“I want to do everything right.” That is what I tell everyone I have spoken to about research ethics. My supervisors, my colleagues, my friends, my parents, the Ukrainians in my life. Especially them. Navigating the research ethics process has been a wild ride of institutional bureaucracy, departmental power struggles, and my growing frustration with the lack of clear answers. I want an instruction manual, a step-by-step guide of what I should do when, and why.

I am six weeks into the second year of my PhD. Nothing from my first year could have prepared me for it. I knew this would be the year where things got real. A year of people and interpersonal relationships instead of reading and writing. “Instead of?”, past Eliza? That’s a great joke! The reading and writing doesn’t stop, but now I have to balance it with teaching and admin and being PhD student rep, and navigating the ethics application process, and trying to find time to do my laundry. It is a good thing that my entire London social life is concentrated around UCL, or I would not have seen my friends all month.

In our PhD training sessions last year, they told us that a time will come when we realise that we are the expert on our research project, not our supervisors. They didn’t tell us that when this time comes, it feels like you have been thrown in the deep end and someone is holding your head under water, telling you not to drown. Every time I feel the passion and frustration of my research, I grow more certain that I am the captain of my ship. Every strong opinion, every moment of conviction is a promise of the expert I will become. This is my research project, I am in charge here, and I don’t know what to do with that authority.

I want to do everything right, but nobody has told me how to do it. Every authority figure gives a different answer, every colleague offers different advice. My inner knowing is a contrarian, a visionary, an idealist. She does not mesh well with institutional bureaucracy. This term, I finally learnt how to spell bureaucracy, which tells you everything you need to know about academia! When I don’t know what to do, I have two options. Option one: I can talk it out. Talking it out soothes my anxious mind, but it is subject to human error, human absence, human webs of complex emotion. Option two is logical. I am a researcher, so I must research. I find 74 articles on research ethics; surely the nuance and clarity I seek will be there?

All I think about these days is research ethics. Not in a nerdy or neurotic way. It goes deeper than that. My colleagues tell me I am “pure of heart”, my friends tell me I have the right intentions and that is what matters. As I read the abstracts of 74 articles on research ethics, I am not so sure. What does it mean to be well-meaning and pure of heart? Neither of these traits will prevent me from unintentionally causing harm.

I don’t often feel powerful, so why I am so convinced of my own power when it comes to this?

If it’s not clear from “all I think about these days is research ethics,” my PhD is the centre of my life. I took all the intensity I once funnelled into hobbies and ill-advised crushes, and redistributed it to my PhD. My research comes first now. Once upon a time, before academia worked its way into my bloodstream, my great love was writing. Half my life ago, I wrote a novel about a scientist Tsar who creates a robot who is so realistically human that even she doesn’t know her true form. The irony of the novel is that she is far more human than he is. It was a futuristic retelling of the Persephone myth, set in 22nd century Russia and Estonia. I spent almost a decade writing and rewriting it, trying to perfect the monster I had created. There is a lot of backstory to this, and if you didn’t know me pre-2022 you wouldn’t know I’d written a novel at all. See, after years of rewriting and various attempts at self-publishing, I decided I was going to redraft my novel once more and try to get it traditionally published. I made this decision in early February 2022. My novel, where a significant storyline involved a war between Russia and a neighbouring country. On 24th February 2022, Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

I remember trying to read through my manuscript, the sanitised, fictional war I had created, then reading the news about the atrocities Russian soldiers committed in Bucha. I put my novel down and never came back to it. Thinking of it now, a quote from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible comes to mind: “I may think of you softly from time to time. But I will cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.” It’s an extreme way to view a novel I spent ten years working on, a novel I once thought would be my life’s work. But I am an extreme person. I read about the war crimes Russian soldiers committed in Ukraine, and I looked at my novel and knew that I was not qualified to write a story about war.

There is a particular intensity I get, a determinedness, a righteousness, a methodical, deliberate passion. I hear it in my voice when I talk about my research, or about teaching. I hear it when I talk about certain people, too. My voice slows down, my usual agitation replaced by calmness and certainty. My adherence to my principles is the scariest part of me. When I believe in something, I do not compromise.

