. And I had also studied Sociology and Education –  these two disciplines brought my thinking together to try to understand the inter relationship between conflict and education. So initially, I wanted to examine the impact of violent conflict on education. But then later on, I developed my research around how problems in educational system, policies, curriculum and practises – were actually contributing to create those conditions for violent conflict. So, its really inspired through the experience in my own native context. And that’s how I actually started my academic journey – basically my PhD.

Professor Catherine Montgomery: That’s really interesting. Very interesting Tejendra. Its really interesting the way that our personal experience has this impact on our research now our own experiences. I mean your work has had a big impact on education in conflict and peace – could you tell us a little bit about some of the projects that you worked on so far?

Professor Tejendra Pherali: After I completed my PhD, I received a grant from DFID then –  now called FCDO –  to develop a collaborative research programme between universities in Cambodia, Nepal and the UK. And basically, this was to focus on – how teacher education programmes in universities can provide conflict-sensitive learning and professional development to be able to prepare teachers to work with children who live in conflict-affected settings. So, that was probably the first research grant I received when I was working in Liverpool John Moore University. It was a very interesting experience to see how little was realised in the education sector  – around the contentious role of education in fueling conflict drivers. We always know that education contributes to well-being, human capital ,and human flourishing –  that’s the foundational principle for promoting education. Plus societal advancement.  But very little was actually realised around the negative face of education, and I think this this project helped me to critically analyse the historical, political, economic, cultural dimensions of education in Nepal and in Cambodia –  that were actually promoting social divisions, inequality and discrimination through educational practices. So that was the beginning of actual research work that really sort of aligned with my own on PhD at the time.  After that, I’ve been involved in a number of other projects as you asked me Catherine. I worked on the role of Higher Education in promoting peace building in Somaliland, where we collaborated with the University of Hargeisa to design a research-based masters-level course on education, conflict and peacebuilding –  which was very grounded in the local realities, it involved local academics, politicians, youth activists and a whole range of other stakeholders in the local context – to generate ideas and curriculum content for that course which actually became a part of a  Masters programme in peace and conflict studies in the University of Hargeisa. I was actually recently invited to a fascinating conference at the Seoul National University in Korea, where colleagues from that University actually picked that work up and then have advanced that to develop a full masters programme on education, conflict and peace building in Somaliland. It was fascinating to re-engage with academics from Somaliland and from Korea to really celebrate some of the achievements that work has gained. And I can go on and on about the other things. But I’m happy to pick pick up on other projects that I’ve been involved in over the past more than a decade so we can pick them up later.

Professor Catherine Montgomery:  Fantastic,  Tejendra! And really fascinating! You’ve obviously worked in very challenging contexts, and challenging circumstances. What do you think are the biggest challenges you faced in these projects, and how have you overcome them?

Professor Tejendra Pherali: I think there are a number of challenges. But also there’s the excitement around the idea of being able to make a difference in those contexts – where this lack of access to quality education. Educational community has been hugely impacted because of ongoing violence and so forth. So that sense of achievement to work with colleagues who are living in those contexts, so the partnership and collaboration is certainly fulfilling. But as a researcher, when you travel to these conflict-affected contexts you hear a lot of distressing stories and experiences of educational communities. Many of them would have lost their family members. Their schools would have been destroyed by violent conflict. Children would have been affected by war. So it’s always in a way painful and you get often affected by these experiences as a researcher. It is very important to balance maintain your professional and academic integrity but also you manage to cope with the stressful and traumatic experiences of having seen those painful experiences. So yeah over the years, I think you build up this emotional connection with the with the colleagues who you work with in those contexts. So it no longer becomes your profession or a job – it becomes part of your life and part of your human responsibility.

Professor Catherine Montgomery:  I think amazing and so interesting to hear about that . I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of changes over the years that you find been working in these contexts change began work with them you know do you feel that things have improved or got worse and you know what do you think the trends might be you know in the future what do you think what do you think will will happen in the future?

Professor Tejendra Pherali: I think over the years, what I’ve really observed is you know a gradual shift in thinking in our field. I feel basically looks into this you know Education and Development in international contexts. And unfortunately, it sort of has the legacy of the colonial past as the field of Education and International Development. So over the past decade, I think there is a strong critique of the of the field as it develops. Development Studies and the work on Education in conflict-affected contexts is also situated within that debate. I think the conversations around decolonisation, ethics, the power relationships between the sentence is set these critical questions have come to the forefront. What I’ve really seen is this emergence of some of the personal questions around the failure of the modernisation theory –  the critique of this idea that the West has solutions to the challenges faced in the Global South or conflict-affected context. I think there’s a greater level of recognition around how donor countries, Western in some ways, has become complicit in reproducing the problems in these settings. So there’s a call and there’s a tresistance essentially from the bottom, from the grassroots around the architecture of development as well as the processes of knowledge production.

I was involved in a social movement learning project which was funded by ESRC where we collaborated with activists from 4 different countries: Nepal, Columbia, South Africa and Turkey – and the idea was to actually build solidarity and build companionship in learning from the activists who were fighting for justice, human rights, educational rights, and freedom. Those social movements in these countries will becoming spaces of knowledge production – where is the traditional academic sort of system that tends to extract knowledge and put it behind the paywalls, essentially. And that we’re involved in this research to try and sort of build that collaboration. And promoting the value of the processes of knowledge production within social movements and how the knowledge that is produced through the social movements could actually enhance the struggles of the people who produced that knowledge. That was quite a transformative experience for me as an academic. So in a nutshell, I think we’ve kind of begun to enter the era of academic work and practice network where there is a there’s a call for more horizontality in partnership and humbleness and respect for the grassroots knowledge. I think that’s what I think I’ve observed in the shifting over the years.

Professor Catherine Montgomery: That’s brilliant. Really fascinating and interesting to hear your perspectives on that you know it’s something that you know we do see reflect literature that’s emerging

You know you have these you have these big responsibilities. And to change the topic slightly, but just wondered how you first got involved with 糖心传媒? How have you seen the organisation evolved over time?

Professor Tejendra Pherali: Yes, I joined 糖心传媒 I think around 2009 – almost about 15 years ago – just as a member of the association. I was subsequently nominated to serve on the Executive Committee as an Ordinary Member. It was a wonderful opportunity to be part of this community, and which actually brought me to the network of scholars working in the field of comparative and international education. After serving for one term, as an ordinary member, I actually took up a position as the Vice Chair, and then subsequently as the Chair of 糖心传媒. 糖心传媒 a great association, we often call this a 糖心传媒 family –  that is not a huge association like some other societies. But also but it is quite inclusive in my view. But also constantly engaging with its membership, and constantly responding to the academic debates in our field. And also engaging in building solidarities with scholars and activists who advocate for right to education – not only in the UK but more internationally – ss you know Catherine, you yourself as a Co-Editor of the Compare Journal. Ss the Chair of 糖心传媒, I also sit on the Editorial Board as the Chair of the Board. And it’s an honour to be able to work with the Editorial Board of Compare, where we have, over the years, championed this collaborative, non-hierarchical and very inclusive ethos of working. As you know, the four Co-editors lead the journal work collaboratively in on xxx  manner. Also in 糖心传媒 Executive Committee, we’ve also promoted this very inclusive and horizontal leadership practice, where 糖心传媒 officers collaboratively make decisions about key issues that the society faces. And we organise conference and we have committed to keeping the conference registration fees low. As an association, that doesn’t intend to make money out of conference. So we redistribute all the sort of revenues that are generated from the conference. And also the revenue that is generated through the Compare to promote the scholarship of early career researchers but also scholars from the Global South. As you yourself (Catherine) lead this initiative called Compare Fellows – where we invite fellows from low-income context to collaborate with scholars in the UK, which actually provides amazing learning experience for scholars in the UK – which is something we need to constantly remind ourselves and be appreciated.

Professor Catherine Montgomery: Absolutely! that’s great and I just wondered you know with all those duties with 糖心传媒 with all the research that you’re doing, and you know fascinating research very engaging work. How do you manage to balance your role as as a Professor with your leadership duties at 糖心传媒. That’s a lot to take on.

Professor Tejendra Pherali: That’s an interesting question. As academics, I think we have multiple roles – as we do we have research projects to work on, we also are involved in teaching, many of us are also we engaged in scholarly activities, serving professional and learning societies that we are part of. It is certainly sometimes overwhelming as you can imagine. It is also very rewarding and fulfilling to be able to lead the association – make a real difference. For example, during my time with 糖心传媒, we successfully registered the association in the Charity Commission. And we developed policies around 糖心传媒 grants. We’ve also really kind of formalised the way that the various decisions are made within the association. And I think 糖心传媒 has reached its new heights over the past four years. What is really important is to have a leadership culture in the association where you know the voice of all members, and specially the colleagues who you work with in the executive committee or the editorial board, are heard, incorporated and they just check for various perspectives. There’s inclusion and equity, if we if we do that and that we we’re able to refer you know improve the value of the association, and you know bring more benefits for its for its members. So even though I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved over the past four years, this would not have been possible without the sort of dedication and commitment of everyone who is involved in the journal but also various scholarly activities that 糖心传媒 has led over the years. so I’m very proud to have been part of this team – both in the journal as well as 糖心传媒.

Professor Catherine Montgomery: There generally mentioned sorting different parts of your B word I just wondered what you feel is being the most rewarding part of your career to date

Professor Tejendra Pherali: That’s quite a difficult question. But I was wondering I think this is this is the interesting question. What I really have valued is the opportunity to work with you know educational practitioners in these very challenging circumstances. In arout 2014, I went to Lebanon – just after the Syrian war had broken out, and thousands of Syrian refugees had started coming to Lebanon. I collaborated with an organisation called multi aid programmes And this organisation is led by Syrian refugees in Lebanon. I actually connected with this organisation with some of my Masters students at UCL, and many of them actually went to work with this organisation on teacher professional development. I engaged with them for a period of time, and I still actually connected with, and we developed a collaborative research programme. We were able to really kind of create value through collaborations between our universities and the association that was working in this very challenging circumstances. So that makes me feel very proud. Because you know we were able to bring the an academic work into practice in the real world circumstances. But also, we’re able to develop some new ways of working in refugee settings. So as a result, later redeveloped course design – massive open online collaboration –  which is a teacher professional development course for teachers and practitioners who do not have the opportunity to sort of attend formal training in universities and institutions. This is the kind of value that is created through these kinds of activities which makes me feel quite satisfied. Second thing that I’ve been very proud of – is  really how we’ve constantly promoted the scholarship activities of early career researchers. I think that’s been a very sort of prominent a work of BAIE and over the weekend I was part of the 糖心传媒 early career researcher conference. And it was quite humbling to be able to see how doctoral students and early career researchers in collaboration with 糖心传媒 are engaged in active sort of academic activities and have benefited from these initiatives promoted through 糖心传媒. So these are some of the things that I’m very very happy to have achieved.

Professor Catherine Montgomery: That’s fantastic and I mean actually that leads on very nicely to my final question – You know, based on all of your experiences and knowledge that you’ve built up over the years, and it’s fascinating area of and important area of research –  What advice would you give to new scholars or early career researchers in comparative and international education?

Professor Tejendra Pherali: Oh Ok. This is a challenging question I I suppose that there’s no one single piece of advice to everyone. I think we all come from different backgrounds and we all have different kinds of challenges and opportunities in our academic life. But I think we live in a society which is affected by you know violent conflict, mass displacement of populations, rising authoritarianism, and also global inequalities and climate crisis. So I think the new generation of scholars in their field have enormous challenges. But also, you know, opportunities to shape our field in such a way that we’re able to engage more critically with with our field. I also think as an association like ourselves as 糖心传媒, it needs to really promote inclusive ethos, and there’s always a risk of being kind of in the middle of confusion and dilemma about the direction that the association needs to take because we live in a hugely polarised politically divisive society. Our members are equally divided in terms of the political issues and theoretical perspectives, and what we’ve experienced. That’s really a challenge. I think to ensure that an association works in service of everybody, but also being very respectful to very strong emotions and feelings of its members. I think we have to grapple with those challenges constantly – so I think 糖心传媒 has always committed to promotion of social justice, equity and rights of education, and human rights of people, who’ve been affected by different challenges – including violence or oppression and so forth. So I would encourage all scholars who are coming to our field and we’re building their academic careers, to be bold! You know systems of violence –  whether they’re physical or structural – so I think we need ethical scholarship, we need to challenge the domination of epistemic monopoly and manipulation. And I think there’s a lot of discussion around epistemic justice and decolonization of education, so I think these are the key concepts and issues that are going to be prominent in reshaping the future of our field. So I would certainly encourage early clear researchers to be mindful about what is happening in the the world and how our field can contribute to to make a positive change.

Professor Catherine Montgomery: Thats fantastic, Tejendra. it’s been reallyinteresting to talk to you today. And thank you so much for spending time with us on our second 糖心传媒 Compare podcast. It’s been really fascinating insight into your work and your career. Thank you very much indeed.

Professor Tejendra Pherali: Thank you so much Catherine for having me. It was an honour to speak with you. Thank you.

Professor Catherine Montgomery: Subscribe to the Compare Podcast Series. Share its content with friends and colleagues. And feel free to use it as learning material in your teaching and professional context.

Pherali, T., & Turner, E. (2017). Meanings of education under occupation: the shifting motivations for education in Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 39(4), 567–589.

Pherali, T. (2016). School leadership during violent conflict: rethinking education for peace in Nepal and beyond. Comparative Education, 52(4), 473–491.

