During the final month or so of a PhD it is a common experience to, finally, start to see credible links between all the disparate threads that you have pulled together in pursuit of your research questions. In my case, an interdisciplinary, experimental doctoral project saw me unite literary theory, visual poems, and concepts lifted from cognitive science and visual psychology into something resembling – as my supervisors and examiners reassured me – a doctoral dissertation. The threads finally began to cohere, however imperfectly, into something that was starting to make sense. Yet no endeavour remains independent of the conditions of its production: once I took a step back, I saw that any sense that the project made upon completion was set against a backdrop of absurdity, of bizarre societal circumstances that months later, I am still parsing. Read more here.
