PhD in Numbers...

As someone who continues to feel like an interloper in academia, I'm struck by how much needs to be quantified and measured. It feels like when it comes to how academia functions, numbers are still 'king'. This is despite my research using a qualitative ethnographic methodology, which explores beliefs, behaviours, voices, and experiences.

When asked for a 'research update', just saying "I'm still in my analysis phase" may seem a bit 'woolly' and inefficient.

As I come to the final phase of my PhD (as well as a cliff edge of funding), I thought it would be useful to take stock of what I have been up to in the last 18 months (in numbers...):

• 314,678 words in transcripts

• 32 interview transcripts

• 31 HOURS of interview recordings

• (all of the above has been reviewed 3 times)

• 111 Documents and policies that have been reviewed and analysed

• 9 Research-based meetings attended/observed

• 15 Presentations given

• 2,773 miles travelled for research activities.

  
  

Disability Studies is a notoriously difficult field to find funding for or to shoehorn into an unyielding academic structure; add to this the need to accommodate the experience of crip time for myself and my participants, and it feels that 'doing' a Critical Disability Studies PhD within the 'typical' timeframe was always going to be a challenge.

I dream of futures where academia has the flexibility to honour the pace needed for Disability Studies, to avoid fishbowling and extractive research practices... an academia that authentically wants to hear and centre the voices of disabled people, and values the expertise and insights of disabled researchers; a future of crip academia; an academia that is built on anti-ableist and anti-normalcy ideologies and is "connected to community, solidarity, outspokenness, and defiance" (McRuer, 2019).

Despite all this, I feel honoured to have spent the last 18 months talking to some fantastic people who have shared their experiences of nature, their efforts to find space with nature, and the insights that could help us in these times of biodiversity collapse. At times, these discussions have brought tears; at others, roars of laughter. Those conversations have been had on clifftops, in urban woodlands, next to rivers, in front rooms or cars looking out of windows. Witnessing the joys that nature brings, witnessing the harms that are being done as well as deep discussions of the 'context of crap' that so many people are living with in a fragmented society where narratives of hate and division try their best to undermine feelings of belonging and relationships with place and nature; also reflecting how society often determines where different humans and non-humans 'fit'.

Images: K.Morley

River Stour with sky reflections. Quiet corner in Poole Park with circular seating. Graffiti on a pedestrian crossing linking two park areas.

How the legacy of political, policy, and personnel churn directly impacts the decision-makers who are working to find space for nature. Hearing how the awe and love of nature for decision-makers motivates them to do more with less, 'when money's too tight to mention', and land use is increasingly being driven towards building non-accessible and non-affordable housing.

It's been an immense privilege to experience nature with my participants, and as I begin to pull the strands of their insights together, I hope I can weave a picture that explains what nature means to disabled people.

As one of my participants shared:

"I feel much better when I’m outside. It’s the air that you breathe, it’s the fact that you’re not indoors stressing about jobs, it’s a complete and utter outpouring of my whole self into a park or a garden. It doesn’t matter where it is, as long as there’s birds or bushes or people, I do find it much better. So nature is a big thing for me, yeah, nature means a lot to me. It's been a lifesaver."

I would like to send huge thanks to my participants and my supervisors, who keep me motivated and allow me the space to still be creative.

Images: K.Morley

The importance of encountering incidental nature. Goats being used for conservation grazing behind beach huts. Community growing space.

Image: K.Morley. Starling being fed by hand.

Links to further reading:

'And that, Damian, is what I call life-changing': findings from an action research project involving autistic adults in an on-line sociology study group. (2012) Milton, D, Moon, L. Good Autism Practice, 13 (2). pp. 32-39.

Enforcing normalcy : disability, deafness, and the body. (1995) Davis, L J.

'Crip'- Composting Feminisms. (2019) McRuer, R.

Doing Disability Research. (1997) Edited by Barnes, C. and Mercer, G.

Revealed Roots

I'm not sure where to start with my beloved space. To sit next to the stream in a cavity of roots, beneath your aged soaring canopy, pondering at how you're still standing when so much of your supporting Earth is gone.

Gone from years of erosion, the wear and tear of the seasons ebb and flow as the waters rise and fall.

To be entombed in your absence but looking with wonder at all that has kept you up for years- supported you. Fed you.