Magee, A., & Pherali, T. (2017). Freirean critical consciousness in a refugee context: a case study of Syrian refugees in Jordan. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 49(2), 266–282.

Pherali, T. (2021). Social justice, education and peacebuilding: conflict transformation in Southern Thailand. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 53(4), 710–727.

Pherali, T., & Buckler, A. (2022). In memory of Honorary 糖心传媒 member, Professor Lalage Bown. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 52(3), 517.

Compare Article

Dr Mona Jebril (2023) Between construction and destruction: the experience of educationalists at Gaza’s universities, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 53:6, 986-1004, DOI: 

Tejendra Pherali

The Compare Podcast series brings you interviews with internationally recognised scholars in the field of international and comparative education the podcast aims to disseminate in a non-academic language research insights published by the journal Compare among educators students policymakers and the wider global education community.  

COMPARE is the journal of 糖心传媒 – British Association of International and Comparative Education. In each episode, one of our hosts together with one member of the editorial board of the Compare engages in a 30 to 40 minute conversation with an academic to discuss research that relates to educational development and change in different parts of the world.

Uma Pradhan

Our first guest in this Compare Podcast Series is Dr Mona Jebril. Today, we explore the experiences of educationalists at Gaza’s universities?under occupation.? 

Aizuddin Mohammad Anuar

At the present time, the Higher Education system in Gaza has collapsed. According to “Scholars Against the War on Palestine”, a transnational coalition endorsed by more than 3,400 scholars around the world, Israel has bombed every university in Gaza. More than 200 educators and 4000 students have been killed in the latest round of Israeli assault. The current situation in Gaza and wider Palestine has been described as a “scholasticide”. 

Uma Pradhan

We will be discussing with Mona her? Compare article, titled – Between construction and destruction: the experience of educationalists at Gaza’s universities. This paper was published online in 2021 and in print in 2023, in Compare Volume No 53 Issue 6.  ? 

Uma Pradhan

My name is Uma Pradhan – one of the editors of the journal Compare,

Aizuddin Mohammad Anuar

And I am Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar, Book Review editor of Compare. And we pleased to co-host this conversation with Dr. Mona Jebril. 

Aizuddin Mohammad Anuar

Dr. Mona Jebril is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge Centre for Business Research,?and Bye-Fellow at Queens’ College Cambridge.?Mona is a Palestinian academic who lived in Gaza for 22 years and worked at two of its universities.?She is an interdisciplinary social scientist focused on Gaza and conflict-affected areas in the Middle East. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter?@Mona_Jebril? 

Uma Pradhan

Hi Mona. Welcome to the Compare Podcast. Thank you for joining us today. You are the first guest in our podcast series, and we are really excited to talk to you.   Your article titled, Between construction and destruction: the experience of educationalists at Gaza’s universities – was published in Compare in 2023. In this paper,you draw on the research you conducted for your PhD as a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, between 2012-2017.?Tell us a bit about this research. Why and how did you get interested in researching higher education (HE) experience for educationalists at Gaza’s universities? 

Mona Jebril

Thank you so much Uma and thank you Aizuddin for inviting me to the first podcast which is really exciting. I am an interdisciplinary social scientist but actually I have a lot of background in education. I worked for several years as a teacher at public schools and a lecturer at two of those universities. My academic qualifications are also in higher education. My MSc is in higher education, and my PhD is in education. So, when I wanted to start looking for my PhD, I was at that time working as a lecturer at one of Gaza’s Universities teaching the BA in Education Programme. And it was very clear that lecturers and students were working under very unconventional conditions including of course at the best dating blockade lack of resources frequent words context of season Palestinian separation internal challenges as well. I was reflecting a lot about this because I noticed that academic work at the university may also be undermined by hidden challenges. I didn’t quite know what that meant at that point but I thought this was something invisible that I would like to explore. So when I started my PhD at Cambridge, I came across a similar observation by Sarah Roy who also talked about the structure of the development in Gaza. I decided to take this observation of the invisible and the de-development from reflection to research. So, I took this as my PhD topic and of course it was supervised by Professor Diane Reay at the University of Cambridge.

‘In Gaza, we are considered as if in a prison, albeit a large one. The aeroplanes and bulldozers are surrounding us from all sides. The sea is for a long time restricted. Everything here is hit with frustration […]. No one can leave or enter. Everything is closed, and our internal resources are zero.’ Mr Omar – An academic living for 55 years between borders and barriers in Gaza (a quote from Mona’s paper).

Aizuddin Mohammad Anuar

Thank you, Mona, for that introduction. So based on your research, can you speak a little bit about the difficulties that are faced by the academic staff at the university that you studied?

Mona Jebril

Yes, I think the difficulties are coming from all sides. So it’s not only from the University or related to academic work. But also related to the context in which the university functions and lecturers and students. This means that, as I indicated, Gaza suffers from a structure of “de-development” that affects all aspects of life. This means that the economy is suffering. There is an increased level of unemployment, there is increased restrictions on academic mobility. So academics and students had to also face 6 to 12 hours of power cuts. This creates difficulties preparing for lessons, of course, correcting exams, using PowerPoint, if at all available, or planning of events. There is also the war, repeated war. So since 2008 at least four to five wars took place in Gaza. This research was conducted from 2012 to 2017. And during the course of this research at least two wars took place. And when we talk about war, we talk about so many destruction. And this destruction are physical and psychological as well. It touches the university space – the offices, the buildings, the equipments. But it also demolishes homes neighbourhoods and creates frustration and trauma. The restrictions on mobility, which I describe in my paper as a structure of “de-mobility” discourages academics from even going or participating in conferences or going to pursue their higher education. Sometimes because of the difficulties that they are likely to face in their way back or in their way out. So even when the border happens to be open, which happens in unpredictable ways, they are likely not to take the risk. Unless there is some kind of backup plan what happens if they were locked out. There are, of course, the restrictions on mobility also means that limited books, limited academic visitors – so this affects the university with lack of diversity. It limits the horizon of the university in terms of their ability to establish platforms that connect them with the global sector of higher education. The Palestinian society also suffers from Palestinian schism, which means the separation between Hamas and Fatah which also added basically more challenges to the internal community. So these are just the sample but there are more and I can continue basically talking about this that in the podcast.

‘Sometimes [the Israeli soldiers] would stop students on their way to the university, the UA. They would stop [… .] particularly university students [… And then out of provocation] order one to hit his friend, to beat him [… and] to spit on his face.’ Mr Suleiman, an academic in the university in Gaza, who with his colleagues have initiated new diploma and master’s programme at the UA which widened Palestinian access to HE (a quote from Mona’s paper).

Uma Pradhan

So, in this context of development and the mobility that the academics are facing in Gaza’s universities, how do they manage or try to navigate these challenges? You also mention in your paper that there is a contradictory role of social network, kinship and social relations. Could you tell us a bit more about it?

Mona Jebril

Yeah, of course. Thank you for your question. I think in brief they do their best that they can, they push as much and as hard as they could. And there are several factors that motivate them to do that. Sometimes I mean the data showed that, for example, lecturers sometimes relied on the religious beliefs for motivation. So because they believe that if they work hard and sincerely – this entails an obligation from God and that it will continue to benefit people. Sometimes what motivated them was a just sense with patience that they need to be patient. And also this is linked to a sense of fatalism – that is this is our faith and we have to do our best. Within it, we cannot change this context and we want to improve life as much as we could for us and for the new generation. Which is also linked to the nationalistic motivation because they feel also they want to help the new generation of Palestinians. They perceive education not only as a way of, you know, gaining financial security or employment but also as a way of resisting the occupation and resisting injustice. Also, there is the social context, and the social context looks at lecturers as role models. So they would sometimes also be motivated by feeling that it is their mission to be strong all the time, even when they don’t actually when they have themselves being exposed trauma, like for example, at the time of the war they will do their best not to show this to their students. For them, students and lecturers together, sometimes also they look at higher education as a space for hope. Some of the lecturers have also during their course of life been exposed to several obstacles and restrictions. They feel more experienced a bit in, and between brackets, and they are now can basically learn also from these experiences to adapt. And you asked also about the social support or network.  I think the data showed that there is the kinship in particular was a strong factor in the social networks in Gaza. And this seems to be playing on the positive side and on the negative side. Which means on the positive side, of course, social network is reported to have helped people. Especially at the time before for example the internet was available to access opportunities of higher education and of employment abroad. Because they could link them then to these opportunities. Also social network has proven for many people as helpful during times of wars because they could help each other seeking refuge at a refuge at each other’s home. Also supporting each other to be strong to be resilient. But on the other hand, because the context of Gaza which had severe lack of resources and opportunities, there is the sense of competition. And sometimes, these competitions are related to basic rights basic human rights such as healthcare or maybe employment. And so this competition created sort of relying somehow on this kinship for access of these scarce resources. And which made it sort of nepotism being somehow condemned as natural in the society, as the data have shown. I have not conducted a specific research on this point however the data has pointed towards that.

‘It would take me three or four hours sometimes to reach my work place, […]. When I enter the lecture hall, I would find that the students were equally late, or have not come at all.’ Mr Zeyad is an academic working in Gaza, who studied for his Masters in the US (a quote from Mona’s paper)  

Aizuddin Mohammad Anuar

So Mona, how did the education lists in your research utilise the spaces within higher education to navigate or assert their positions or agency despite or amidst all of these challenges that you mentioned?

Mona Jebril

Thank you. It varied by the time as well, because for example when we talk about lecturers – some of them have witnessed, were teaching at the time of war or studying as well at the universities, when these universities were closed. And so they turned to alternative ways and spaces like the mosques or their homes – turning their homes as schools. I remember one of the interviewees mentioned that her teacher for example took the chemistry equipment to her home to help students during this period of closure. So they strived with whatever spaces were available for them. And, of course, then things also change with the Internet. Then the people have also alternative spaces because they could also link to other, for example, universities or educational institutions as well and have some sort of exchange. In general, those who have been also receiving their higher education in other countries or foreign countries even before these liberties have become available in Gaza, they use their expertise basically to open a new Masters and PhD programmes as well and empower their students as much as they could. There is a general influence of Egyptian education on Palestinian universities. And this is, of course, linked to a history of I think almost two decades of Egyptian curricula and text being taught at Gaza. But also linked to the proximity and some scholarships also that were available. So there are, as I mentioned, the universities to try as much as possible to find empowerment in whatever spaces could be available at the time.

‘I was trying to escape [the war], and to feel that I was still alive’. Ms Etaf – an academic in a University in Gaza who published a research paper amidst the war in 2014 (a quote from Mona’s paper).

Uma Pradhan

Thank you. We talked about educationalists, and university lecturers doing different things to manage these challenges. What about the students how have their experiences been shaped by these political contexts?

Mona Jebril

I think students have been affected because they live in the same society, obviously. So the impact of occupation, of restrictions on movement, of repeated wars, of the economic conditions –  all reflect on their life and on their education. For example, with regard to employment, there is a high rate of unemployment and especially among the graduates which reaches around 70%. So this has a lot to do – it is impacting on their motivation as students. Because many of the interviewees, student interviewees, talked about basically their education journey as being a journey without aim, without hope. They have seen queues of graduates who could not find any employment for them, even after four years of studying. So, they try basically to get higher marks. So they increase their competition in the very limited labour market available. Generally,For example, teaching is looked at as a female space – mostly female students will be encouraged to study for education, so that they have a teaching job. But now the data also pointed that males started to also wanting to study teaching. And the reasons they give for that is not their interest in teaching or becoming teachers but because this seems the largest labour sector for employment that is available. And they hope that it may give them better opportunity for kind of permanent employment. So, they the same thing that I mentioned about fatalism and about religion as well, are used or sometimes students draw on their sense of religion and on a sense of fatalism as well, on social support to be able to go on with all these difficulties and focus on their education. While some students also reported looking at education actually as a space where they can experience their agency as the mini-states – you know considering the university as a mini-state, where they could actually feel some joy by connecting to their lecturers, feel through the reading they are reading for example at the university or things that they are learning. They feel they are in different space and again it gives them this sense of hope of a better future.

‘I was raised in an environment where all my family are educated, so I followed their footsteps’ Nawal, a student in a University in Gaza (a quote from Mona’s paper).

Aizuddin Mohammad Anuar

So, Mona, you did mention about how the choice of education pathways are also related to potential employment prospects and the differences say initially between female and male experiences and choices but did you also find any other kind of differences along the lines of gender in terms of student experiences in these universities in Gaza?

