In March 2022 I presented at the RGS-IGB PostGraduate midterm conference. My title was the same as this blog post "We need to talk about death" This topic is of significant importance in understanding landscapes and landscape change, but also important for research and researchers more widely. This is a thesis tangent that I haven't been able to include in depth, so I am including the conversation here (and adding it as an appendix!). Perhaps this is, as a blog post, a more useful place to begin this conversation anyway. In the summer of 2020 I had already decided to change my research methodologies to account for (what was at the time the worst case scenario but quickly became the reality of 2021. This also meant an application for amendments to my original ethical review. Part of the original review included both participant and researcher safety. Over the past year and partly due to my involvement in the farming communities the importance and dangers involved with men
I'm writing this following an excellent workshop at the RGSIBG Postgraduate forum's 2022 conference. Phil Emmerson and Sarah Hall presented and led discussion around the strategies and challenges of publishing papers as a PGR. It was great, really supportive, and made me feel absolutely nauseous I dedicated a chunk of time whilst on Covid lockdown to getting a paper written that was based on the data from my MSc research and further interdisciplinary research conducted for my PhD. It took a year of the paper being submitted and resubmitted, to the same two reviewers, undergoing significant revisions, until the paper was finally rejected. The process, alongside the fact that my personal details had accidentally been sent to the reviewers (and my subsequent panicked guesses about who they might be and how important they may/may not be in my future career) had a huge impact on my confidence at the time. Having put the paper to one side I had tried to consider other options. Howe