The Researcher Is Not Static: What Changes During a Collaborative Museum PhD?
A few months ago, returning to my PhD after an extended period away from study, I found myself reopening chapters I had not looked at for some time. I expected the familiar challenges of writing up: revising arguments, tightening analysis, checking references, and recovering the thread of a project that has occupied much of my life over the last five years. What I did not expect was the feeling that I was entering into a conversation with a former version of myself.
Revisiting my literature review, methodology and reflective notes, especially those authored in the first few years, felt less like editing and more like an encounter with a researcher shaped by different assumptions, experiences, emotions and ambitions. The questions I was asking, the examples I found significant, and even the way I understood my own position within the research all reflected a particular moment in time. Reading those chapters again was a reminder that a doctorate is not only a process of producing knowledge. It is also a process through which the researcher is continually reshaped.
Perhaps many doctoral researchers experience this. We often talk about a PhD as a journey but rarely pause to consider quite how much changes during that journey. This feels particularly true for those of us studying part-time. A doctorate can stretch across five, six, seven or more years. Years in which careers evolve, institutions change, relationships deepen, families grow, and the wider world shifts around us. The person who begins a PhD and the person who submits it are rarely the same.
I wanted to share this reflection not only with those beginning a doctorate, but also with those in the middle of one: navigating fieldwork, spending months in archives, working through analysis, returning after interruptions, or staring at draft chapters wondering why they no longer sound quite like the person writing them today. That feeling can be unsettling, but it may not be a sign that something has gone wrong. It may be evidence that something important has happened.
For many researchers in the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership programme, which I have been fortunate to be part of, this experience is perhaps even more pronounced. Our projects are often embedded and partnered within museums, galleries, libraries and archives alongside our university. We spend years engaging not only with collections and records, but also with institutions, professionals, communities, policies and organisational cultures. Some of us start as practitioners. Others arrive as researchers. Many occupy a shifting space somewhere in between. Over time, our relationship to these institutions evolves, just as they evolve themselves.
The museum, archive or heritage organisation that first inspired our research may look very different several years later. Staff move on. Teams are restructured. Priorities shift. New opportunities and challenges emerge. At the same time, our own understanding develops. We acquire professional experience, encounter new perspectives, and deepen our engagement with the subject. Often, the questions that first motivated the project begin to take on different meanings.
For those undertaking collaborative doctoral research, this can be particularly pronounced. The institution that helped shape a project proposal at the outset may not be the same institution that exists by the time the thesis is submitted. In my own experience, many of the individuals involved in conceiving and supporting the project in its early stages are no longer within the organisation. Over the course of the doctorate, staff moved on, organisational structures changed, and whole areas of institutional activity were reconfigured through restructuring and wider sector pressures. Looking back, I realise that I have not simply been researching a cultural institution; I have also been witnessing its evolution in real time.
This creates an interesting challenge for those of us working in partnership with museums, galleries, libraries and archives. We often begin our studies thinking of the institution as a relatively stable context for the research. Yet over the lifespan of a part-time PhD, institutions can transform significantly. Relationships built at the proposal stage may no longer exist. Departments may disappear, merge, or be reimagined. Strategic priorities can shift. By the point of writing up, we may find ourselves reflecting on an organisation that is recognisably connected to the one we started with, but by no means identical.
It is not only researchers and institutions that change during a long doctoral project. The wider political, social and professional landscapes change too. One of the realities of undertaking a PhD over many years is that the context in which your research sits may look very different by the time you complete it.
In my own case, when I began researching religion and belief within art museums and the policy landscape of the wider cultural sector in 2019–2020, there were relatively few visible examples of formal policy interventions, strategic frameworks or sector-wide initiatives engaging with these questions. Now, writing up in 2026, I find a slightly different landscape. New conversations have emerged. Organisations have begun developing resources, programmes and interventions that engage more directly with religion, belief and worldviews. Questions that once felt peripheral within the sector have become more visible and more established. The field itself has moved.
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Returning to my writing recently, I realised how many of my own positionalities had shifted since the PhD began. Professional experiences had broadened my understanding of the cultural sector. Personal experiences had reshaped how I think about participation, belonging, care and public culture. The institutional context surrounding the research had evolved. Even my emotional relationship to the topic had changed. Looking back at earlier chapters, I could recognise a researcher writing from a very different moment in their life, with different forms of knowledge and different ways of seeing. Yet that earlier researcher was still me.
I think there can be a temptation within doctoral research to treat reflexivity as something completed at the beginning. We write a positionality statement, acknowledge our standpoint, and then continue as though that standpoint remains fixed. But positionality is not static. The longer we spend researching museums, archives and heritage organisations, the more our understanding tends to deepen and complicate. We notice things we previously overlooked. We develop greater appreciation for institutional realities whilst often becoming more aware of their limitations. We become more attentive to complexity.
For researchers working with qualitative, ethnographic or reflexive methodologies, this is not simply a personal observation. It may also have methodological significance. One of the most surprising realisations during writing up has been that the distance between where I began and where I stand now feels meaningful. Not merely as background context to the research, but as something worthy of reflection and interrogation.
This is where approaches such as autoethnography can be particularly valuable. Autoethnographic methods invite us to take seriously the movement of the researcher through the research process. They remind us that our changing experiences, assumptions and relationships to the field do not simply accompany the research; they shape how we interpret it. In that sense, the researcher is not external to the project but part of its ongoing story.
For those researching museums and archives, this raises an interesting possibility. The reflective notes, field journals, supervision records and methodological memos that accumulate across a doctorate may be doing more than documenting a research process. They may reveal how our understanding of institutions, collections, heritage, public engagement and even wider social debates evolves over time. In some cases, that evolution may itself become a valuable source of insight. Not because reflection replaces interviews, archival research or analysis, but because it helps us understand the lens through which those materials are being interpreted.
For those at the beginning of their doctorate, my encouragement is simple: keep those reflections. Record moments of uncertainty, excitement, frustration and discovery. Write about the first time you encounter an unexpected archival record, gain access to a collection, conduct an interview, present your research publicly, or realise that your original questions are beginning to shift. You may later discover that these reflections are doing more work than you realised.
And for those further along the journey, particularly those returning to projects after significant periods away, perhaps allow yourself a moment to acknowledge what has happened in the meantime. You are not simply finishing a project about a museum, archive, collection or institution. You are also encountering the accumulated versions of yourself that helped produce that research.
For me, writing up has become less about returning to unfinished work and more about reintroducing myself to the researcher who began it. The conversation is sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes surprising, and occasionally affirming. But it has reminded me of something that feels particularly important for doctoral researchers to hear.
The researcher is never static.
Over the lifespan of a doctorate, the researcher changes, the institution changes, the field changes, and the wider world changes too. Sometimes those shifts remain in the background. Sometimes they become visible within the analysis. And sometimes, particularly through reflexive and autoethnographic approaches, they become part of the knowledge the research itself produces.