Mona Jebril

Yes, thank you. I think generally I would say that the experiences differ. So there is a disparity. However the data shows that males seem to enjoy more freedoms than females in Gaza. And restrictions on females for example included prescriptions sometimes on their specialisation. Aometimes females are the ones who are choosing education because they have taken the decision that this is actually better for me for employment or for whatever. But there are other students who talked about their society a kind of describing this to them as the best choice because then they can have better time, it’s more suitable for a female compared to a job that would require night shifts, for example. And then they also some students also talked about -female students talked about surveillance over their dress, as they are in the university. And this surveillance sometimes included not only wearing jilbāb or but also including the colour, including the design – whether it has buttons or not, including the headscarves. They also complaints about limitations on their ability to travel for higher education alone. Some said that their family or their society would require them to have a Mahram, a male relative, basically who’s mam to travel with them. And, of course, there are also limitations for travel if they have responsibility for their homes. So, there were disparity again about these accounts – some students were still feeling that their families would encourage them to go on. But this seemed as general theme from the data that females enjoy relatively smaller spaces of freedom than males. Female lecturers also reported about biased scholarships, between males and females, and also challenges that they face in their leadership positions. Interestingly, some males talk about actually that they perceive females as having more advantages than them. Because they are higher in the higher achievers in their academic study. And also they reported that sometimes employers actually would prefer to have a female employee because they work harder or whatever. The data also pointed towards a contradiction between the reality for female students inside the university and outside the university. In a few cases, where at the university females may be felt more empowered and could decide for themselves. even go a smaller small set of making a small set of choices related to their study. While in the society. they felt that they still had to fit within a traditional perception of the role as females. Again males contradicted mentioned something, which also was interesting, that they perceived females actually as receiving better treatment and that the university would be more flexible with females than males. However, they were also kind of supporting this contradiction in thinking that OK we actually have better space in the society compared to our female counterparts. So again, the data showed contradictory impulses about gender which would be interesting to explore in more detail.

Aizuddin Mohammad Anuar

Thank you, Mona. So, in concluding your paper you mentioned, and I quote, empowering Gaza’s universities and their educationalists requires interventions that would connect the procedure universities with a lifeline of truly generous international academic support that is based on the Palestinian experience. So by way of conclusion, how can our listeners learn more about this and contribute to this lifeline of support?

Mona Jebril

I think it’s really an important question and specially at this time for Gaza, where what is happening in Gaza at the moment – all universities have been damaged, students studies have been disrupted, the condition of displacement, the loss, the suffering, the humiliation and the humanization – requires that world universities also discuss among themselves what they could do to support higher education in Gaza – students, lecturers, universities. Based on recommendations, I talked about empowering Gaza’s universities and their educationalists, at the time I wrote this research, considered that since we’re talking about a context of the “de-development” and what I described in my research paper as a process of construction and destruction, and this is continuous. I try to visualise it in my thesis actually as a swing – so you do construction and then it’s destruction, construction – destruction, so how do you deal with that?  So my recommendation was actually to increase the construction in relation to the destruction. Because it seems that there is always it has always been that there is destruction there. And the way to do that within limited resources in Gaza, within continuous challenges on all aspects, is really difficult. And so having a lifeline to empower these universities is essential! And this lifeline… because we’ve seen also through the history of education, of higher education, and both Palestinian developmental context, more generally, that there are efforts that happen.  But sometimes donors interventions and developmental interventions also make their political agendas. And so this is why I emphasise on “truly generous” that it does not work to undermine Palestinian right to Palestinian self-determination. The suggestions I thought of, at that point, and possibly now also could be explored in relation to the current situation is that these universities need to be connected with global higher education – through partnerships, through programmes, through collaborations. We need to create platforms for the voices of Palestinian academics and for Palestinian students and encourage them to share their own experiences – whether in publications, conferences or other ways as well – to contribute with their own voice about their own higher education, to create opportunities with scholarships and widening participation for students in Gaza, more generally. But now also thinking about OK what can we do to these students who, all of a sudden, have seen their universities being blown up, and they are in their third year or fourth year?  What can we do for these academics? And once these students come basically to study international universities, do we assume these students to be just within the body of international students or do we actually create mechanisms also to acknowledge that there are conflicts, that there is a situation of war, and conflict, and occupation and this needs to be considered in helping these students and staff to be included in the university space. Donors and funders need also to base their projects on the Palestinian experience. I hope that my research can contribute to that as a memorandum of initial understanding basically on some aspects of the university experience. But I’m sure there are also other ways to learn about this experience including conducting research on Gaza which is a significantly under-researched contexts, supporting libraries with online subscriptions as well, translation services, creating remote and physical opportunities for employment as well. And when I’m talking about this it just comes to me that it is not when also international universities would help and connect with Palestinian universities, they should not look at these universities as being inferior. Because this came also in one of the pieces of research that I conducted, where the perception was that these are disadvantaged universities So what are we actually going to benefit from them. But I think that Palestinian academics have proven to actually perform to the highest levels, when they had the opportunity of studying and of connecting to global higher education. I really hope very much that the listeners of Compare Podcast as well as world universities and all people who are able in the position to help Palestinian students and universities –  to try at least to explore what can be done to support them now or whenever at the nearest possible chance, after this war ends.

Uma Pradhan

Thank you so much for speaking to us today and sharing these important insights from research. And thank you so much for the wonderful work that you’re doing as well. We really appreciate your time.

Mona Jebril

Thanks so much, Uma. Thanks so much, Aizuddin. I really appreciate this opportunity for sharing my research on Gaza.

Aizuddin Mohammad Anuar

Thank you, Mona.

Academic Life under Occupation in the Gaza Strip

A series of videos from Mona Jebril’s Cambridge PhD thesis. Her research is entitled: “Academic Life Under Occupation: The Impact on Educationalists at Gaza’s Universities”. It is a sociological study which explores the past and present higher education experience of educationalists at Gaza’s universities, and how this experience may evolve in the shifting socio-political context in the Arab world.

Video 1: Introduction to the series

Video 2: A Journey Without Aim, Without Hope

Video 3: A Life Between Borders and Barriers

Video 4: The War Experience

00:00:01 Speaker 1

Hello everyone and welcome to the 糖心传媒 Student Podcast, a podcast for postgraduate students in the field of international and comparative education to share advice and ideas to help you through the long process for easier postgraduate study.

00:00:17 Speaker 1

糖心传媒 is the British Association for International and Comparative Education.

00:00:22 Speaker 1

糖心传媒 promotes teaching, research, policy and development in all aspects of international and comparative education and is a diverse professional association composed of academics, researchers, policymakers and members of governmental and non-governmental organisations.

00:00:43 Speaker 1

If you are not already signed up, please check out the 糖心传媒 membership. As a student member, you get access to the 糖心传媒 journal, compare discounts to attend both the 糖心传媒 and update conferences, and access to grants and research, as well as being a member of a grown community of academics. Find out more at 糖心传媒.ac.uk.

00:01:04 Speaker 1

So today I’m very excited to have the team from the Ibali project on the 糖心传媒 Student podcast to tell us more about this innovative project.

00:01:12 Speaker 1

To unpack the concept of inclusive education and explore storytelling as a methodology, and just to have a really good chat.

00:01:20 Speaker 1

So storytelling in different forms is becoming much more widely used as a research methodology.

00:01:26 Speaker 1

We are lucky enough today to have six amazing women with us from the project, so please can you introduce yourselves and tell the listeners a little bit about your background and how you came to be working on the project and perhaps what made you interested in storytelling in the first place.

00:01:41 Speaker 2

Hi, I’m Alison Buckler, and I’m the vice chair of 糖心传媒, so your listeners might know me from that. I am a senior research fellow in international education at the Open University, where I’m also the Deputy director of the Center for the Study of Global Development.

00:01:58 Speaker 2

And I’m the PI for this project, which comes together after, nearly five years of working with this.

00:02:08 Speaker 2

Like you say, amazing group of people thinking about storytelling, thinking about inclusion.

00:02:13 Speaker 2

And this, this bid is really the culmination of, you know, five years of thinking about these issues and how we can think about them more deeply come together.

00:02:23 Speaker 1

Great, Alison. Thank you.

00:02:25 Speaker 3

So hi, I’m Jennifer Agbaire, research associate at the Open University.

00:02:31 Speaker 3

I’m also the executive secretary of 糖心传媒 and working with Alison on that, on that front as well.

00:02:37 Speaker 3

This project is really something that we have, like Alison said, have been working on for quite some time now.

00:02:43 Speaker 3

We are all kind of interested in, you know, inclusion issues and innovative methods and my work in the past years has been around that very centrally and that’s where I kind of like really key in.

00:02:56 Speaker 3

I’m also the project manager on this particular bid as well.

00:03:02 Speaker 1

Thank you, Jennifer.

00:03:06 Speaker 4

Hi, I’m Joanna Wheeler and I’m the founder and director of Transformative Story.

00:03:11 Speaker 4

And I’m also a research fellow at the University of Western Cape in South Africa and I’m Based in the UK.

00:03:18 Speaker 4

How did I get interested in storytelling?

00:03:21 Speaker 4

Uhm, I mean, I think anyone who has had kids or has taken care of children, has spent many hours, you know, telling stories and listening to stories and so I just, I’m, I am really interested in the ways that stories kind of weave in and out of our lives.

00:03:47 Speaker 4

And I think this project is a great way to learn more about that, and to think more about that critically in different contexts.

00:03:57 Speaker 1

Thank you, Joanna.

00:03:59 Speaker 5

Hi, my name is Faith Mkwananzi and I’m with the Center for Development support at the University of the Free State. My research is around the areas of inclusion and exclusion in South Africa Indians and I am part of this project because it speaks to the areas that I’m interested in and also speaks to my own, my own experiences.

00:04:23 Speaker 5

So that’s why I’m very passionate about the project.

00:04:27 Speaker 1

Thank you Faith.

00:04:30 Speaker 6

Hello uh my name is Yusra Price.

00:04:34 Speaker 6

I am an anthropologist by training.

00:04:39 Speaker 6

I am passionate about education and storytelling, and my work has been mostly focused in using storytelling to help teach, uhm, ethnography

00:04:57 Speaker 6

And methodologies related, as well as using storytelling to help people tell their story, especially in spaces of advocacy.

00:05:07 Speaker 6

I am part of this project because it speaks to the passions that I have around innovative methodologies.

00:05:18 Speaker 6

I love exploring expressions of art.

00:05:22 Speaker 6

I I love that storytelling as a method and how it invites different ways of doing things, and it brings all of my interests into a central place so there’s nothing left out.

00:05:38 Speaker 6

And that’s what I thoroughly enjoy about it.

00:05:43 Speaker 7

Thank you Yusra.

00:05:45 Speaker 7

So my name is Jane Nebe and I’m an ethnographer on the Ibali project.

00:05:52 Speaker 7

I did my PhD at the University of Bristol where I worked on issues around education, inclusion exclusion and that’s been the motivation for me joining this project.

00:06:08 Speaker 1

Thank you, Jane.

00:06:09 Speaker 1

OK that’s a great introduction to you all.

00:06:11 Speaker 1

Thank you.

00:06:12 Speaker 1

Uhm, Alison, I don’t know if you want to.

00:06:14 Speaker 1

Tell us a bit more about the project.

00:06:19 Speaker 2

Uhm, yes. So this is a two year AHRC funded study that builds on an international storytelling research network that we’ve all been part of.

00:06:29 Speaker 2

For the past five years or so and this new, this new phase of the research is using storytelling approaches with young people and teachers in Nigeria, South Africa and the UK, and the storytelling strand is empirically focused on ideas and experiences of educational inclusion and exclusion.

00:06:49 Speaker 2

So that’s the kind of empirical.

00:06:50 Speaker 2

Strand of the research and then, in parallel, we are planning a critical exploration of this storytelling work, which is going to be undertaken by three ethnographers, and they are they are trained in Nigeria, South Africa and the UK respectively.

00:07:07 Speaker 2

And the ethnographers will individually and collectively document and analyze the storytelling process in each country.

00:07:13 Speaker 2

So they’ll be exploring how researchers and participants from different contexts and in different contexts make sense of storytelling as a meaningful approach to researching and articulating people lived experiences.

00:07:25 Speaker 2

So really, it’s a research study.

00:07:27 Speaker 2

On top of or embedded within another research study.

00:07:30 Speaker 2

And the aim of it is, is really to help us think more critically about the House and the whys of the decisions that we make when we’re researching using creative methods, and especially when we do that in UM and across different contexts.

00:07:43 Speaker 1

OK, so uhm, how did you come to choose these three countries?

00:07:49 Speaker 2

Well, we’ve chosen them because we are from them, and we have collectively, a lot of lived experience and expertise researching, working, being educated, studying in these contexts.

00:08:04 Speaker 2

Uhm, but also we really wanted to explicitly position inclusion as equally relevant across different geographical divides that are often split by this sort of UK based research and then this whole world of development research which kind of others this issue of inclusion.

00:08:21 Speaker 2

So we really wanted to see, and, explore the issue of inclusion across those divides and kind of re calibrate how inclusion is researched.

00:08:29 Speaker 2

In that sense, we were drawing on the work of people who argued that, you know, we need to be using more common analytical frames for doing research under this banner of development.

00:08:43 Speaker 2

And I think as well collectively we are really interested in.

00:08:48 Speaker 2

Thinking more critically about why we choose certain spaces in the world to do our.

00:08:53 Speaker 2

Searching and thinking about what feels comfortable to us, or uncomfortable and why, and we’re really hoping to get.

00:09:01 Speaker 2

Under the they’re kind of under the skin of those questions, which in themselves can be really uncomfortable and thinking about and answering them through the ethnography part of the research.

00:09:11 Speaker 2

And then finally, uhm, I think there’s a there’s a real ethical justification to come.

00:09:18 Speaker 2

Obviously your listeners will be familiar with the compare journal UM being members of 糖心传媒 and may have read the UM retrospective review of 50 years of compare articles that was published last year and.

00:09:32 Speaker 2

And something that was really interesting that came out of that review is that the, you know, the the dominance of articles that were written with the first author based in a in a high income context, researching education in a low income context and the.

00:09:51 Speaker 2

Uhm, there they were.

00:09:53 Speaker 2

Almost no, maybe none at all.

00:09:55 Speaker 2

No examples of researchers from low income context researching education in high income context, and it was an almost invisible dynamic in the compared journal across the past 50 years.

