The ‘Point’, or How I Wound Up Starting a PhD by Declaring “I Don’t Know”

I certainly haven’t fully processed it, but I’ve just completed my 7^th day of my PhD at University College London, or at least the Zoom equivalent of it. I promised myself I would write my way through this undertaking, and not just those couple hundred thousand words I’ll somehow compile into a thesis that will determine if I get to call myself Doctor in three years. I promised myself I’d put words to, around, and through the entire experience, to commemorate, to connect, to stay true.  

This last week, my morning meditation (cue my closest circle of friends making mostly loving fun of me) focused on naming, honouring, and holding in gratitude the many moments that had to come before so that I could find myself in this, the present moment.

Had you asked me in high school, at any point in college, before my master’s, even after my master’s, I would have said that I would be the last person here, changing her email signature to ‘PhD student’. 

In the last week I’ve had multiple students part of the global health master’s program I finished four years ago ask me what I see as the ‘point’ of research and make definitive statements about their future career plans to ‘do’, not ‘just think’. I resonate deeply with their questions, with their reluctance, with their drive to be a part of change in the world and hesitancy to see that possible within academia. So much of my adamance that I would never go back to school after college, and then never again after my master’s, was rooted in that same fear that to study meant to quit ‘doing’, that same perceived tension between knowing the world and changing the world, that same resistance to getting trapped up the Ivory Tower. 

In my own master’s cohort, there was another layer of questioning I received: why focus on dying children, rather than be part of work that aims to keep them alive? I was repeatedly met with this assumed dichotomy: prevention versus accepting illness, treatment versus giving up, life versus death – a hard line where preserving life and allowing death lie on opposing, disagreeing ends and global health only has space for the one. 

So now, the questions have converged: what is the point of, how is the world going to change by spending three years ‘just’ thinking about dying children? 

It’s not a question I’ve answered, but rather one I ask myself nearly all of the time. 

So how did I end up here? 

I’ve written before about what I see as the basis and purpose of my research project. But how did I, Callie, come to be in this very unexpected place, just studying dying children for three years, and with some vision of continuing my life in research beyond this degree? 

Sometimes when I’m asked this I think of a boy named Wellington, the first child I knew to die. Sometimes I think of watching his father drive away from the children’s home where he left his son just one week before that son would die. 

Other times when I’m asked this I think of a child named Evans, the first child I held knowing full well he would soon die, while his father left the hospital to go in search of any casual labour he could find to pay the piling bills. 

Still other times, I think of watching the mother lying face down, kicking, beating her fists into the earth, screaming for her child whose body had just been wheeled to the morgue. I think of her hoarse voice, of how someone first thought she’d wandered away from the psychiatric ward before they realised, of that process of us all coming into knowing, and yet still having no idea. 

I was seventeen years old through all of these events, so certainly I had no conscious awareness then that those moments might be the first building blocks toward this, but now I see them as nothing but foundational. 

So you could say that this PhD is very personal for me. And it is. And, if asked to pick a side in the Twitter debates, I would say that I don’t see how a PhD could ever not be. 

But the reason I’m here, doing this thing I vowed to never do, is, ultimately, to shift it away from me.

In the years since those moments, I’ve used my memory of them, the emotions they stir up in me, the aspects of my character they established, to motivate me to ‘do’. And while my doing was about the change I wanted to see, it was about the change I defined, desired, deemed. And I was so unaware of just how bound up in the centre of it I was. If asked, I can transport myself back to any of those three moments, and so many others like them, with such vivid detail it’s as if the decade in between never happened. But now when I go back to those places, I can also see all the things I thought I knew then, all the ways my view was limited, and skewed, all the questions I didn’t yet understand how to ask and the complexity I wasn’t capable of keeping close, every unknown to which I wasn’t listening. And I can see that all of that influenced what I ‘did’.

Grounded Theory, the methodology I’m embracing and endeavouring to achieve in my thesis, is, in simplest terms, about letting the data speak, about removing any preconceived hypotheses and arguments, about entering the field site and listening, about intentionally holding yourself in a space of not knowing so that you might be able to illuminate a deeper layer of truth, to explain with complexity what is. 

To succeed in Grounded Theory, and, in my view, all qualitative research, the researcher must actively, critically, and constantly engage with their subjectivity. This process, referred to as reflexivity, is about challenging yourself to acknowledge your position within your research, all the ways that everything you are changes what you see and how you see it, and asking yourself over and over to stay open to seeing something else. 

And, when coupled with participatory and transformative research methods, Grounded Theory can be about shifting power, changing the viewpoint, interrupting colonisation of minds, practices, and beliefs and creating space for the seat of knowledge to be held by those who have lived whatever topic your study seeks to unfold. It can be about watching Wellington’s father drive away, holding Evans in your arms, witnessing that mother’s screams and pausing, waiting before defining, holding yourself in the space of not knowing, asking yourself to look from another angle, and then listening to and collaborating with those fathers, that mother, to determine what is and to deem what change could be. 

So that’s why I’m here: to listen with rigour, to ask questions with openness and intention, to critically look from new and multiple views, to let the data speak so that I might explain with complexity what ‘is’ for dying children and how it is that their deaths are survived, on and in terms other than my own.

And I might not get it right all of the time. It’s likely I won’t. The ideal vision might not go perfectly to plan. It’s likely it won’t. And starting a PhD by declaring “I don’t know” may be ludicrous. But here I am, believing that there is worth, there is life, there is change possible, through just studying dying children for three years. 

I hope you’ll join me.

*P.S. Apologies for this hectic conglomeration of British and American English spelling, I barely know what time it is. Just wait until you hear my accent, or how many times a day I manage to misuse ‘quite’ in both lexicons.