If you spend nearly ten years on a thing – a thesis, a question, an ache – then what do you come away with? This is a problem that many researchers wrestle with long after their viva.
My thesis, Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry (Verran, 2025), emerged from my exploration into the murky realm of meaning-making; into how humans make sense of their environment and articulate this through the art of language. While engaging with methods and approaches of scientific materialism, it was open to other, less quantifiable aspects of understanding. My approach exists between the hard data of environmental science and the soft collapse of attributing a lyrical utterance to a physical sensation. Mesotopia is that middle place. It is a weird, damp, mossy ground where you are forced to admit that you’re guessing, and that guess, that intuition, is something beautiful.
Here’s what I’ve learned, and I offer it not as truth but as partial revelation: all environmental research ends in conjecture. You can measure carbon flux. You can map watersheds, but the moment you ask why – why the tide is rising, why the magpie sings – then you have left the laboratory and entered the weirder world of the poetic. This requires intuition; not as a substitute for rigour, but as its strange twin. The best researchers I know don’t pretend to be robots or LLMs. They listen for what the data doesn’t say.
This became painfully clear when I tried to get a clean historical picture of Celtic culture. I wanted something tethered to the languages themselves: Old Kernewek, the living breath of Breton fragments. What I found instead was a hall of mirrors. There are no objective sources. Texts were scripted by either a monk or a cultist with an agenda. Every archaeological layer has been interpreted by a romantic, a nationalist or a grant committee. Anyone who proclaims certainty about Celtic culture should be eyed the way you’d eye a man selling miracle water from the back of a van.
This is the deeper sickness. Doing a PhD means watching how the money moves. You see funding streams shape ideological and political directions for corporate profit: pharmaceuticals, tech, and weapons. These industries don’t just buy labs. They buy histories too. They buy the humanities, indirectly, turning entire departments into PR factories churning out favourable narratives. There are red lines and guardrails everywhere. You learn them quickly. Don’t scrutinise the military applications or environmental impacts of all this wonderful new tech. Don’t question the ethics of corporate influence on land use. Don’t look at the family backgrounds of financiers recently termed ‘philanthropists’. Do that, and the funding dries up. The list goes on. This is the unspoken rule – to have any kind of career in Western academia, you need to learn when to keep your mouth shut.
I finished my PhD less certain about what is real. So much of academic work seems to be about inventing reality for other people to live in. I admit that I can never find my way through all the misdirections and dead ends, and that any meaningful clarity eludes me. On reflection, I don’t see that as a failure. That is the crack where light gets in. I’ve glimpsed the man behind the velvet curtain of western liberalism, working his bells and whistles and selling his snake oil, and I don’t believe him anymore. I do not believe in the neutrality of universities, nor in the clean hands of Western research culture.
I live in partial revelation. I am always listening. I am certain of nothing and sceptical of everything. However, I can still hope that somewhere – in a different kind of institution with a different way of asking – there is a place where intuition is honoured, funding doesn’t own the questions, and any person is free to research, interrogate or argue controversial positions.
As always, my a’th kar!
Follow this link to a video where I discuss this blog in more detail: