I decided to do a PhD because I had a question about law I wanted to answer. So the goal of the PhD has been to make that “original contribution to knowledge”. But as I progressed, I have found that my research has been plastic, in the Hegelian sense. On the one hand, I have shaped my research not only in deciding what to do but also in how my background has shaped my paradigm. In realising the latter, I started to learn things about myself. Doing the PhD became a process of self-discovery. In a sense, at some point, the boundary between my research topic and myself became porous.
As PhD student Kirsty Warren said in the video below, I didn’t start to discover myself by attempting to discover myself; I did it by getting on with life and focusing on something beyond myself. In a sense, as Hegel said, only by recognising that there was something outside me worth recognising did I recognise myself. I became a posthuman researcher.
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