Creative Research Methods
Academic | Performer | Musician | Public Speaker | War Veteran
Seven Days Down South: A War Story
A doctoral dissertation in two parts:
More than a research project, Seven Days Down South is both a personal act of emancipation and a deeper meditation on remembrance, loss, and the social legacy of war.
Fitting The Flatness
The research uses PowerPoint as its canvas for a place for memory work and for performing the self. Within the canvas are many types of documentations from my life. They include critical text, voices, images, personal photographs, written notes, poems and music. The documentation is chronologically arranged over a timeline of an autoethnography course I attended at the University of Bristol. It flickers back to memories of my time as a Royal Marine and to my academic life. My ‘voice’ is heard from an absence, from my tiled face, from my poetry and my music.
Structured around “Fyttes,” in homage to Middle English poetic form, the piece considers identity through the lens of absence, rhythm, and reflection. At its heart is a reflection on what it means to fit: into roles, expectations, and stories we outgrow or reclaim.
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Unshedding The Masks
This dissertation explores the question “Has my journey from Royal Marine to counsellor enabled me to embrace my experience of war—and ultimately accept it?”
This dissertation is an ethno-autobiographical narrative that creatively draws on multiple modes of representation. It uses media coverage of the Falklands, radio transcripts about PTSD, psychiatric reports, song lyrics, and diary entries and the work navigates themes of masculinity, emotional survival, and truth-seeking.
It interrogates the idea of the “false self,” explores the shifting role of the veteran in public discourse and invites the possibility that some questions don’t need to be answered, only carried on an existential journey of self-awareness.