Month: May 2026

Academia Isn’t Dangerous, So Why Does It Feel Like This? by Chris Rhyss Edwards

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This may cut against the grain, but after three decades in the public and private sectors, returning to academia for a PhD feels less like leaving the real world and more like a reckoning, and, unexpectedly, like coming home.

I want to start there, because it matters. Having recently completed my first year, I recognise I’m still very early in the journey. Still finding my feet, at times firing on all cylinders, other times fumbling along, asking inane questions (much to the vexation of my esteemed supervisors) as I continue to learn how this world works. Yet despite the unrelenting pile of papers to parse, the intellectual gymnastics, and the imposter syndrome diatribe murmuring in the background, I’m grateful to be here because it’s the ideal environment for someone who’s constantly curious and ambitious.

Still, at the same time, I’ve become gradually aware of something else: a familiar tension in my body. A low-level alertness. A sense of bracing for ‘something’, not from looming lectures or supervision meetings, but for something primal from earlier chapters of my life. And that’s surprised me.

Over a 35-year career, I’ve moved through several very different worlds. I began in the military, spent two decades in corporate environments such as Telstra, News Corp, and Clemenger, went on to build and run startups, and now find myself back in a university setting as an ingénue PhD researcher. Each transition demanded adjustment. Each carried its own pressures.

But this time around is different in an unexpected way.

Not because academia is necessarily “harder” than previous environments, it is and isn’t. What has caught me off guard is how subtly it recreated some of the same internal stress patterns I associate with previous high-pressure work, yet without the obvious markers that usually tell you when you’re under ‘under the gun’, so to speak. Stress does not need to be loud, visible, or dangerous to be real.

There are no warning sirens here. No clear moment when you’re told to stand down.

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Challenging the Culture of Silence: My Research Taught Me to Speak in My Own Voice by Shinasa Shahid

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I’m Shinasa, a South Asian PhD researcher studying addiction recovery, culture, and stigma among ethnic-minority women in the UK. My work sits at the intersection of addiction, identity, gender, and community. I care about emotional wellbeing and social justice and empowering people to share their stories.

When I started my PhD, I thought the hardest part would be the writing. But the real challenge was carrying other people’s pain while trying to hold on to my own sense of self. My research explores the recovery journeys of South Asian and African Caribbean women who live in communities where silence is survival, where honour decides a woman’s fate, and where addiction is denied, hidden, or punished.

I didn’t expect their stories to crack me open. I didn’t expect them to heal me. Nor did I expect them to teach me how to speak again. And yet, here I am using my voice. I am writing this to reflect on what happens to researchers when we sit with trauma, silence, and responsibility, and how our own wellbeing is shaped along the way.

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