I can’t imagine I will ever go back to that novel. Perhaps its title, The Purest Form of Chaos, was a prophecy of what it would become. I considered rewriting it, setting it in a fictional world. I would have to change so much of the plot that it would unravel completely. Writing The Purest Form of Chaos made me who I was, choosing to stop writing it made me who I would become. Last Tuesday I went to an underworld-themed creative writing workshop. It was the first creative writing I had done in god knows how long. Writing about the Persephone myth felt like falling into the arms of an old friend. I went to the workshop to get a much-needed break from my PhD, and spent the whole time writing stream-of-consciousness poetry about research ethics.

I am not self-indulgent enough to post all of it here. The poems I wrote were deeply personal, and far too specific in their imagery and subject matter for me to post online. But there is one line that sticks in my mind “If I put you neatly in a box, outside the reach of my microscope’s prying eyes, can I tell myself that first I did no harm?” When I followed the prompts of the underworld, I became the mad scientist. I became the villain from my novel of years gone by. My metaphors made me sound like a STEM academic. Perhaps sociology doesn’t make for good poetry, or perhaps there is a deeper fear behind it. I ended the poem with the lines: “You, the artist, the maker of worlds. I, the scientist, capable only of conducting a postmortem. How is it that you are the one preoccupied with death, but it is I who have lost the ability to bring things to life?”

The Ukrainian word for science refers to all academic disciplines. In English, we separate ‘hard’ science from the social sciences and humanities. I don’t view myself as a scientist in my day-to-day life, but my deepest fears, the caricatures of my shadow self, come complete with goggles and a lab coat. I am so conscious of my positionality as a British academic researching a community I am not part of. The more I read about the ethics of researching refugees, the more I question what good I can do. Is it even ethical to want to do good? There are layers to this. Area Studies as a discipline is rooted in colonialism and knowledge extraction. Refugee Studies has a significant history of Western researchers going to refugee camps in the ‘global south’ and either over-promising the impact of their research, or not telling research participants how their data will be used. Even academics who do research for the ‘right’ reasons still unintentionally cause harm. I know the power dynamic is different here, because I am conducting my research in the UK, and the conditions here allow for informed consent in a way that is not realistic in a refugee camp. But can I be sure I am not causing harm?

I have spent much of this year thinking about what it means to be an outsider, and the ways I can bridge that gap. It is the reason I (admittedly poorly) speak Ukrainian, it is the reason I have made such an effort to learn about Ukrainian art and food and music and history and culture. I have often questioned: when does one stop being an outsider? A new thought occurred to me today: do personal relationships blur this insider/outsider distinction? The more I go to Ukrainian events and make Ukrainian friends, the more the line blurs in my own head. The line between my personal life, my personal feelings and relationships, and my research. When I think of the Ukrainians in my life, I don’t think about my research. But when I think about my research, all I can think about is them. It has made me a better researcher, a better writer. It has given me a capacity for nuance that I lacked in the early months of my PhD. Making it personal has given me an unwavering level of devotion to my research that I know will sustain me throughout all the challenging moments of my PhD.

But it leads to new ethical questions. Who am I allowed to care about, and in what capacity? What happens when personal relationships and research-related relationships overlap? There is a part of me that tried to compartmentalise, as if I could somehow keep any friendship or care I felt for a person separate from their connection to my research. As if the two had not been connected by the red string of fate from the moment we met. The dilemma I keep coming back to is that my research is the centre of my life right now, and I want to talk about it with people who understand. I can either talk with other PhD students, who understand the relationship between a researcher and their research. Or I can talk to Ukrainians, who understand my research itself. But I am so conscious that the war, and leaving Ukraine, is a huge part of their life. At the same time, it is not the only thing that defines who they are. I am scared that if I talk about my research too much, I will make Ukrainian people in my life feel like I only view them as research subjects, when quite the opposite is true.

I once had a friend tell me that I viewed him as a science experiment because I read his astrology chart and made him do a 5 Love Languages quiz, so maybe this fear isn’t 100 percent tied to my research. I am analytical and I see patterns with an almost prophetic level of clarity, and I am a deeply intense person. When you take those traits and add a PhD to the mix, it’s a lot to handle. I have thought long and hard about where I, the human inside the researcher costume, fit into my research. I take my research incredibly seriously, but I am not a serious person. I have to ask myself, can someone who has seen my ridiculous side, my anxious side, my affectionate side, still view me as a serious researcher when it matters? Does my personality cancel out my professional competency?

As I navigate these ethical dilemmas, one thing becomes clear to me: I am on my own in this. My supervisors, my colleagues, my interlocutors, they are all part of my research world. But I am the one who must make the hard choices. The only way to trust myself is to face these challenges instead of asking someone else to be my moral compass.