00:10:05 Speaker 2

So that, uhm, idea of inverting the lens of who researches education where is something that we’re really interested in as a collective.

00:10:13 Speaker 2

Of people from lots of different contexts with different experience of working in different contexts.

00:10:17 Speaker 2

We’re really hoping to kind of write about that.

00:10:21 Speaker 2

Yeah, that dynamic as well.

00:10:23 Speaker 1

That’s really interesting.

00:10:24 Speaker 1

And from that I’ve kind of got two different questions for the group.

00:10:28 Speaker 1

And I realize you’re at the start of this research, but just to get your opinions and thoughts on this now would be really useful to students.

00:10:34 Speaker 1

So when students are thinking about doing their field work, actually before this, when they’re thinking about what context to look at and why.

00:10:43 Speaker 1

So now, considering everything you’ve just said, and obviously ideas and opinions on this are shifting very a lot and there’s a lot of debate around this, do you think there’s still a place?

00:10:54 Speaker 1

For students from.

00:10:58 Speaker 1

I guess from you know from originating from the UK or from another quite privileged from Northern would say country, do you think there’s still a place for them to be doing research in the so-called global S you still do you think it’s still appropriate and if so?

00:11:15 Speaker 1

What do you think can make it more ethical for them to do?

00:11:20 Speaker 5

I, I, I definitely think that there is still space for students in the global North to come and research in the global.

00:11:27 Speaker 5

South, I mean they, they should be open to the, I mean to lending the experience, claiming the life that people lived in the global South and also.

00:11:40 Speaker 5

I think to be open minded about what they may experience in the global South think, which is what storytelling allows because it allows you to be very reflective and open minded.

00:11:51 Speaker 5

About your own experiences and other people’s experiences and another thing that I think is very important would be to.

00:12:02 Speaker 5

To have a uh mind that’s open to learning.

00:12:06 Speaker 5

And those learning happens through the people that you are going to meet and the people that are definitely going to be to be working with.

00:12:13 Speaker 5

I think that’s what’s going to make it very interesting and useful for a person coming from the global North to the global South.

00:12:22 Speaker 5

I don’t think it’s a question of whether or not people in the global North should come in researching the global South, I think the point is.

00:12:29 Speaker 5

Trying to learn from each others experiences and create relationships and networks during that experience.

00:12:37 Speaker 5

Because we can, we cannot isolate the global South from the club or not, and either can we isolate the north from the South.

00:12:45 Speaker 1

So it’s maybe rather than not coming as you say and it’s more kind of like.

00:12:52 Speaker 1

A shift in attitude and a shifting kind of perspective and realizing yet coming with an open mind and ready to learn is important.

00:13:00 Speaker 3

I think just to add to that, we’re not assuming you know that, you know, global N researchers are close minded in any way or we do know that every researcher tends to come to research with preconceived notion.

00:13:15 Speaker 3

If they don’t check that, I think it’s what people call unconscious bias, that all of us are really guilty of a different point.

00:13:21 Speaker 3

And we can’t.

00:13:21 Speaker 3

Be guilty of if we’re not aware of that.

00:13:24 Speaker 3

So I guess just to add to what Faith is saying is really about.

00:13:28 Speaker 3

You know, being reflexive about our positionality as research as when we come into contact, especially those that we are not, you know, we don’t have a background or lived experience in would be really, really useful.

00:13:43 Speaker 1

And I guess it’s about being transparent about that isn’t like you said, Jennifer, just having transparency about your positionality.

00:13:49 Speaker 1

I think it’s really important from the officer, yeah.

00:13:52 Speaker 2

Well, I think it’s also about the label, like how you label the work that you do.

00:13:56 Speaker 2

And if you.

00:13:57 Speaker 2

If you say you work in development and then you only work in low income context or research in low income context, then I think that’s more problematic than kind of individual research.

00:14:07 Speaker 2

Study where you might be from the UK but go into your researching garner for, you know, some personal and professional.

00:14:13 Speaker 2

Intellectual reasons, you might have to be interested in something that’s going on there.

00:14:17 Speaker 2

And so as part of this project, but also, you know more broadly in 糖心传媒 something that we’re trying to do a lot more of is not think of international education as a as kind of solely rooted in.

00:14:28 Speaker 2

And then in in development studies which you know is actually quite a recent shift for a lot of the work that people do in 糖心传媒 and just really trying to think back.

00:14:37 Speaker 2

To more the kind of the origins of.

00:14:41 Speaker 2

Comparative education, but putting a modern twist on those and thinking about them in a more critical way.

00:14:46 Speaker 2

But when?

00:14:48 Speaker 2

Is it not just thinking about development research as being something that can only be?

00:14:51 Speaker 2

On in in in low income context, but thinking about development as a global issue and thinking about the work that you’re doing in low income contexts and how that relates to issues and challenges though so really evident in context that you know wouldn’t be considered, you know, development contexts in the same way.

00:15:09 Speaker 6

And I mean to add to that I think.

00:15:12 Speaker 6

When it comes to your question, often the apprehension.

00:15:16 Speaker 6

Comes from UM.

00:15:20 Speaker 6

I, I guess, impart a history of people coming in, perhaps from the global N, doing research in the poorest of areas and assuming that they are there to give them something that they do not have, to enrich them with ideas and methods.

00:15:38 Speaker 6

And resources that they do not have, and so it perpetuates this divide.

00:15:46 Speaker 6

That we.

00:15:48 Speaker 6

Yeah, it, it, it perpetuates this divide between, you know, the, the developing country and the developed country.

00:15:55 Speaker 6

And in that it would often take away the agency of people to tell their own stories and this idea of giving voice.

00:16:04 Speaker 6

And so I think that’s often where the apprehension has come from and I mean in part to some extent my arms would be like yes and no and.

00:16:15 Speaker 6

I think it does come down to what everyone so far has said is that.

00:16:20 Speaker 6

You must know why you are going to a place before you’re going to do the research in it.

00:16:26 Speaker 6

You’re not going to do research in Africa because you have never been to Africa, or you are going to witness the poor African people and so on because then already.

00:16:34 Speaker 6

Your ideas are skewed, uhm.

00:16:37 Speaker 6

And it’s definitely about understanding what positionality means for you, where you are, where you come from, and where you’re going.

00:16:46 Speaker 6

And like they say, it is like being open minded to the experiences, but also being open to those moments where people confront you and say.

00:16:55 Speaker 6

What are you doing here?

00:16:57 Speaker 6

Or why do you think?

00:16:59 Speaker 6

The research that you are doing is useful or like in because people can often confront you and they could, you know, come up into your face and in those moments you’re going to have.

00:17:09 Speaker 6

To respond to them.

00:17:11 Speaker 6

And uhm, because it’s I think what what’s often echoed is that people are sometimes a bit exhausted.

00:17:20 Speaker 6

By having these tropes and ideas of Africa or developing countries or low income spaces, just being is just perpetuating this idea of what is here.

00:17:34 Speaker 6

Uhm, you know, when we’ve all we when, when so many of us are in that space where we are really working towards collaboration and the give and take of it.

00:17:44 Speaker 6

Also, I think when it comes to a student deciding whether they want to do their research in the global S, not just Africa, but UM.

00:17:54 Speaker 6

You know they need to sincerely have a critical conversation with themselves and reach out to peers and supervisors and mentors in having that conversation before.

00:18:06 Speaker 6

And during and after.

00:18:10 Speaker 1

Thank you.

00:18:11 Speaker 1

All right.

00:18:12 Speaker 1

Sorry, Alison.

00:18:13 Speaker 2

Well, I think, I absolutely agree with what you were saying and I think it really comes.

00:18:19 Speaker 2

Down to the questions you’re asking and the reasons you’re going to those contexts to do the research in.

00:18:24 Speaker 2

And again, if you go back to the, the sort of the.

00:18:27 Speaker 2

Uhm, you know, the early days of comparative education. And, you know, I’m saying this with the, you know, understanding that there are there are other challenges with the way that people framed research in the 1960s that we could spend ages discussing. But the primary focus of comparative education research in the 1960s was to go to other countries.

00:18:46 Speaker 2

To learn lessons, to bring back, to improve.

00:18:49 Speaker 2

You own education system and now we’re appointing a part of education where the main reason people go to research in other countries is to improve them.

00:18:56 Speaker 2

And I think that’s the dynamic that I find really interesting.

00:19:00 Speaker 2

It’s like why are you going to research in this place?

00:19:02 Speaker 2

Is it because you think you’ve got the skills to improve it, or are you actually trying to learn from it to contribute to a bigger global narrative?

00:19:09 Speaker 2

On you know how children can learn better.

00:19:14 Speaker 1

That’s great. Thank you.

00:19:16 Speaker 1

So the project also other than storytelling, which we’re going to move on to in a second, but also talks about inclusive education.

00:19:24 Speaker 1

So just again.

00:19:25 Speaker 1

Open to the group.

00:19:26 Speaker 1

Uhm, what do you consider?

00:19:28 Speaker 1

This the so.

00:19:28 Speaker 1

Much debate and sometimes misrepresentation of what inclusive education is.

00:19:33 Speaker 1

So what does that mean to?

00:19:34 Speaker 1

You as a collective.

00:19:37 Speaker 3

Uh, I think that’s a very interesting question and that really motivated what we’re doing in the research the entire design of our understanding of how we want to do this.

00:19:47 Speaker 3

Is really built on.

00:19:48 Speaker 3

How we are thinking about inclusive education, the term inclusion.

00:19:52 Speaker 3

We think that is really very under conceptualized.

00:19:56 Speaker 3

We think that is such.

00:19:57 Speaker 3

Above development word, now that people just really use the term inclusion and we, we also think that you know.

00:20:08 Speaker 3

We don’t think that there is there. There is a specific definition of inclusion that will be A1 size fits all. A kind of definition, right?

00:20:19 Speaker 3

We think that we should put more thought into what we consider not just inclusive education, but how we research.

00:20:28 Speaker 3

Inclusive education.

00:20:29 Speaker 3

And so we can’t be talking about inclusivity when we are not, you know, also trying to see how we are aligning that to our practice of knowing about inclusivity.

00:20:41 Speaker 3

So that is what is really informing what we are doing.

00:20:43 Speaker 3

We think that inclusion is out there and we think that really engaging with people lived experiences of what inclusion might mean to them in similar and different contexts would give us a better understanding of what.

00:20:56 Speaker 3

That really is.

00:20:57 Speaker 3

And that doesn’t really apply to 1 context that has been described.

00:21:01 Speaker 3

As underdeveloped or.

00:21:04 Speaker 3

But we might just be really surprised to see that these are things that cause across, you know, very many diverse contexts.

00:21:12 Speaker 3

So yes, inclusion is inclusion.

00:21:15 Speaker 3

But it’s something that needs to, we need to, we need to conceptualize more.

00:21:20 Speaker 3

We need to theorize more.

00:21:21 Speaker 3

We need to think about more.

00:21:23 Speaker 3

And we need to engage with more through what people, how people make meaning of what that might mean within outside the education space.

00:21:34 Speaker 2

I I think from when we were writing the bids.

00:21:39 Speaker 2

You know, there’s this sort of pressure to pin down what you mean by inclusion and we, you know we’ve been reading about these things and writing about them for years and you know we obviously had a sort of starting point.

00:21:50 Speaker 2

So, you know, UNESCO has got some quite useful, UM, definitions of what it means to be included in in education.

00:22:00 Speaker 2

And one of the framings that we’re bringing to the project is the idea you know is Amartya Sen’s capability approach and so one of the ways we’re thinking about it is you know he, he, he says you know kind of famous questions that he posed.

00:22:13 Speaker 2

Was equality of what?

00:22:16 Speaker 2

And we are one of our starting points for this research.

00:22:20 Speaker 2

Is inclusion in what you know, what does it mean to young people and to their teachers?

00:22:24 Speaker 2

For UM.

00:22:26 Speaker 2

For them to be included or excluded from their learning.

00:22:29 Speaker 2

And so by using the storytelling approach, UM, that’s something we’re really trying to understand.

00:22:33 Speaker 2

Like, you know.

00:22:34 Speaker 2

Inclusion in what from their perspectives.

00:22:39 Speaker 1

And that’s great.

00:22:40 Speaker 1

And that really talks into as well, the power of storytelling.

00:22:45 Speaker 1

Which I think is really important.

00:22:46 Speaker 1

I’m a huge fan of storytelling in my own research, and I just think storytelling on any kind of, UM, not just to do with education in lots of different ways.

00:22:55 Speaker 1

As we’ve already touched on, this is such a powerful form to get information across and people narrative.

00:23:02 Speaker 1

So in relation to your research, what do you mean by storytelling?

00:23:07 Speaker 1

Another big question for you.

00:23:11 Speaker 4

I think that’s a it’s a really.

00:23:12 Speaker 4

Good question and a little bit like inclusion.

00:23:16 Speaker 4

You know, it’s quite a fashionable term right now.

00:23:20 Speaker 4

There’s, you know, so many.

00:23:22 Speaker 4

Uhm, ways that it’s coming up and talked about and a lot of excitement about it.

00:23:30 Speaker 4

You know, sometimes in academia and sometimes less so in academia, but not necessarily that much clear conceptualization of what?

00:23:41 Speaker 4

It is.

00:23:42 Speaker 4

Methodologically speaking.

00:23:45 Speaker 4

So I think for us, one of the things that has helped drive our interest in working together is a shared sense of what we mean by storytelling that has come together over time.

