Talking joy at the Middlesex DProf researcher conference

It was an honour to be invited into two sessions at the Middlesex University postgraduate researcher conference this month — first to run a Talking Joy event, and then to take a seat on a panel discussing creativity in doctoral research.

I will be honest. A quiet thread of imposter syndrome ran through the day. Everyone else on the panel was officially a Dr. I am still working my way to mine. Sitting in that line of chairs, I noticed the old internal question surface — do I belong here yet? — and chose, deliberately, to stay in the seat anyway.

I am still a little shy about fully leaning into the word academic. It is a title I am growing into rather than one I wear comfortably. And yet by the end of the day I had learned an enormous amount, met researchers whose work I will be thinking about for a long time, and — perhaps most usefully — had genuine fun.

Running the Talking Joy session inside a research conference was its own small experiment. Joy is not the first word most doctoral researchers reach for when describing their work. What surprised me, again, was how quickly the room opened once the framing was granted. People spoke about what actually animates their research — the question underneath the question — and the conversation deepened in the way these conversations tend to.

On the panel, the conversation about creativity in doctoral research was a gift. Hearing how others hold the tension between rigour and imagination, structure and play, gave me language for things I have been quietly practising in my own work.

A particular thank you to the wonderful David Adams and Kate Maguire, the creators of the DProf TD programme, for their kindness and generosity — both in attending the joy session and in inviting me onto the panel. The day was a reminder that the academic spaces I am stepping into can be, at their best, genuinely warm ones.

I left with a slightly straighter spine about the doctoral path ahead, and a renewed sense that joy is not separate from serious research. It is, very often, the thing that makes the serious research possible.