The Earth smells of leaf litter and worm-turned-over soil in the autumn. It barely smells at all in summer as the stream dries to a bone. But in the spring, the carcass of a nearby pigeon rots away, and its perfume of death mingles with the earth, a reminder of the labour of a sparrowhawk who sat and watched from your branches above.

For that time when I sat and removed my glasses and hearing aids, and with no taste or smell, labouring lungs, robbed by a global pandemic, but the absolute joy I felt to be back on the Earth. To be connected with a past touched by the hardships endured by generations gone by. A place where I was most sensorial 'dimmed' but the most held and most connected to the Earth... the most whole.

Aware of my privilege to have an intimacy with a place, unseen, unwatched, except by the eyes of the other non-humans in this space.

The years have again gone past, swiftly drawn down the stream of life, the stones and soil worn by the flow and carried away in minute detail.

Then one day, after storm after storm, your branches were broken and crashed to earth- destabilised by a life of erosion to your roots whilst revealing your intricacies, you could hold no more, and you too return to earth.

Your trunk slips into being deadwood utilised by bugs and grubs. Will your cavities be filled with dormice nests, will the moss that still cloaks your bark be scampered over by returning pine martens, or will you just be 'let be', and crumble and rot as the mycelial network works its magic and converts substance and structure to elements and minerals?

No longer will I sit beneath your cavity and canopy as the world changes and fragments, my understanding of interconnectivity and interdependence to the soil, to the water, to the air that I breathe, your body becoming my body. Your body becoming my mind.

Revealed Roots. Image: Kate Morley

This piece was written during the first of a series of creative writing sessions that are being led by Dr Tanvir Bush and supported by Dr Sarah Bell of the Sensing Climate project. The series is called ‘The Elementals’, with each session guided by an elemental theme; Earth, Fire, Water, Air and Spirit.

How do moles tell the time?

Image: K Morley

I’ve recently become a bit obsessed with moles…

After exploring the ideas of ‘sensescapes’ and sensory difference I’ve been pondering how my aural diversity means that I experience the land here differently to those with what some would call ‘normal’ hearing, whilst acknowledging Alison Kafer’s words “We all have bodies and minds with shifting abilities” and reflecting on how people who have different embodied experiences of a place perceive a more “nature-full” space.

This has led me down a “rabbit hole” (or should I say mole hole) thinking about how different species with different ways of hearing exist in our place, and how they might sense their environments differently, such as by using tactile cues from fur or whiskers to interact with the world outside.

We are lucky enough that moles have found a home at Hill Crest. They tunnel away and unless they surface at an inopportune moment of a passing owl or stoat, are rarely ‘seen’ here at Hill Crest but the evidence of their daily toil pepper the landscape, where their crumbly piles of soil are a testament to the time they spend digging away looking for the jewels of earthworms or ant pupae.

Molehills on track (Image: R Morley)

In Rob Atkinson’s fantastic “Moles” book he describes how Moles will eat up to 60 grams of earthworms a day which is more than half its body weight. To seek out these treasures, moles are equipped with wondrous articulated shoulders and forelegs with broad ‘hands’ and nails that are perfectly compatible for chiselling and scooping away the soil to create a network of interconnected tunnels.

These ‘scoopings’ are sometimes deposited above ground in domes of soil- often the only indication that moles are present. These soil piles provide golden opportunities for seed establishment. Wood ants often colonise molehills, which in turn become food sources for many birds.

The intricacy of a mole's hand and 'nails' (Image: R Morley)

Nevertheless, the mole has a chequered history of co-existing with humans. Seen as a pest creating ‘trip hazards’, disrupting immaculate lawns, with soil from molehills contaminating hay or silage which could lead to listeriosis in livestock.

However here at Hill Crest, the moles are integral in our rewilding efforts. I collect some of the soil for mixing in with our homegrown compost for use in the Tree Hub, with the thought that perhaps mycorrhizal spores will enrich the saplings and acclimatise them to our local soil type. But as I do so, I ponder how these moles live their lives.

Rob Atkinson has a great chapter about the physiology of moles and how the tunnels they live in often have oxygen levels that are “15% lower” than at the surface, “Moles' blood contains a lot of haemoglobin- the protein that carries oxygen to the organs.”

If you search for images of moles nearly all the characterful renditions are bespectacled. Isn’t it funny how humans have assumed that moles' visual inputs require some sort of intervention… the reality of a mole’s eyesight is that they see differently than humans and can perceive UV light. This sensory difference is also apparent in their auditory system. To protect their hearing system from soil encroachment moles do not have fleshy ear flaps (pinnae), and they are known to have a hearing range of 0.1-15kHz. This astonishing ability to hear low-frequency sounds means that moles can hear much lower-pitched sounds than humans, bats or even mice.