00:23:58 Speaker 4

And it so it’s really important to be clear about what we mean.

00:24:02 Speaker 4

So when we’re talking about storytelling, we’re focusing not just on the stories that are produced, but on the process of how stories are told.

00:24:11 Speaker 4

Old, which means that storytelling.

00:24:14 Speaker 4

We’re looking at storytelling as a relational activity.

00:24:17 Speaker 4

It has someone who is telling a story and someone who is listening to the story at the same time, and both of those aspects are important to understanding storytelling.

00:24:29 Speaker 4

We also look at storytelling.

00:24:32 Speaker 4

As a creative and iterative process, which means that we are not using this methodology in search of the story.

00:24:42 Speaker 4

You know a singular story the right story.

00:24:46 Speaker 4

But more seeing storytelling, particularly autobiographical storytelling, which is what we’re working with as being about the way that we make sense of our experiences to ourselves and to others.

00:25:02 Speaker 4

And that means that you have multiple versions of a story that you might.

00:25:07 Speaker 4

And part of what we’re doing methodologically is working through those different versions so that the person who is telling the story can craft the version that they choose to craft.

00:25:19 Speaker 4

Through that process, so.

00:25:20 Speaker 4

So therefore you have to also have lots of different ways of being creative because stories are expressed not just in words, they’re expressed in many other ways.

00:25:32 Speaker 4

And as researchers and as facilitators, we then want to bring all those different dimensions into the.

00:25:39 Speaker 4

Storytelling process so when so when I.

00:25:42 Speaker 4

Say that it’s.

00:25:43 Speaker 4

Creative I mean that we use lots of different forms of creative expression.

00:25:47 Speaker 4

So we might use theater, we might use.

00:25:48 Speaker 4

Movement we might use.

00:25:50 Speaker 4

Making or sculpture or drawing or.

00:25:55 Speaker 4

Silence or creative writing or music.

00:25:58 Speaker 4

So any form of expression could potentially be part of a storytelling process.

00:26:06 Speaker 4

But what we’re also thinking about is how does thinking about story structure help you to move through those different expressions of what the story is?

00:26:19 Speaker 4

So I guess that’s not, it’s not a very I’ve not given you a very academic definition, but.

00:26:25 Speaker 4

More a kind of.

00:26:27 Speaker 4

Sort of what, what, what does it really mean in practice that we do and I think that.

00:26:34 Speaker 4

That that could hopefully be helpful for students to hear because sometimes we get a bit lost in the in the theory and don’t really come down to land on what it actually means in practice.

00:26:50 Speaker 1

So with that in mind, when you’re saying that, it’s not you.

00:26:52 Speaker 1

Know you haven’t given.

00:26:53 Speaker 1

A particular academic kind of response to that.

00:26:57 Speaker 1

So my next question would be then what makes storytelling research so for students that may be?

00:27:04 Speaker 1

Uhm, haven’t considered using this kind of methodology before.

00:27:08 Speaker 1

Maybe in the past they’ve been used to using.

00:27:11 Speaker 1

May be quite quantitative.

00:27:13 Speaker 1

Kind of methodologies or uhm, they use more traditional kind of interviewing techniques?

00:27:20 Speaker 1

Uhm, could you just explain to him a bit more that what makes storytelling research?

00:27:25 Speaker 3

The question about, you know, what makes storytelling research?

00:27:30 Speaker 3

I, I, well, I think the response to that is perhaps to think about what we constitute as research in very simple terms.

00:27:37 Speaker 3

What does Social Research do?

00:27:39 Speaker 3

What’s the purpose of, let’s say, qualitative research?

00:27:44 Speaker 3

We, we classify which we will classify storytelling on the simply I think it is.

00:27:52 Speaker 3

About working with people to understand their realities and explore how these might in turn generate knowledge that creates an understanding of the issues that we as researchers are concerned with.

00:28:04 Speaker 3

If that’s the case, then definitely there is no question about, you know, whether storytelling is a research or what.

00:28:12 Speaker 3

Makes it a research, but it is an approach that does exactly that, only it does this through a, I would say an epistemological and ontological process that tends towards being more inclusive, you know, one that’s kind of aims to create.

00:28:27 Speaker 3

Uh, to a great extent.

00:28:29 Speaker 3

A space where traditional research power hierarchies are flattened.

00:28:34 Speaker 3

Uh, storytelling as a research practice also tends to move our ways of knowing in a traditionally central academic space to something that is less exclusionary, a less exclusionary space in that sense.

00:28:52 Speaker 3

So that’s that there might.

00:28:54 Speaker 3

I’ve read around arguments that say, well, you know, you can just.

00:28:58 Speaker 3

We tell stories all the time.

00:29:00 Speaker 3

I mean, we get people to talk to us about things that are happening with them.

00:29:04 Speaker 3

How can we then classify that kind of knowledge that we get as storytelling and students might actually grapple with defending that, you know, in to some maybe examiners.

00:29:19 Speaker 3

Supervisors, for example, who might?

00:29:21 Speaker 3

Not be taken to the idea of just going out there.

00:29:24 Speaker 3

To get.

00:29:25 Speaker 3

Stories from people.

00:29:26 Speaker 3

I would say that the reality that, you know, a storytelling approach tend to align with more indigenous ways of knowing, you know, that are not typically academic.

00:29:36 Speaker 3

Ways of knowing does not take away from, you know, it’s research.

00:29:42 Speaker 3

It’s the potential that it has to help us to understand the realities that research set out to, to understand, to explore the lived experiences of people, to engage, to connect in ways.

00:29:55 Speaker 3

You know that.

00:29:56 Speaker 3

The research a researcher under participant would normally do, and it’s a question of knowing as a research and what you are using the storytelling approach for.

00:30:05 Speaker 3

What are you going out there to find out?

00:30:07 Speaker 3

Why are you going out there to do this kind of thing?

00:30:10 Speaker 3

How can you justify the ethical implications of this?

00:30:14 Speaker 3

All of this feed into the approach.

00:30:16 Speaker 3

It fits into the design, feeds into how you carry out risk and storytelling research and I think that that is core.

00:30:22 Speaker 3

Uh, to understanding why it is research in the first place.

00:30:28 Speaker 1

I think there’s something to be said as well.

00:30:29 Speaker 1

Isn’t there about the?

00:30:32 Speaker 1

Output being accessible too often accessible to people that aren’t in the academic sphere.

00:30:37 Speaker 1

That’s still important, that this work is you know, reaches and that they understand.

00:30:42 Speaker 1

And what’s come out of it?

00:30:43 Speaker 1

And the lessons learn.

00:30:44 Speaker 1

And it’s a really accessible kind of output, I think, which is really important.

00:30:49 Speaker 4

I was just.

00:30:49 Speaker 4

Thinking about the question, Jennifer’s answer to the question and I think.

00:30:56 Speaker 4

Another part of the answer is that.

00:31:00 Speaker 4

If we take a step back and look critically at the field of Social Research and qualitative research, we can identify certain biases, historical and current biases, within our own field of research.

00:31:17 Speaker 4

I mean, there are many.

00:31:18 Speaker 4

There’s no point listing them all here, but certainly one of them is that it’s heavily text based.

00:31:25 Speaker 4

So if you think about the process of interviewing for example, or focus groups, the researcher decides the questions, goes and asks the questions of a group of people or an individual rights down there.

00:31:37 Speaker 4

Answers and then decides what the those answers mean.

00:31:42 Speaker 4

And then writes about.

00:31:44 Speaker 4

So storytelling is research in in that it makes us question some of those assumptions about what counts as knowledge, who gets to decide the meaning of that knowledge, and how that knowledge is then used.

00:32:02 Speaker 4

And I think that that’s one of the really.

00:32:04 Speaker 4

Interesting features of it, as you said Emma, that the story itself takes on a life of its own which is not controlled by the researcher.

00:32:14 Speaker 4

You know, the person who’s told the story can decide what they’re doing with it.

00:32:17 Speaker 4

So where does that leave?

00:32:19 Speaker 4

You know what the role of the researcher and how do we take account of all the different forms of knowledge that are created in the storytelling process?

00:32:27 Speaker 4

So all of those questions then come in to thinking about how storytelling is research.

00:32:34 Speaker 4

And I think that if we really engage with them, it can potentially help us broaden our horizons of how we see research.

00:32:47 Speaker 2

And I think if I, I again, building on those two answers for me, coming in with a background in education, one of the reasons storytelling research is so fascinating to me, or the idea of stories as research is, you know, my work is, is really rooted in social, cultural ideas around how people learn.

00:33:07 Speaker 2

Is about people learning together, and you learn through the conversations that you have.

00:33:13 Speaker 2

And actually, more conventional forms of qualitative research sort of really contradict that idea of collective learning, as Joanna and Jennifer were saying, because there’s all this power, so you’re controlling that knowledge.

00:33:23 Speaker 2

You’re not opening yourself up to come to being.

00:33:27 Speaker 2

To learning from it and.

00:33:31 Speaker 2

I really like what Walter Benjamin says about the difference between a story and a piece of information and a piece of information is sort of, he says.

00:33:42 Speaker 2

It’s kind of shot through with guidance on how to understand that and that’s what a lot.

00:33:46 Speaker 2

Of other qualitative research comes with.

00:33:49 Speaker 2

It’s kind of tells you how to read something, whereas what a story is, it doesn’t come with that guidance.

00:33:55 Speaker 2

It’s up to you to interpret it and that’s.

00:33:57 Speaker 2

Where I find really exciting is how kind of storytelling as research doesn’t.

00:34:03 Speaker 2

Give people the answers.

00:34:05 Speaker 2

It just helped people to think about issues in different ways and that’s, I’m sure that’s a quote from one of our articles or blogs, because I feel like I’ve said that, or we’ve written that lots of times before, but it’s about this kind of what.

00:34:17 Speaker 2

And Hannah Aaron would call this objective in between or what Santos would call the contact zone.

00:34:23 Speaker 2

I think for me, storytelling can be researched and is really powerful as research because it opens you up to seeing these spaces where people are coming together to learn together through the through the narrative of the story.

00:34:38 Speaker 1

OK, now you just mentioned your blog, which I’d just like to.

00:34:42 Speaker 1

Actually, Faith did you have something to say? And then I’ll come back to the blog.

00:34:46 Speaker 1

Sorry, Faith.

00:34:47 Speaker 5

Yeah, I mean, I wanted to add to what Alison just said, I also think that, you know, using storytelling, it really goes beyond the instrumentalisation of research participants, especially those that we view to be from poor backgrounds because it does give participants the agency and the freedom to decide what stories they want to tell.

00:35:13 Speaker 1

Brilliant. Thank you.

00:35:16 Speaker 1

So Alison you mentioned the blog and the blog on the 糖心传媒 website which all the students should take a look at.

00:35:22 Speaker 1

It’s really great, really accessible and super interesting.

00:35:26 Speaker 1

But that also reflects on the risks associated with using storytelling as a methodology.

00:35:31 Speaker 1

Could you explain these a bit more to the listener and maybe students are considering using these methodologies maybe?

00:35:37 Speaker 1

Any advice that they can have to counter these risks?

00:35:41 Speaker 6

So this this is actually a question that I brought up earlier so.

00:35:47 Speaker 6

In work that I in storytelling work that I’ve been using.

00:35:51 Speaker 6

Uhm, outside of the body project, but also definitely strongly related to.

00:35:57 Speaker 6

Was in working with what we’d call vulnerable groups of people.

00:36:03 Speaker 6

From people with migrant refugee asylum seeking backgrounds.

00:36:08 Speaker 6

Uhm, people who experience various forms of violence is on a daily basis.

00:36:15 Speaker 6

And never in storytelling would you want to exclude anyone from being able to participate in this process of, you know, having the opportunity to tell your own story using your own forms of expression and getting it out there.

00:36:31 Speaker 6

And one of the concerns that was brought to my attention was around retraumatization was one of them, but also it’s I think in thinking of risk when it comes to the storytelling process is it’s in, you know, the risk that sits with the participants or the people, the storytellers themselves, you know you are opening up stories and experiences of yourself that you know you wouldn’t have told otherwise and then also, as a facilitator, you can never be prepared for all there is, nor can you list them.

00:37:14 Speaker 6

Things happen spontaneously in the workshop. That puts you in a, you know, ethical conundrum. And so in thinking about risk is not just about you mitigating risk for the participants themselves, but also caring for yourself and your colleagues within that process.

00:37:35 Speaker 6

And I think when it came when in thinking about the risk of you know people feeling deep discomfort, people having trauma resurface and more it’s what we have bought into a kind of a support network or forms.

00:37:55 Speaker 6

Of care.

00:37:57 Speaker 6

What comes over the top of my head is that we put things in place.

00:38:02 Speaker 6

Four people so like psychological support, support and trauma, social worker of these children and more.

00:38:10 Speaker 6

And if we are working with organisations, is also negotiating with organisations, what forms of care is important and other people that we need present.

00:38:21 Speaker 6

In those workshop spaces, uhm.

00:38:25 Speaker 6

Also, what I think is very important is the closed group when it comes to the the storytelling.

00:38:35 Speaker 6

The whole point is to have a closed space, almost.

00:38:38 Speaker 6

It’s the facilitators, it’s the participant, and you people is not meant to come in and out, you know, you can’t just allow anybody to permeate the space, because there is.

00:38:51 Speaker 6

It’s you.

