Now that I have your attention, it would be remiss not to begin with something everyone needs: context.
This PhD is two years in. There have been a few bumps along the way, some team changes, and the odd escape holiday. Lately, it has felt like we were treading water in a tidal wave of academic writing. One morning we stopped and asked each other a simple question: why are we doing this?
It turned out we had both drifted into a bubble of academic language, and the irony was not lost on us. This blog was meant to record the journey, and part of the research concerns our relationship with nature, place and landscape, and the human connections within them. Yet we weren't experiencing any of it. "Touch grass" may be a catchy slogan, but we had forgotten it entirely. We talk a great deal about trust and transparency, so it seemed only fair to be open about this. We aren't sailing on a millpond.
A Reassuring Word
When we admitted this, our academic support team reassured us that it would be unusual not to feel this way during a PhD, and that it is often a sign you are on the right track. That helped, but we still needed a way out of the identity-crisis whirlpool, and the way out was to reconnect with our purpose, which meant being in the landscape.
The human/nature divide, which we had spent hours reviewing on laptops, hit us in the face. We had separated ourselves from the very thing that made us feel better, and we hadn't expected that to be what held us back. As they say, you can tell someone until you're blue in the face but they only learn until they realise it themselves. Suddenly we were craving the Cornish coastline and moorland air. It made us think about how closely humanity, health and nature are intertwined, and about the growing mental health and nature movement across disciplines. Even the digital tools meant to connect us can pull us away from the places we study.
Sometimes it takes a moment like this to break the complexity back down to basics, or rather, as Jean Boulton would suggest, to embrace it. So we made a promise to spend at least one day a week in the landscape. But getting outside was only half of it. We also needed to remember why we were out there, so we headed off to Cape Cornwall!
Why do we do this?
That first question deserved a proper answer, and it is worth asking during a PhD. Our work had become increasingly desk-based: chapters, literature, references, frameworks and a great many words. All necessary, of course. But we had realised we had become disconnected from the landscape, and from the people at the heart of the research. We couldn't remember the last time we had talked about Cornwall while actually standing in it.
So we went back to our motivations.
For Nige, the research centres on power, influence and equality of access. Why are some voices heard during consultation but absent when decisions are made? How do we include people often described as hard to reach, hard to hear or easy to overlook? How can protected landscapes become places where everyone has a fair opportunity to belong, participate and benefit?
For Tiegs, environmental protection is inseparable from social justice. Individual stories matter, and so does the knowledge held by farmers, conservationists, businesses, community groups and people who have known a landscape for decades. Who holds social capital, who benefits from networks and who remains excluded, but equally in the capacity already present within communities and how research might help strengthen it? That is where hope becomes action, and where academic research can begin to matter beyond academia.
Our motivations are different, but they complement one another. Eight words keep bringing us back to the purpose of the research:
VOICE - POWER- FAIRNESS - INCLUSION - KNOWLEDGE - RELATIONSHIPS - ACTION - HOPE
We are beginning to see a possible progression through them:
VOICE -> INCLUSION -> RELATIONSHIPS -> POWER -> ACTION -> CHANGE
This is an emerging idea, not a finished or validated framework. But it reminds us of something important: being heard is not the same as having influence.
Sometimes reconnecting with research means leaving the desk, returning to fieldwork and remembering the people and places that made the questions matter in the first place. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have some grass to touch!
