Matthew Sillence: Music.

Welcome John to the studio here at UEA. Thank you, Matthew,

fantastic to have you here today. Absolute pleasure. These

are taking time out of your very, very busy week, I'm sure

to come and talk to us today about a recent publication

John Turnpenny: that actually links back to our second episode

on the PGR matters podcast where we were talking to Maria

Tsimpiri about her involvement on something called the courage

project. Oh, yeah, so, and I remember being involved in that

project as well. It was

Matthew Sillence: part of a much larger initiative of catalyst

funding in the UK to explore post graduate research well

being, and that's really going to be the topic of today's

conversation. So supporting PGR, well being, and looking

particularly the kind of policy implementation and practice, and

that's your that's your thing. But if listeners don't know much

about you already, do you want to give us your academic origin

story? So

John Turnpenny: where are you coming? Try not to make this

sound like a job interview. So my name is John Turnpenny. I've

been at the University of East Anglia for quite some time now,

mainly in the politics department, since 2012 so I

teach politics, public policy, and I research lots of different

things, particularly the relationship between knowledge,

evidence and environmental policy. But also, more recently,

I've become very interested in researching the politics

surrounding well being and how well being is both defined and

also interventions that support well being.

Matthew Sillence: Thank you. Thanks. That really helps give

us some some kind of context of of your of your background, and

also how that's led to this recent publication. One of the

things that's kind of struck me about the article that you've

published recently, which was in policy and politics, that's

right, and is the kind of political aspects of wellbeing

support for postgraduate researchers. So what motivated

you to be focusing on that dimension of it? And there's

been quite a bit of literature around well being mental health

for researchers. But why? Why the kind of policy dimension for

John Turnpenny: you? I think it brought together two different

elements of my life over the last few years. So from 2016 to

2020 I was Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research in the

Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UEA. And one of the main

reasons why I applied for that job in the first place is

because I saw that there was a lot of challenges that post

graduate researchers were having with well being and mental

health. Had been a lot of concern about those things over

a period of years. I was also aware that a lot of the

attention at that time, back in the mid 2010s was focused on

undergraduate students, there was some work that was being

done by the Students Union here to support well being and mental

health at that time, and I was particularly interested in what

the challenges are, were that were being faced by postgraduate

researchers who didn't really feature very prominently in that

in that report back in 2015 at all. So that's one side of what

I was doing. The other side is my research on the way that the

politics of well being has developed over the last few

years. So I'm particularly interested that well being is

often researched from a health sciences point of view -

psychology - there's a lot of research in in business studies

and organizational studies as well, but actually relatively

little on the political angles of what well being is defined to

be, and how attempts to support well being are created,

designed, implemented, who's involved with them? What power

dynamics are there, what kind of resources are allocated. So. His

voices are heard and whose voices are not heard. And so

bringing those things together. In the mid I think it was 2018 I

led a big project that you mentioned before Matthew, funded

by the UK's Catalyst Fund called the courage project, and it was

one of 17 projects that were funded across the country, which

aimed to support post graduate researcher well being. And one

of the things I wanted to do with the project here at UEA,

when we were in partnership with the University of Suffolk as

well, was to look at a wide range of different kinds of

interventions that try to support post graduate research.

Well being So, right from the very kind of practical things

like yoga sessions all the way through to the more structural

elements, like improving supervisor training, which, as

you know, Matthew, you were instrumental in developing that

module on the MA HEP, which, between those, those two very,

very different elements, it covers a large range of

different kinds of activities and bringing together the work

that's going on in in academic faculties, with the work that

the students union, the Postgraduate Research Service

and Student Services were were carrying out as well. So

bringing bringing together a lot of different types of of

agendas, types of people, different priorities, different

resource bases and so on. And one of the things that I really

wanted to do was to examine how politics defined quite broadly.

So not necessarily party politics or elections and stuff,

but but politics more broadly in the sense of the exercise of

power and the distribution of resources, and how that affects

the way that these interventions were designed and actually

played out in practice. So since the the end of the courage

project, which was a very practical project trying to

design and implement these interventions. I've carried out

some research myself looking at more explicitly analyzing how

different higher education institutions within the UK are

dealing with the political operational, analytical

constraints on how these kind of interventions are developed and

and play out in practice. So it's a kind of the research has

come out of the project that I led.