00:38:51 Speaker 6

You’re so highly vulnerable when you’re telling a story, any story.

00:38:57 Speaker 6

And so within the there’s also the fact that people, at the end of the day, their stories for them.

00:39:05 Speaker 6

So in terms of like dissemination or shading it further it they really become the ones who decide that and they’re always if we could help them figure out whether it’s something they would want to share and the implications of shading in different spaces.

00:39:21 Speaker 6

As for the facilitators, it’s so, so important to debrief with one another.

00:39:28 Speaker 6

And sometimes what might affect you might not affect the next person, and so you cannot always foresee what might cause you deep discomfort.

00:39:39 Speaker 6

Uhm, you know, compared to someone else.

00:39:42 Speaker 6

So definitely debriefing and having someone to speak to afterwards.

00:39:46 Speaker 6

And it definitely helps that we have one another to speak to.

00:39:50 Speaker 6

You know we’ve, we earlier we spoke about what kind, what kind of work would go into it and how much time we actually spend reflecting on the day that has just passed.

00:40:02 Speaker 6

Or sharing with one another something that has happened in the day that maybe no one else has seen?

00:40:08 Speaker 6

It’s because your eyes can’t be everywhere all at the same time, so it’s also just having the time afterwards as facilitators to do.

00:40:15 Speaker 6

But even and speak with one another and support one another and so.

00:40:20 Speaker 6

I think, yeah, that’s it’s the point that I’m making is that I can’t at all in any way list various kinds of risks that would come from this.

00:40:31 Speaker 6

UM, but that’s the risk.

00:40:34 Speaker 6

In different ways is a part of it.

00:40:39 Speaker 7

Alright, so just following on what is Roger said the whole notion of which that’s.

00:40:47 Speaker 7

One cannot fully answer page all of the risk out there.

00:40:53 Speaker 7

We can only try your best before going onto the field.

00:40:58 Speaker 7

OK.

00:40:58 Speaker 7

But then again, I think as facilitators while on the field, one has to be continuously reflective because?

00:41:09 Speaker 7

Uhm, within this situation?

00:41:13 Speaker 7

Look, it look like there’s no risk.

00:41:16 Speaker 7

But when you go back and think about what has happened or what is happening for time, you can then envisage, likely with writing for arising form in an incident or something that happened.

00:41:28 Speaker 7

So I think as well such as we should continuously.

00:41:32 Speaker 7

You cannot fully anticipate audience even why in this section sometimes you would encounter or BTC likely which possibilities after?

00:41:44 Speaker 7

Don’t search.

00:41:45 Speaker 7

Thank you.

00:41:48 Speaker 1

I think that’s so interesting and you both really touch on that kind of element of when you’re working with people and they’re giving their story that it’s the respect that’s required around it and it is actually real privilege I think to be in that space and to be receiving that story and.

00:42:02 Speaker 1

I really like how that was put across.

00:42:06 Speaker 1

Thank you.

00:42:08 Speaker 1

So I I guess.

00:42:09 Speaker 1

With when people are doing students and.

00:42:12 Speaker 1

Conducting research or.

00:42:14 Speaker 1

Uhm, more advanced academics are conducting research then it’s.

00:42:18 Speaker 1

There’s always that kind of, UM, having to evidence things, isn’t there?

00:42:21 Speaker 1

There’s always that kind of having to back things up.

00:42:23 Speaker 1

So how do you know?

00:42:24 Speaker 1

In this circumstance, ’cause.

00:42:25 Speaker 1

Obviously it’s not like you’re doing, UM.

00:42:29 Speaker 1

Research that you’re like in a in a hard science that you’re backing up or that you can check or UM, so how do you know that story?

00:42:37 Speaker 1

Is true.

00:42:41 Speaker 7

OK, so there are two ways to look at that question.

00:42:46 Speaker 7

Now, if the story is true, you can look at it from the angle of whether the story is genuine or authentic, or you can look at it from the angle of what.

00:43:00 Speaker 7

The process of getting this story is rigorous, all right, if you recall what Joanna said.

00:43:08 Speaker 7

And for our research, what storytelling means to us is not the idea of this perfect story, but the process of construction.

00:43:19 Speaker 7

You know the meaning, how people make sense of something that that has happened to them or something that is happening to them.

00:43:28 Speaker 7

You know how the constructor can construct meaning of their lived experiences, so in that sense.

00:43:34 Speaker 7

The focus of research will not be to identify whether the story is true or not, but trying to understand how they have been able to construct meaning from the way they have presented the story.

00:43:49 Speaker 7

Then when it comes to the other dimension of regal, the process of getting this story.

00:43:55 Speaker 7

How are we truly authentically getting this story as it should be done?

00:44:01 Speaker 7

I think Joanna will be able to answer that better.

00:44:05 Speaker 7

Yeah, I mean it.

00:44:07 Speaker 7

It’s a.

00:44:07 Speaker 4

Really interesting question, and I think as Jane said the question of whether or not the story is true, it kind of assumes that there is a truth to be found in this story.

00:44:21 Speaker 4

So if we let.

00:44:22 Speaker 4

Go of that idea and recognize that the story is about, as Jane said, is about the storyteller making meaning.

00:44:32 Speaker 4

Through the story, then, the question is not whether or not it’s true, but is this the best version of the story that the storyteller wants to create?

00:44:42 Speaker 4

And so the therefore I guess when we look at sort of what we mean by quality or rigor and storytelling, you know you can do storytelling it at lots of different levels of depth and the process that we’ve been talking about is a five day process at a minimum.

00:45:02 Speaker 4

That’s very different from a one hour interview, you know, and that’s not to say that you couldn’t get a narrative from a one hour interview, but it will be different from the type of story that we’re talking about that is created through an extended process.

00:45:21 Speaker 4

So I think the question of truth in this story is really more about.

00:45:30 Speaker 4

Uhm, the level of expression that is in the story.

00:45:34 Speaker 4

And when you see a story where someone is very confident in their expression of that story, it.

00:45:44 Speaker 4

Really comes across in the story itself.

00:45:47 Speaker 4

There’s a quality to that story that is different from other ones.

00:45:52 Speaker 4

And that I think is what we’re hoping for, you know, for participants to feel like they can they can achieve in their own story and that looks very different for each person.

00:46:02 Speaker 4

It’s not the same.

00:46:04 Speaker 4

The stories are all different, just like the people are all different.

00:46:09 Speaker 1

So you started.

00:46:09 Speaker 1

To talk a bit there about that process of uhm, that it’s, you know, it’s an extended process.

00:46:15 Speaker 1

It isn’t just something that you do very quickly, so could you maybe let students know maybe what a typical day looks like?

00:46:23 Speaker 1

Uhm, when you’re doing storytelling research and how do you facilitate?

00:46:29 Speaker 1

The approach what do you need to be prepared for.

00:46:33 Speaker 2

Well, I think the first thing to say is that this is not an off the shelf method that you can.

00:46:41 Speaker 2

Do in this context and this context, and over here and with these people.

00:46:46 Speaker 2

There’s a there’s a set of common sort of principles and activities that we use in this approach that we might use in different contexts.

00:46:55 Speaker 2

But the actual way that workshop would happen in different contexts is very dependent on the, UM, the research question that you’re interested in the people that you’re working with.

00:47:07 Speaker 2

The time that you have.

00:47:08 Speaker 2

The age of the people that you know, the familiarity of the group with each other and very practically your budget is a really, you know, big consideration.

00:47:18 Speaker 2

So you’ve got all these things and every workshop would, you know, we would spend weeks and weeks planning and.

00:47:27 Speaker 2

But in terms of the sort of format I guess.

00:47:33 Speaker 2

And again, others feel free to come in who’ve done it in different.

00:47:35 Speaker 2

Contexts but the.

00:47:37 Speaker 2

The idea is so the end the end result of the workshop is a for each participant too.

00:47:46 Speaker 2

Come away with a 3 to 5 minute digital story, which will be a narration of their story over a series of images that is recorded on a on a tablet.

00:47:55 Speaker 2

So and that will be their story.

00:47:58 Speaker 2

And in the process of getting there involves a whole range of activities that help people to sort of zoom out and see their whole life and then zoom in on a particular issue and maybe zoom out again in again and moving between these different kind of levels of thinking about their story across the week and then.

00:48:18 Speaker 2

Helping them to.

00:48:21 Speaker 2

To kind of decide on the what their story might be about and then helping them to generate a construct a narrative around that around that uhm instance or occasion or event that they that they have chosen to write about and.

00:48:36 Speaker 2

We would do that through a whole a huge range of activities on an individual level and in a group level really high energy.

00:48:46 Speaker 2

Activities and then much more quiet and reflective ones come, you know, using, as Joanna said earlier, lots of different kind of modes of expression.

00:48:54 Speaker 2

So drama and art and collage and.

00:48:58 Speaker 2

And so on and so on and then uh.

00:49:01 Speaker 2

Are uh really core?

00:49:04 Speaker 2

Sort of strand of the UM, workshop is the story circle.

00:49:09 Speaker 2

Uh, because this is a this is a process that’s based on iterative story development, and the story will change and develop across the across the week or across the period of the workshop.

00:49:18 Speaker 2

And in the story circle, UM, the participants come together and share their story, and they’ll do that multiple times.

00:49:25 Speaker 2

Uhm, and in each story circle, they would have a a critical friend and there will be prompt questions.

00:49:31 Speaker 2

So even though the story that they tell is is very much a personal process, sorry, a personal story, the process.

00:49:38 Speaker 2

Of generating that.

00:49:39 Speaker 2

Story it is a collective activity.

00:49:44 Speaker 2

So that that is a kind of snapshot, but then there would be loads of different ways that it would vary.

00:49:48 Speaker 2

So Faith and I are doing a storytelling process with, UM, adolescent girls and Zimbabwe and most of whom have only.

00:49:57 Speaker 2

Had a couple of years of formal schooling and so one of the UM.

00:50:03 Speaker 2

Kind of tweaks.

00:50:04 Speaker 2

That to the design.

00:50:05 Speaker 2

So this is all based on Joanna sort of approach that she’s bringing into this group and one of the tweaks that we made for those involving research was this.

00:50:13 Speaker 2

The entire workshop is text free, so it’s a it was a week long workshop on storytelling without using any text and we had loads of different ways of helping the girls to articulate UM.

00:50:24 Speaker 2

Their story without having to read anything or write anything down.

00:50:27 Speaker 2

And that was a, you know, a big attempt to make that that workshop really inclusive of.

00:50:32 Speaker 2

You know, the girl who had the lead.

00:50:33 Speaker 2

Just the least educationally stability to be able to read and write, but making it the same for everybody so she didn’t feel like she was losing out by not being able to read and write.

00:50:42 Speaker 2

And I’m sure other people have loads.

00:50:44 Speaker 2

Of different examples on how it might look different in different contexts with different people.

00:50:49 Speaker 1

I think that’s really important, isn’t it?

00:50:50 Speaker 1

The contextuality of it is just is really important and even.

00:50:57 Speaker 1

You’re saying the workshops adapt and change depending who you’re working with and et cetera, but do you think it’s also important for students if they’re going to come?

00:51:07 Speaker 1

Do this methodology and to make it part of their research.

00:51:11 Speaker 1

To do some level of training as well.

00:51:13 Speaker 1

Uhm, I know I had a great opportunity to attend some workshops myself and also making your own digital stories.

00:51:19 Speaker 1

Really helpful, isn’t it?

00:51:20 Speaker 1

Because then you understand the process that other people are going through.

00:51:25 Speaker 1

Nodding to agree.

00:51:28

Thank you.

00:51:30 Speaker 5

Alright, so let me first speak to my experience. I started considering and using storytelling in 2017 and prior to that I.

00:51:41 Speaker 5

Had never thought.

00:51:42 Speaker 5

Of it as a method that could be used in academic research.

00:51:47 Speaker 5

And I I became exposed to storytelling.

00:51:51 Speaker 5

By reading other people’s work and subsequently using it in the small projects that I was, I was part of them.

00:51:59 Speaker 5

And I guess the 10 for me was when I attended a workshop, a storytelling workshop in Cape Town in 2018, where I saw the potential actually of the method and decided that this is what I wanted to do with most of the projects that I was going to be part of their.

00:52:19 Speaker 5

After so knowing what I know now.

00:52:23 Speaker 5

About the potential and the challenges that that come with using storytelling that Yusra mentioned, I would definitely encourage anyone who’s thinking about using storytelling to think about the things that we have already discussed and also be really honest to themselves in terms of why they want to use.

00:52:44 Speaker 5

Storytelling as a method.

00:52:45 Speaker 5

So for example, you would ask yourself questions such as.

00:52:49 Speaker 5

Why am I interested in and why?

00:52:52 Speaker 5

And what is it that storytelling can do that other research methods cannot do?

00:52:58 Speaker 5

And what’s in it for the participants?

00:53:02 Speaker 5

What is?

00:53:03 Speaker 5

What is it that the people participating are going to get out of the process and out of the output?

00:53:09 Speaker 5

So for me those are very important questions to ask before considering storytelling.

00:53:15 Speaker 5

And I mean similar to choosing context that was discussed earlier.

00:53:21 Speaker 5

You would need to be sincere about the intention because storytelling is beyond hearing and listening to people stories.

00:53:30 Speaker 5

It was a lot in the process and after we’ve actually exited the field as we call it research, so I think.

00:53:41 Speaker 5

Most of the answers to those questions would require reading widely, obviously.

00:53:47 Speaker 5

What storytelling and other methods?

