It's been a while...

A lot has happened since my last post. I got sick with long Covid, struggled for a couple of years, had a placement with Rewilding Britain for three months, started teaching, moved house, and made new friends from my PhD.

In the rest of the world, Covid happened, I was locked inside for months. We had Boris, Truss, and Rishi, and an opposition that looks basically the same as the Tories. Change seems hopeless, but utterly necessary in the face of global crises such as genocide in Gaza, environmental disaster and a turn towards fascism.

With all of this going on, why have I not written more? I think I felt pressure to use social media, but hated it. In terms of my blog, I didn’t know why I would use it, what this blog was for. Is it for myself? For friends? For other researchers? For potential employers? I had no idea. I still don’t have any idea. But I think I will try and write some stuff here regardless. I have come to despise social media. Twitter is full of spam, fake accounts and rage. Facebook now seems to be mostly cartoons for me, which is better than Twitter, but not exactly what I wanted… Even the more equitable versions like Mastodon seem to have the same problems, small texts, lack of nuance, confrontation, and when I do post, there’s no response anyway. Why not just post here then, where no one will read it, but I don’t have to concern myself with the enshittification of social media here.

On my research, during Covid it was hard. I wrote and wrote and struggled to redesign my research from what was going to be an ethnographic study to one using online interviews. But I couldn’t make decisions and struggled with impostor syndrome. I wanted my supervisors to tell me what to do, obviously they couldn’t. I tried to do things that would please them, which led to resentment when they didn’t, when what I needed to do was make my own decisions.

At the university of Brighton, my supervisors struggled with Covid lockdown too. The staff made huge efforts to support us, often providing counselling for students that couldn’t get home, had no idea what to do with research, while also dealing with their own difficulties and trying to work from home while often caring for family too.

I interviewed 24 people connected with rewilding in my research. For a large part, I was stuck on critiquing the concept of the “stakeholder”, a word which seems to be flexible enough to mean whatever you want. However, for this reason, its a word which is difficult to build any methodology around, something I discovered at my cost when I couldn’t make decisions about my research. In the end, I did categorise my interviewees but the process was extremely painful and left me feeling depressed for long periods.

For the last six months, I have enjoyed my writing again. I moved out of a damp dark flat that was full of mould which funnily enough didn’t help my writing. It’s still difficult, but I feel like the points I wanted to make are coming together. Rewilding as articulated in the UK seems to be something that is highly influenced by elite landowners and their views of correct land management, and increasingly being transformed by capitalist discourses.

I was supposed to go abroad for a 3 month visit to Wageningen Universite this week. However, my passport turned out to have been put on a list of stolen passports and the confiscated it at the border… apparently there is no way to check this before you travel! I am looking forward to getting out there soon, working with some great academics such as Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher. Hopefully I will be able to submit some papers soon on my work!