Matthew Sillence: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can see that trajectory

and that the focus that you've now got in your in your latest

work, the article itself, discusses something called the

policy capacity framework. Do you want? Could you tell us a

little bit more about that? First of all, just so we

understand what we're what we're talking about.

John Turnpenny: Yeah, so the policy capacity framework is

quite prominent within public policy literature, and it's got

various different manifestations. But the idea is

that successful policy making, and if you think of policy as

being it could be at the international level, or it could

be right down to the level of individual teams within an

organization, that successful design and implementation of

policy depends on the ability to deploy Various types of

capacity, different types of capacity. So in the framework

that I use, they are so political capacity, which would

be the capacity to gather allies for and overcome opposition to

designing and implementing particular initiatives,

operational capacity, which would be things like the ability

to deploy resources, whether the governance of particular aspects

of the interventions or post graduate community, whether

that's that's coherently and consistently governed, or

whether it's fragmented. And the idea of this is also to look at

different levels as well, so you could look at the individual

level, so the capacities that different individuals have,

they. Capacities at the organizational level that could

be at the level of a university, and also the wider systemic

level. So the social and political context, and that can

be the higher education sector within a country, or the general

social and political landscape within a country, or even

globally. So it covers quite a lot of different aspects.

Matthew Sillence: So in this, in this exploration that you've

done at these different levels and different kind of dimensions

of that framework that you've just explained, how's it helped

in understanding the kinds of challenges and opportunities

when it actually comes to implementing well being

interventions. Are there any kind of specific examples that

really come to mind from the research that you've done? Yeah,

John Turnpenny: so what it does is it helps to first broaden out

the discussion beyond saying all this worked and this didn't

work, to saying, Well, exactly why is it not working? And

explicitly looking at the political aspects. And some

people are very uncomfortable when it comes to talking about

those things. They'd rather not. They'd rather think, Oh,

actually, what we need is more resources. We need more

knowledge about the problem. But of course, I would say this, the

politics is woven into all of those other things as well. And

I think the policy capacity framework is a very useful way

of trying to tease out those different elements and make the

political explicit. But in a way which is quite accessible,

rather than being something that that people think of as being

done at the national or international levels. The second

thing that the framework helps with is looking at the

interactions between these different types of capacities so

they're not static. So for example, some of the, some of

the, some of the things that I found, the the fact that the

ambiguous status of postgraduate researchers, the way that often

post graduate researchers are seen as neither staff nor

students, or sometimes they're seen as both, and actually are

both in Different contexts, that ambiguity is actually a strong

factor in marginalizing postgraduate researchers within

organizations. So it's something I call organizational

marginalization, and that's layered on top of other

dimensions of marginalization that we know about, so aspects

like gender, race, social class and so on. So already you've got

quite a lot of layers on top of each other. The second thing

that I found was that there is a low political capacity at

various different levels. So the capacity to gather allies for

designing and implementation of these initiatives. It's, it's

quite, it's quite a difficult job for the people who are

involved with those things to make those things happen.