But are these hearing ranges assuming that auditory perception is solely by air conduction (how sounds travel through the air to reach the auditory system- the ear), could moles have a much more sensitive system for perceiving sound vibrations via bone conduction?

If their bodies; bones, fur and whiskers are more attuned to direct vibrations could this 3D embodied visceral detection of sound create much more information about their surroundings and influence how they interact with the structure of the place and those other beings that also inhabit it?

As I walk the tracks above them how do they perceive me…? Do we perceive this place differently, together?  

As I watch the clock and rigidly plan a day which is driven by a capitalist society’s timeframe, how do moles spend their lives? As they spend most of their days in the dark below ground are they driven by the night and day circadian rhythm? Do the other creatures that inhabit the subterranean mole’s realm have their own rhythm and does this rhythm impact the mole? Does a mole have any reference to time?

Being driven by society’s clock is something that Disability Studies theorists and activists have explored. This non-normative framing of time is often referred to as ‘Crip Time’. Crip Time may be where time becomes elastic and negotiating societal barriers requires time to assess and overcome. Similarly, Crip Time might also encompass the time needed to negotiate life admin, the time needed to interact with medical professionals, and the time needed to rest.

In my own case, my long-term health condition means that sometimes during the month I can be turbocharged, time flies, I’m energised and can interact with society at my pace- sometimes society is moving too slow for my “zingy brain”, but the moment passes and my desire to crawl into a hole and slow down creeps over me. My ‘productivity’ slumps and I spend my time wondering how I can crawl through the day where time stretches only long enough to get the nitty gritty done.

This awareness of how my timeframe shifts has in some respects been revelatory but in a society that requires everyone to work at its supercharged pace, with little understanding or accommodating of immovable deadlines, frustration and feelings of failure are often the end result.

My beloved Gramps used to have a saying that he often used: “Time waits for no man”- but as I get older I can now understand this to mean “Society has no time to wait for anyone”.

As Alison Kafer says “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, Crip Time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”

In her beautiful essay,  Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time Ellen Samuels reflects:

“For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don't want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.”

I often talk about Rewilding being on a spectrum, but the reality is that this is not a linear journey.

Trees grow at various rates- squirrels come and ring bark some trees “setting them back”- storms come, death intervenes but new life is injected into the system via the mycorrhizal network. Where does time really sit within all these ‘natural processes’?

So I reflect on how much of nature’s rhythms we don’t understand; the interconnectedness of nature and the interdependence of each species’ timeframe upon each other. The timeframes that shift seemingly imperceptibly ensure that the timings of when a flower emerges and the anthers unfurl to feed a passing insect, which has bred and flourished at a time that coincides with the return of the swallows. This intricate timing and synchronicity of a multitude of species is a complex attunement of so many systems, but in a changing climate, do all these beings have time to adapt?

As we move towards a more nature-full space here at Rewilding Hill Crest I puzzle and wonder what time means to the returning nature, and by rewilding the land we are in turn stretching and moulding what we mean by timeframes, timelines and shifting baselines…

So mole, I shall sit in my world and my time and ponder on your life. Are you having the “time of your life”? I’m just grateful that you spend your time near to mine.

Further information:

Atkinson. R. (2013). Moles. The British Natural History Collection. Book 3. Essex: Whittet Books.

Bell, S.L., Hickman, C., and Houghton. F. (2023) From therapeutic landscape to therapeutic ‘sensescape’ experiences with nature? A scoping review - ScienceDirect 

Harrod, A. and von Benzon, N. (2024) Untangling nature-based interventions’ influences on participants’ mental wellbeing Critiquing ‘nature on prescription’.  Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Mental Health and Wellbeing. Eds. Boyd, C.P., Boyle, L.E., Bell, S.L., Högström, E., Evans, J., Paul, A., and Foley, R.  London: Routledge.

Kafer, A. (2013) Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Samuels, E. (2017) Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time | Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37 No. 3: Summer 2017

YouTube video for Rewilding Britain Webinar: Smaller Scale Rewilding: Hill Crest, Embercombe & Devon Wildland (2022) A conversation with Sara King- Rewilding Britain with Kate Morley and Laura Fairs.