00:53:50 Speaker 5

Because then that’s going to help you make the decision and the choice, but most importantly.

00:53:56 Speaker 5

I’m not sure that it would be a good idea to just go to the field and say I’m going to you very telling without getting some orientation in the form of it can be seminars, it can be workshops like I attended or some maybe attending.

00:54:16 Speaker 5

Webinars on storytelling?

00:54:18 Speaker 5

Uh, because I think, like I said it, there is a lot involved in the storing storytelling process.

00:54:25 Speaker 5

Like what USRA and others have already highlighted.

00:54:28 Speaker 5

It’s quite a lot of ethical challenge.

00:54:30 Speaker 5

Changes that would come with it for both facilitators and participants.

00:54:36 Speaker 5

So for example, you have emotions involved, you have time, we have money involved and other risks that are part of the process.

00:54:45 Speaker 5

So I guess as someone who has been both.

00:54:50 Speaker 5

A participant in the facilitator in the storytelling process.

00:54:55 Speaker 5

And seeing how rewarding the storytelling process is for both participants and researchers or facilitators alike, I would definitely encourage anyone considering this.

00:55:10 Speaker 5

If at all possible, attend a storytelling web shop.

00:55:15 Speaker 5

And be a participant first, then you will be in a position to be able to facilitate because you learn a lot.

00:55:22 Speaker 5

Uh, by just being a participant?

00:55:25

Right.

00:55:26 Speaker 1

You really do.

00:55:27 Speaker 1

I think understanding the process and what the participant goes through is just invaluable.

00:55:33 Speaker 1

Jennifer, did you have something to add?

00:55:35 Speaker 3

I was just saying that I totally agree to everything that Faith has said and which really feeds into what you strong was saying earlier about, you know, all that needs to be considered.

00:55:46 Speaker 3

In the process of what to prepare.

00:55:48 Speaker 3

For I think.

00:55:49 Speaker 3

For a PhD student, in addition to that is really.

00:55:52 Speaker 3

Be realistically thinking about what is possible within the scope of a PhD study.

00:55:58 Speaker 3

You know, the time limits that I involved, you know, for you to think about because you might have, you know, yeah, you would have to think about, you know, the restrictions that you might have, you know, it depends in some context, for example because of.

00:56:11 Speaker 3

All of these.

00:56:12 Speaker 3

Strong ethical implications that are there.

00:56:17 Speaker 3

You know I’m working in Uganda now where you take it may take you like 22 months to get ethical. Clarence Forest or attended research that is as intensive and rigorous as we are. You know we; we are advocating. So those are some kind of issues to think about but also.

00:56:34 Speaker 3

The elements of collaboration in facilitating a storytelling workshop is really, really, in my experience, really key.

00:56:43 Speaker 3

I think about, you know, haven’t also been a participant and a facilitator.

00:56:48 Speaker 3

I think about how I would have gone through the process if I didn’t have a Joanna there, or Alison or a Faith, but.

00:56:55 Speaker 3

You know, and now that we’re going forward with it, I still, you know, think about how really useful it is to have that kind of collaboration in in really successfully pulling off.

00:57:08 Speaker 3

A workshop, it’s it.

00:57:10 Speaker 3

It comes in.

00:57:11 Speaker 3

Just not just about the friendship that you would need to lean on if you if you can’t have that, but also the care you know the handling of the tensions and the pressures that would come in, the constant reflection on your, you know, your own facilitation.

00:57:29 Speaker 3

And you know how that’s working for everyone, you know, reaching out to the participants.

00:57:34 Speaker 3

Sometimes it’s also really.

00:57:37 Speaker 3

Easier or even doable when you have that collaboration.

00:57:41 Speaker 3

So for a PhD student who might intend to be a lone worker.

00:57:45 Speaker 3

Uh, in a storytelling approach, you know, it might be important to consider whether that might be possible within the scope of the PhD work, and whether to consider really after the training and everything, getting some kind of support.

00:58:01 Speaker 3

Uh, in that respect, in terms of facilitation, things we’re going through, but also thinking about what that might mean for those who would be supporting, it’s your PhD.

00:58:09 Speaker 3

And when you talk about output, for example, what might they be interested in that and what would they get?

00:58:14 Speaker 3

So all of those kind of, you know things are really like.

00:58:19 Speaker 3

Important to think about for a PG I feel if I’m honest, I would really recommend an early career researcher and a PhD student to maybe consider the storytelling approach, which I think is really uh.

00:58:38 Speaker 3

An interesting a fascinating, fascinating, fascinating, and a useful way to do research even at PhD studies.

00:58:46 Speaker 3

Is what elements of a period of a storytelling approach would be useful could enrich you know your research, you.

00:58:54 Speaker 3

You could go on, you know, after your PhD for example, to do something more elaborate, more extensive.

00:59:00 Speaker 3

You know, if you don’t have the resources and the support to do it at that level.

00:59:04 Speaker 3

But what elements of the storytelling approach?

00:59:06 Speaker 3

Could at this moment more realistically and practically support and enrich your work and maybe think about that more in moving forward with the approach for your PhD.

00:59:18 Speaker 1

Yeah, and the solutions of that as well could be working with like a local organization, couldn’t it?

00:59:22 Speaker 1

I know for my PhD I’ve been working with a local organization that already works strongly with the community, and for them it’s been.

00:59:30 Speaker 1

Uhm, useful process for them as well and sharing the stories for their own advocacy.

00:59:35 Speaker 1

So it’s kind of like it’s not only given me kind of people to work alongside and to help invaluably with, but also it’s to know that it’s of use to them is really important as well, I think.

00:59:48 Speaker 6

So, I mean we’re talking about the storytelling methodology and approach, but.

00:59:53 Speaker 6

Well, what’s, what’s very useful and insightful about the process itself is that there are elements.

01:00:00 Speaker 6

I mean, we’ve also speaking earlier about there are elements of storytelling that can help people do different forms of expression.

01:00:07 Speaker 6

So it’s like Jennifer is definitely there are there are pieces to storytelling that can help people.

01:00:14 Speaker 6

Articulate something.

01:00:16 Speaker 6

You know, one of the one of the activities we do is like there over of life.

01:00:20 Speaker 6

You know, using the metaphorical river in drawing and illustrating it to talk through a a topic or prompt or an experience and so that that that there is an element of the story to the fuller storytelling process that you could use in conjunction perhaps like with.

01:00:40 Speaker 6

With interviewing and so on.

01:00:41 Speaker 6

So it’s not to say that, you know, in order to do storytelling, it’s.

01:00:45 Speaker 6

It’s either or.

01:00:46 Speaker 6

You either you either going to use it or you’re not going to use it.

01:00:49 Speaker 6

But you can take inspiration from the storytelling method itself and incorporate that into the methods that you are interested in you.

01:00:56 Speaker 6

Using and what I also want is I I’m thinking about a friend of mine.

01:01:02 Speaker 6

She takes such keen interest in storytelling, but she is so, so anxious and she cannot imagine herself being in a room facilitating it.

01:01:18 Speaker 6

So like, you know, how do you then uhm, what’s nice about storytelling as a method and in the process itself is that there are different elements to it that you can use.

01:01:32 Speaker 6

To kind of cater to your comfort and what you feel capable of doing.

01:01:37 Speaker 6

And so sometimes it could be a remote facilitation even there is just …so I was also thinking about like you know, if you are interested in the method but you are also so anxious about being the main facilitator.

01:01:51 Speaker 6

Like Jennifer said, having a network of people to support you is super, super important because that’s where your advice lies, your debriefing lies.

01:02:01 Speaker 6

Uhm, but that there are also ways to think creatively about this that can make you feel comfortable in facilitating it differently.

01:02:13 Speaker 6

You don’t have to be super extroverted all the time like everyone in this podcast.

01:02:21 Speaker 1

I guess, like Jennifer Connor said as well, you need to remember sometimes as a PhD student that your PhD hopefully isn’t the last piece of research you’re going to.

01:02:28 Speaker 1

Be involved with.

01:02:29 Speaker 1

So even just touching on an element like you’re saying can be really then lead to more involvement with digital stories or different forms of storytelling over research as well?

01:02:38 Speaker 2

Yeah, I guess, I think one of the things that I love the most about being in this collective is that we all come to it with distinct expertise and interests, and it’s a real embodiment of social cultural learning, which is what my background is in and it’s, you know, it’s happening in practice and I absolutely love that and I it, it runs really counter to this other narrative in academia, which is this kind of this superstar academic who doesn’t need anyone else who has all the, you know, forced our F papers and all the big Pi grants and yeah, exactly. And, and I think the challenge for PhD students is that that.

01:03:27 Speaker 2

That you know.

01:03:29 Speaker 2

Well, it’s actually quite a short period of your academic career overall is really focused on pushing you towards this identity, it being a sort of an independent.

01:03:36 Speaker 2

And research.

01:03:37 Speaker 2

Yeah, not working in a collective.

01:03:39 Speaker 2

And so I think that it’s hard in the PhD to work in a collective because you have to be constantly proving that it’s, you know, independent.

01:03:47 Speaker 2

A thought and that it’s, you know, it’s you own that knowledge generation so you can jump through the hoop of getting the PhD and I think that’s the real.

01:03:56 Speaker 2

It’s, it’s one of the big challenges, right, reflecting back on, you know, having done a PhD, I think, and now supervising students who really want to work collectively, but having to kind of caution them about, you know.

01:04:07 Speaker 2

How far they can go with that within the within the confines of the PhD is really challenging and.

01:04:13 Speaker 2

But I think, you know, again on the other hand, we really don’t want to say that you can’t do this within a PhD in like Bushra and Jennifer.

01:04:20 Speaker 2

And Faith has said it’s about elements of it and Jennifer speaks really articulately about how she had already done her PhD.

01:04:28 Speaker 2

I mean, she can explain it better, but she only got her data when she started looking at storytelling.

01:04:33 Speaker 2

And then it was through understanding storytelling and the kind of epistemological shifts that she went through made her think completely differently about the data that she’d already got.

01:04:44 Speaker 2

You have to say it much more articulately than we can.

01:04:48 Speaker 1

This meant we’d onto actually my last question, Jennifer, but I just want to say before I move to the last question and then I’ll come straight back to Jennifer with that because I don’t want to keep you too long.

01:04:58 Speaker 1

Is there any quick, very quickly, is there any reading that people should be doing?

01:05:02 Speaker 1

And can you signpost people to about digital storytelling?

01:05:07 Speaker 2

Well, I mean, Joanne has written a lot about this, so I’d put you towards.

01:05:12 Speaker 2

Joanne’s work and I I really love and I always come back to Michael Jackson’s work from the politics of story telling. His book. Uhm, I think that’s, you know, really talks really beautifully about.

01:05:25 Speaker 2

You know, especially the thing the question earlier about truth and stories and you know, he’s he writes really wonderfully about.

01:05:31 Speaker 2

You know, even the stories that we tell ourselves in our heads aren’t true because they’re how we make sense of things to ourselves and that, you know, that that really resonates with the work that we do.

01:05:44 Speaker 2

Recently we’ve been thinking about UM, so a lot of Hannah Arendt’s work is obviously very relevant to the work of storytelling and this idea of the subjective in between. But we’re trying to sort of.

01:05:55 Speaker 2

Maybe move away from Hannah Arendt, work a little bit and think about.

01:05:58 Speaker 2

A you thinking about that idea in a different way?

01:06:03 Speaker 2

And Santhosh, his work about contact zones.

01:06:05 Speaker 2

Uhm, I find really helpful in thinking about the kind of intercultural translation and how story stories put you at that point where you’re forced to come to translate and.

01:06:15 Speaker 2

It’s what comes out of that translation that is the really fascinating thing about stories.

01:06:19 Speaker 2

They’d be my top three.

01:06:22 Speaker 1

Right, and I’ll put links to them as well.

01:06:25 Speaker 1

On the 糖心传媒 website.

01:06:26 Speaker 1

With their podcast.

01:06:28 Speaker 1

So something that we’re going to be asking all our guests on the podcast, which I’m going to start with Jennifer, just to put you on the spot because of what Alison mentioned earlier is.

01:06:37 Speaker 1

Uhm, what?

01:06:38 Speaker 1

You wish you’d been told as a PhD student that you now know and didn’t know that?

01:06:43 Speaker 3

Well, that’s them.

01:06:44 Speaker 3

I could, I could write the whole thesis on that.

01:06:49 Speaker 3

I tend to keep it very short.

01:06:54 Speaker 3

Very, very short, but I think it’s for me, it’s about, you know.

01:06:59 Speaker 3

What it really means to be a either an insider or outsider in a research process.

01:07:07 Speaker 3

How that is really nuanced and how that doesn’t necessarily.

01:07:13 Speaker 3

Always tie down tight, tight to or only links to your background or where you’ve lived or how much you’ve lived there.

01:07:23 Speaker 3

I’m saying this because of my specific case of having been a Nigerian who was researching Nigeria and I was very at home with the idea, you know, of research.

01:07:33 Speaker 3

In Nigeria, I had a supervisor who was really.

01:07:36 Speaker 3

We who had lot of experience, you know in working in the Nigerian context as well.

01:07:41 Speaker 3

So she really cheered me on but I think she did try to raise my awareness of how sleeping I was constituting myself as a Nigerian and.

01:07:56 Speaker 3

My knowledge of context how that really is.

01:07:58 Speaker 3

To that she, she, she, she.

01:08:00 Speaker 3

** *** signaled from the beginning that you would need to calm down a little bit about what you think you know about context, because that means everything about how you engage with your participants, how you go ahead to even be open enough to know, uh, and to learn from the process.

01:08:20 Speaker 3

I took her advice, of course.

01:08:21 Speaker 1

So trying to get past another like assumptions, trying to trying to get past our assumption.

01:08:23 Speaker 3

Yeah, exactly.

01:08:25 Speaker 3

But I wish that, you know, I had done.

01:08:29 Speaker 3

I I wish that I had really engaged with that more deeply or I have.

01:08:34 Speaker 3

I was really pushed to do that more because it was a shock, you know, to a very large extent when I went into the field and.

01:08:43 Speaker 3

Even though before that I had written all about how I might be an outsider.

01:08:48 Speaker 3

Even though I’m an insider, because I was in a comparative reason.

01:08:52 Speaker 3

That was for between the northern and the southern part of Nigeria.

01:08:57 Speaker 3

And, you know, eventually my entire argument became about how you shouldn’t really homogenize anywhere, even within specific regions of a national boundary.

01:09:07 Speaker 3

So you can’t even homogenize the entire T of the north, for example, but also about.

01:09:12 Speaker 3

The kind of effect that has on the researcher who is going out there and feeling more confident about being, you know, part of the process.

01:09:20 Speaker 3

I’m trying to distinguish themselves from someone who would be a total include outsider, so I think the meaning of otherness.

01:09:27 Speaker 3

In this case has been really deeper that we would think it is and how to really engage with that constantly you know as you go on and not take for granted at all what positionality really means within research.

01:09:42 Speaker 3

I think that’s something I’ve wish I knew more about or I engaged with in a.

01:09:49 Speaker 3

A level at that time.

01:09:52 Speaker 3

I know all about it now at last.

01:09:58 Speaker 1

Obviously, OK, I do, you know, go.

01:10:00 Speaker 7

Right.

01:10:04 Speaker 7

I think it’s a.

01:10:05 Speaker 5

For me it’s really a difficult one.

01:10:10 Speaker 5

Yeah, because most of the my PhD research was definitely was driven by my own, my own experiences as a migrant.

01:10:20 Speaker 5

So I understood my personality welfare, but I think knowing what I know now in terms of methodology.

01:10:31 Speaker 5

I would have really considered, uh, using some elements of storytelling because what I did in my PhD was narrative interviews, but I was not familiar with the storytelling methodology then.

01:10:50 Speaker 5

Yeah, but if I would have to go back to the field, I would definitely consider storytelling because I think there’s some rich stories that I missed from.

01:11:03 Speaker 5

Uh, from the participants that I was working with, and I think they those stories may have driven my passion maybe in a different direction, but I do see that there are lot of migration and issue migration and education issues that are very.

01:11:20 Speaker 5

Contentious nowadays, which I feel like I didn’t do justice to then because of my lack of knowledge in terms of methodology.

01:11:30 Speaker 1

Thank you, Joanna.

01:11:34 Speaker 4

Oh, it’s a really.

01:11:36 Speaker 4

I haven’t thought about that for a long time.

01:11:38 Speaker 4

It kind of while since my PhD uhm.

01:11:45 Speaker 4

I remember I remember someone telling me in the course of my PhD I forgot who it was.

01:11:49 Speaker 4

Now I think it was one of my colleagues where I was working that uhm.

01:11:56 Speaker 4

When you’re doing the PhD, it feels like the most important thing that you’ll ever do or ever write.

01:12:01 Speaker 4

And then when you finish it, you realize.

01:12:04 Speaker 4

That it’s probably not.

01:12:07 Speaker 2

That’s what, that’s what blood man told me.

01:12:10 Speaker 4

Is it OK?

01:12:11 Speaker 4

Clearly there’s like a handbook for supervisors where this gets put in it, but I remember, you know, when I was in inside the PhD, It was so hard to keep that perspective because it just felt.

01:12:26 Speaker 4

All consuming like nothing could possibly be more important than what I was doing in.

01:12:31 Speaker 4

The PhD it.

01:12:32 Speaker 4

Was the most important thing I had to think about all the time, you know?

01:12:37 Speaker 4

And it was really only.

01:12:40 Speaker 4

Afterwards that I was able to see that.

01:12:44 Speaker 4

It’s a lot better.

01:12:46 Speaker 4

It would have been a lot better if I could have treated the PA.

01:12:48 Speaker 4

HD more like what it was, which is a stage in an academic career rather than the defining moment of who you are and who.

01:12:58 Speaker 4

You will be forever and ever.

01:13:00 Speaker 4

Uh, so I I think.

01:13:03 Speaker 4

But it’s.

01:13:03 Speaker 4

It’s very hard.

01:13:04 Speaker 4

To do that, because there’s so much about the structure of a PhD that pushes it into every corner of your being.

01:13:14 Speaker 4

That it can really take over.

01:13:15 Speaker 4

And I think I was lucky that when I was doing my PhD I was working and I had two kids, so.

01:13:26 Speaker 1

What’s grounded developers then as well, do it.

01:13:26 Speaker 4

I did.

01:13:26 Speaker 4

It part time.

01:13:28 Speaker 1

You’ve got to yeah, can’t.

01:13:30 Speaker 1

Compute, so I had.

01:13:31 Speaker 4

To sometimes leave it, you know.

01:13:33 Speaker 4

Yeah, but, but aside from that, I think, you know, it doesn’t.

01:13:38 Speaker 4

I wish I had known that.

01:13:40 Speaker 4

It doesn’t have to define what you will be doing as an academic in the future.

01:13:46 Speaker 4

Yeah, you know, you can, you can go through the PhD and you can also leave it behind, although of course you still take it with you, but you know you can go in other directions.

01:13:55 Speaker 1

We can shift focus on meeting, yeah.

01:13:58 Speaker 4

Yeah, yeah.

01:13:59 Speaker 4

But at the time, you know, it just felt like it was so…

01:14:02 Speaker 1

That’s really important for students to hear, actually.

01:14:03 Speaker 4

It’s just.

01:14:06 Speaker 4

Yeah, yeah.

01:14:08 Speaker 4

It will be over.

01:14:09 Speaker 4

And you can. You can.

01:14:10 Speaker 1

Wrong night.

01:14:11 Speaker 4

There can be other pathways that you don’t see when you’re in it.

01:14:14 Speaker 4

They’re just sort of hidden because you’re so, you know, focused on the PhD.

01:14:22 Speaker 6

As someone who has not yet done their PhD, I have been battling with it for a long for a longish time, so there are so many people who are encouraging me to do the PhD as this natural next step in my academic career.

01:14:47 Speaker 6

And I still hold this thing where I say that.

01:14:53 Speaker 6

I’ve always imagined that any PhD I do will become part of something else.

01:15:07 Speaker 6

So what I mean by that is that I’ve always imagined that a PhD and the work I do comes alive.

01:15:13 Speaker 6

And that dissertation and the red robe and the certificate that says I’ve officially clocked university.

01:15:19 Speaker 6

Uhm, will be the formality of it, but that I would want to create something that I can return to once I’ve submitted everything and.

01:15:31 Speaker 6

I haven’t found what it is that I want to do.

01:15:36 Speaker 6

At times I feel like there’s a clock ticking.

01:15:39 Speaker 6

You know something that’s chasing me there saying, you know you are turning 51, uh, you’re gonna have to start doing a PhD Sometime real soon if you want to be eligible for funding.

01:15:54 Speaker 6

And so I’m defiant in that I’m actually going to go study a second master’s because.

01:16:01 Speaker 6

It’s something that’s going to contribute to the to the actual career that I’m forging and creating, but I don’t, I’ve not yet let go of the PhD So I think I’m in a very fortunate space and place because I have people who have already done the PhDs and I have a support network of, you know, people who established in their various careers.

01:16:26 Speaker 6

And then I always make use of my support network is 1.

01:16:31 Speaker 6

Whether Joanna wants to receive messages and voice notes from me or not, I will send it to you.

01:16:39 Speaker 6

So I guess I guess I would be in the same place as those students who are really struggling with the question of do I or don’t I?

01:16:48 Speaker 6

And if I do, it’s dedicating so much time of my life, a minimum of like three years.

01:16:55 Speaker 6

To something or more and if I don’t.

01:17:01 Speaker 6

Will that impact me in any way?

01:17:03 Speaker 6

Will I have regrets?

01:17:05 Speaker 6

I don’t know.

01:17:07 Speaker 6

So I’m still in that little liminal space of decision making.

01:17:11 Speaker 1

And I think it is a big decision when you’re actually already working in research.

01:17:15 Speaker 1

So then do a PhD I think is a is a big decision.

01:17:19 Speaker 1

Yeah, I understand that, Jane.

01:17:22 Speaker 1

And then Alison.

01:17:25 Speaker 7

What I’m thinking about the question, I think there are so many.

01:17:32 Speaker 7

It’s funny, but there’s so much I wish I could have.

01:17:36 Speaker 7

I wish I had known he left before I saw the PhD But I’m I just wanna focus on one of them.

01:17:44 Speaker 7

And that is I’m not being afraid to make a change.

01:17:49 Speaker 7

You know, sometimes we will feel that we’ve come too far to stop or to go back or, you know, to change the direction whether the methodology you have chosen, the research purpose you have chosen, you know and then thinking about overspending, I’ve read so much at.

01:18:09 Speaker 7

Those are stuff like that.

01:18:11 Speaker 7

But I I think what I would have, looking back, wish I had known that it was OK to make any change I felt was necessary at that time were done methodologically, whether in terms of my research public OK and research questions, things like that.

01:18:33 Speaker 1

That’s good advice.

01:18:34 Speaker 1

Thank you, Jane.

01:18:35 Speaker 1

Now listen.

01:18:37 Speaker 2

Uhm, well, when Joanna was speaking, I was reminded of something that my dad kept saying to me in that final year and I also had life going on in my final year of my PhD.

01:18:50 Speaker 2

I was expecting a baby.

01:18:51 Speaker 2

Was due as I was submitting, so it was kind of against the clock to get it in and.

01:18:55 Speaker 2

And my dad said you know you’re never going to finish it.

01:19:00 Speaker 2

You just have to decide to stop working on it and it’s that kind of knowing when that point is was having people around you can help you know when that point is because you could make your PhD.

01:19:02

Oh no.

01:19:10 Speaker 2

D last for your whole career.

01:19:11 Speaker 2

Uhm, but you can’t.

01:19:13 Speaker 2

You need to get be getting on with the rest of your career ’cause that’s the exciting part.

01:19:16 Speaker 2

So having people around you.

01:19:18 Speaker 2

Who can help you know when to stop is really good and then my second one is much more.

01:19:25 Speaker 2

Is practical in a way and it’s about the examiners that you pick up and really try to be involved in that discussion with your supervisors because especially if you’re using something that’s a bit.

01:19:37 Speaker 2

Different or more creative? Uhm.

01:19:42 Speaker 2

I think supervisors push you towards examiners who have a really big footprint in the field or you know big status and that that can really benefit you in the future.

01:19:52 Speaker 2

You know, I’ve had a brilliant examiner who also happens to be very prestigious and he’s been a great sort of support through my career since.

01:19:58 Speaker 2

Then because you know.

01:20:02 Speaker 2

But I’ve also had students who we’ve picked someone.

01:20:05 Speaker 2

You know, we’ve picked people and then they’ve had really difficult viewers because there’s this kind of way of thinking about what a PhD is and should be.

01:20:14 Speaker 2

That’s actually very old fashioned and what I was saying earlier about.

01:20:18 Speaker 2

Uhm, learning and you know in collectives and thinking about learning as a more.

01:20:23 Speaker 2

Kind of social cultural thing.

01:20:26 Speaker 2

It is changing slowly, but not everybody is on board with it and I think if we keep you know.

01:20:32 Speaker 2

There are certain ways that we can kind of push back against that as students and supervisors and picking an examiner who.

01:20:40 Speaker 2

Buys into those ideas of thinking about learning differently and thinking about what knowledge is in a different way.

01:20:44 Speaker 2

I think it’s probably more useful to launch your career than someone who’s just a big name on a, you know, PowerPoint somewhere.

01:20:51 Speaker 2

So yeah, so pick supervisors carefully.

01:20:55 Speaker 2

Sorry, examiners.

01:20:55 Speaker 2

Pick examiners.

01:20:59 Speaker 1

Thank you so much.

01:21:01 Speaker 1

I think it’s been such an interesting conversation and really lead into kind of some bigger themes.

01:21:06 Speaker 1

Obviously, we’ve been focusing a lot on storytelling.

01:21:08 Speaker 1

But really like.

01:21:10 Speaker 1

Just on the consideration that’s needed when thinking about methodology on PhD’s on any projects that you’re involved in and how much to consider, just the practicalities, the ethics, the reason, being honest with yourself of why you’re choosing a methodology I think is really, really important. And also just I think you’re such a great example.

01:21:31 Speaker 1

Of collaborative work.

01:21:33 Speaker 1

And, you know, and just having that kind of, uhm, working with people that.

01:21:39 Speaker 1

You respect and really trust and that can have that support has really come through, I think during this conversation.

01:21:47 Speaker 1

So it’s been great.

01:21:48 Speaker 1

I’ve loved chatting to you all.

01:21:49 Speaker 1

I’ve learned so much about my own research as well, and I think it’s going to be really invaluable for students.

01:21:55 Speaker 1

Thank you all very much.