There's, there's there's quite a lot of lack of understanding by

staff across the universities that I spoke to, a relatively

low voice that postgraduate researchers have within an

organization to get their message across, to make sure

that that what they need is actually happening. Another

element of what I found was about the low operational

capacity, so things like limited resources in various different

ways. So that could be money, it could be time, it could be

people, but also fragmented governance and fragmented

responsibilities, not only for postgraduate researchers but but

also for the kinds of interventions that are supposed

to support well being So, different faculties, different

professional services, they're all responsible for different

elements of it, and I found in in quite a lot of different

universities, some overlaps, and in some cases, some very

difficult relationships between different groups in different

parts of the organization, trying to do different things

and stepping on each other's toes. That was a phrase that

came quite came out quite commonly. In the in the

interviews that I did, yeah,

Matthew Sillence: I noticed that actually, when I was reading the

article, that the there seemed to be a certain amount of kind

of protection, or kind of people feeling quite protective of

their domain and their areas of interest and specialism, and

that might be perhaps through, you know, fear of becoming

centralized or relevant in some way, perhaps from those, you

know, the smaller divisions of an institution. And it doesn't

seem as though, at an individual level, necessarily, people want

to, you know, consciously undermine, you know, the access

to any of these resources and support, but in establishing

those kind of competitive boundaries between between

groups, that fragmentation is kind of preserved, and there

isn't that there is A lack of access that's happening just by

default that behavior. So not that there's necessarily

something malicious behind it, but, but it seems to be coming

out of the of the nature of that competition and protective

attitude. Yeah, yeah. I just want to sort of back up a little

bit, because you mentioned about status ambiguity, and it's

something that has been quite prominent in literature around

postgraduate research in, well, actually globally, really, not

not just in the UK, but particularly, I guess, in

Australia, New Zealand, this idea that there's A sort of

liminal space that that researchers post graduate

researchers operate in so they're they're not quite they

are students. Very often in the UK, registers as students in

some countries around Europe, for instance, that you know, a

research student, PhD student, would become an employee of an

institution as part of their kind of contract of study and

research that doesn't seem to be standard here in the UK, but

there has been quite a lot of discussion around revising the

resolving that ambiguity. I mean, could you say a little bit

more about about that? I guess that maybe slightly

controversial idea of whether students should be seen as staff

full stop and with all of the rights and responsibilities and

then kind of characteristics that that might bring with it,

yes,

John Turnpenny: and you're right. I mean, I should say the

study that I did was was focused on the UK. So there are many

different models around the world. And one of the things

that would be interesting next, yeah, is to compare more widely

and see what, what, what else is going on. I think the

there, there are a lot of different opinions about whether

post graduate researchers should be classified as staff or

students. And in fact, when I was Associate Dean, we had a we

had a quite some long discussion about how people should appear

on their emails, because at UEA, as you know, people are labeled

John Smith staff or John Smith student. And we argued

successfully, and it took quite a while to implement, but a

third category of postgraduate researcher, because what was

happening was that post graduate researchers who were teaching

were being labeled as student and that people who they were

teaching were getting quite, shall we say, concerned about

this, what's who's teaching me? Yeah, and I think, I think

trying to resolve this, this, this issue, because post

graduate researchers generally take on different roles at

different times, so contribute to the research environment of

our institution. Write publications. In many cases,

they're doing a lot of extremely novel and exciting research, but

also doing a lot of teaching. They pay fees to the

institution. The teaching is often done on short contracts

with with very little permanence. So there are these.

Different factors at play here, and there are many different

arguments for whether we should, we should say, come down on one

side or the other. I think my, my sense is, is to take the

typical academic view and well, that's not actually the

question. The question is, how do we understand how things are

working in practice? So my my argument in my article was that

if just saying, Oh, well, PGRs are staff or PGRs or students,

is not likely to resolve the issue of poor well being or low

institutional voice, because all of those factors that I was

talking about a few minutes ago are still in play, yeah, and

we're still working within a wider social and political

environment that prioritizes certain careers over others,

that prioritizes certain people over others. And so my

recommendation from the article was to say, well, we need, we

need to improve this framework for understanding what is

actually going on, what's the interaction between these

different kinds of capacities. And in my article, I did start

to look at that. So, for example, that so low operational

capacity reflects low political capacity. So for example, if

there's various different kind of misunderstandings about what

postgraduate research is, and that can lead to people saying,

well, we're not going to give you any resources because we

don't, we don't really know what we're giving you resources for.

But then low operational capacity can actually amplify

low political capacity. So it's a kind of a lock in, if you

like. So, for example, you talked about particular

individuals that I found there's a lot of reliance on particular

individuals to be kind of champions, to do a lot of the

work involved in supporting post graduate researcher. Well being

that makes it very vulnerable to those people leaving or funding

for them being cut, or for another job that they have to do

that comes along that requires them to divert their attention

onto that, but also fragmenting of governance that I talked

about before. So that can reinforce low political capacity

by people thinking, Oh, I don't really know where these these

people sit, or who do I go to to make a a point about something?

Where do I go to to improve something? It could be this,

this group. It could be that person. It could be, it could be

all sorts of things. So I think that element is something I want

to look at more. Yeah, I don't know. It may. It may not be

answering the question of students or staff question mark,

but I think it would be a useful addition to unpack. I hate that

word unpack. Say it again. What is actually going on? Yeah,

yeah.

Matthew Sillence: I was while you were giving the example

there of the email designation, which I think was, I mean,

certainly one that was, it was kind of a third way, our third

option to a question that was often the binary, kind of, you

know, one, basically one thing, or the other, student, that

designation, postgraduate researcher, which I think

actually has, has been probably taken Up in the UK, at least a

bit more commonly now than actually I was thinking. I was

minded of this recently when the current head of our Doctoral

College mentioned it in a in a meeting, which was the the risk

of simply calling a postgraduate research student, a PhD student,

because, actually, we have many different forms of postgraduate

research degree in the UK, and students who are part of those

cohorts, those intakes to British universities, may well

be doing a kind of a Masters by Research program. You know,

MPhil programs. There are, you know, they're probably quite

subtle designations or differences, but actually the

length, the duration of the of the study, will be probably

shorter. In those cases, the nature of the work that's being

submitted will be slightly different. We've seen the

emergence of things. Like professional doctoral doctoral

programs as well, which are proliferated. So I think using

simple terminology slips, I guess that we tend to say, well,

there are three types of student. There's a

undergraduate, there's a Master's student, and there's a

PhD student in the world, and that's it. But actually that

masks of much more varied ecosystem at postgraduate

research level. Yes, and did any of those sorts of things like

designations come out in the those findings? Because, I guess

that shorthand that we use when we talk about people between

different departments and different groups is I'm always

fascinated to know whether that has an impact on the way people

are seen and the characteristics are known.

John Turnpenny: Yes, I think it comes under what I was saying

about different dimensions earlier. So, I mean, one of the

obvious things is whether somebody is a part time

researcher or full time and the challenges that part time

researchers face are often varied. A lot of people might be

doing quite a large number of hours in paid employment that's

nothing to do with their research. They might have family

responsibilities. They might be living somewhere completely

different. And so that's, I think it's important to be

precise about who you who you mean when you're making claims.

And certainly, postgraduate researcher is quite a, as you

said, a broad term, and there are different challenges that

are faced by different people doing or reading, for studying

for different different kinds of degrees. You mentioned

professional doctorates as well. I mean, I think, I think the

kind of findings that I came out with from my study were very

broad and general. So I wasn't trying to evaluate a particular

university or a particular well being intervention program or to

look specifically at, say, part time post graduate researchers

or international postgraduate researchers, or whatever it was,

it was very much looking at some common and big themes that were

coming through. But absolutely it would be very interesting to

build on some of the research that's already being done, which

which is looking at different different researchers and

different contexts, different people and drawing out some of

those challenges and how they layer on to the kinds of

capacities that I was talking about.

Matthew Sillence: One of the things that I to get to kind of

go back to thinking about well being interventions. So actually

things that universities do and they provide for for

postgraduate researchers. I think there was a point in your

in your article, where student well postgraduate researchers

had been part of a well being workshop or an event that also

that included undergraduates as part of that, and that sort of

probably a bit more of a trend now to institutions thinking

about tailoring their provision so they've got a model of

provision that they might use at undergraduate level. They're

kind of thinking about ways that that could be modified in some

ways, tailored, adapted to a different group of people with

slightly different characteristics and demands in

their lives. And we were talking, you know, just, just

probably a few months ago, actually, we had Cassia Hayward

Fitch on the program, who's the current equality, diversity and

inclusion ambassador for the CHASE DTP, and one of the things

that she was talking about there is the is this sort of sense of

frustration that often happens around institutional policies

and regulations not necessarily recognizing those specificities

and those circumstances, and that was in relation to neuro

divergence and the post graduate research experience. So there's,

there's obviously quite a lot of work to do. I think it's good to

see, though, the kind of impact of what you're looking at, I

guess you're, you're making a lot of these more hidden

assumptions and practices a little bit more explicit, or at

least providing a model for thinking them through. Yes, one

of the, one of the things that I've, I mean, we've worked.

Together over the years, and one of, one of the things I've

always admired about you is your ability to slow down our

thinking process so that we don't we don't do things in

organizations in reaction to something, but we actually

actively assess and then deploy an effective response. And that

seems to be something that your that your approach is, is

advocating as well. Would you? Would you say that's an accurate

assumption? Yeah,

John Turnpenny: well, I'm flattered Matthew that with that

description, and that is essentially what I do try to do.

I think sometimes you have to make very quick decisions faced

with a massive problem, and you have to react straight away. But

one of the best ways to be able to do that is to have already

done some slow thinking about what's going on, so you're ready

to respond quickly. So I think what is it? The distinction

between impromptu speaking and speaking impromptu, it's

generally better to do the first rather than the second. So yes,

it's intended to get people to think and reflect on some things

that perhaps, as you said, are a little bit hidden and and often

people try to hide the political aspects because perhaps they

don't want to acknowledge them, or perhaps they might feel that

their boss might be upset with them or or perhaps they they

feel like, well, there's nothing that we can do about those,

those things, that stuff that happens above my pay grade. I

mean, we all feel things like that. And my hope, with the kind

of framework that I've used, is that people can connect with

what's going on and think, Oh yeah, well, I can see a little

bit how we might get around some of these problems and where we

might try to try to make a difference.

Matthew Sillence: As a final question, or a couple of

questions, I guess, is around the future of research in this

area, and kind of different policy implications of this so

based on your findings, what are the most promising lines? Do you

think for future research in the field of PGR well being, because

it's it has this area, is a has sort of proliferated, I guess,

in educational literature in recent years. But, yeah, I mean,

what sort of, what sort of directions of travel. Do you

think we could go on?

John Turnpenny: I think several, I suppose, first, from the kind

of public policy angle, the policy capacity framework that I

used was quite a simple version of it, and that's developing all

the time. So there's some work to do to update that and develop

that a bit more. The second thing we touched on this before,

about the way that different countries think of postgraduate

research, and it would be interesting to do some

comparisons. I think. The third thing, and this is something

that I may get onto if I have some time, is that as part of my

interviews that I did for the article, of course, there was a

lot of material that I couldn't use in the article as about

150,000 words of interview material and only 8000 words in

an article. So I focused on the theme that particularly seemed

to come out most strongly, but something that originally was

going to be in the article, but it didn't make it in, and I hope

would form the basis of another article, is To look at

analytical capacity so related to whose expertise is used in

designing and implementing interventions. What sort of

processes are there around gathering that expertise? How

does that interact with the kinds of dimensions of

marginalization that we were talking about before, like race

and gender and social class and so on. And I think one of the

one of the important things about that is to is to look at

some of the processes of co creation, because a lot of the a

lot of. Interventions have a kind of co creation element to

them, so people who are postgraduate researchers, people

who are researcher developers, people who are academics working

together to try to design something that's going to be

useful, and as you said, tailored. But those kind of

processes don't necessarily work very well in practice, there may

be particular capacity issues that are going on there, again,

that could be a very sensitive thing to be looking at,

especially if people feel like you're going to be evaluating at

their particular team or their particular university, but I

think it's important research to be done to get get a more

detailed look at one of those other dimensions of policy

capacity that I didn't really cover very much in the article.

Matthew Sillence: Thank you, John, that's, I think that that

sort of analytical dimension that you were talking about

there is particularly helpful, I think, looking at, as you were

saying in the in the article, that there's a perhaps a bit of

over reliance on individuals who might have certain, a certain

skill set that they can use, that there is a kind of in built

fragility, I guess, in the system at the moment that we

don't, we don't necessarily understand how those skills are

transferable from one role into her, out from one person to

another person. So I think it would be quite interesting to to

explore, explore how that would work. Are there any other sort

of final observations that you have about? I mean, it could be

about policy implementation. It could be about, you know, your

own experience observations for the sector. Oh,

John Turnpenny: well, I suppose my own post graduate research

experience was formative in the sense of, I found it very

difficult, and this was quite some time ago now, and there

wasn't the support in place. My supervisors did the best they

could at the time, but I think things have come on enormously

since I got my PhD. I think there's a lot more understanding

about well being as a lot more understanding about some of the

challenges and causes of why people might have some issues

around the post graduate researcher experience. I think

there's a lot of exciting literature coming through now,

which you know quite a lot about yourself, Matthew, and I'm

really excited to be to be part of this.

Matthew Sillence: Thank you ever so much, John. It's been a

pleasure having you here today and to have this conversation.

It's also great. We're catching up again, because I know we've

been had a few years where we've been where we haven't been

working together as closely as before, and the kind of long

term impact of the project, work that you were doing with the

courage project, and now this kind of individual research that

you've done around policy implementation, the framework we

look forward to hearing more about that, to actually learning

more about how that develops and and and it's kind of deployed, I

guess, across the sector and felt within institutions, both

by students and staff, or students slash staff, depending

on how we think about post graduate researchers. Thanks for

your time, and we look forward to hearing from you soon.

John Turnpenny: Thank you very much. Matthew.