It is less common to talk about failure in academia. Recently I have had a lot of failures. I have had three articles rejected over the past three weeks in “top” journals. One of these had been under consideration since early 2023 and was at a second-round stage and had satisfied two of the three reviewers. It’s the second time I have fallen at this second-round review hurdle at this FT50 journal and the ninth time I have been rejected from this journal in my career. I have never published there. I would say I am ready to give up but it would be a lie. I will try again…at some point!
I don’t write this in an attempt for sympathy or even anger at the system (although that is clearly an issue when you have spent a total of 5 years in a submission process with two papers that not only remain unpublished but at square zero ready to embark on another round of reviews). This is just to remind us all (particularly postgraduate and early career scholars) that despite the fact I have a fairly successful career thus far, it is also filled with failure and rejection. This is a normal feature of academic life that somehow you need to come to terms with. I remember my first rejection from this FT50 journal back in 2012 and I was visibly angry in front of my colleagues over lunch and I can still remember and feel the emotion because it meant so much. I shudder with embarrassment thinking about it in fact, but I wasn’t just angry, at the time, I was scared. It was the difference between employment and unemployment, a stable job to support my family or an alternative career, This recent rejection hurt but it was a) slightly less consequential (hopefully, given the state of our sector!) and b) I have learnt to put these things into perspective over the years as we all do as we grow into our academic careers. And yet, unless we are independently wealthy or close to drawing down our pension we are all playing a publication game, we all need a steady flow of success in good journals to keep food on the table and the wolf from the door.
So imagine my relief/joy when I received an email from the British Academy to tell me I had won a mid-career fellowship. I only decided to go for this quite late in the day and rushed it through the internal review process much to the disgust of my research office who (quite rightly) thought that it was going to be rejected at the first of the two stage process. Thankfully, unbeknownst to them, I had done a fair bit of background research on this call (read multiple successful grants and studied the call closely) and had tailored it around a fellowship which had a really strong public engagement aspect in the final quarter. The grant will pay for me to exclusively research from October 2025 for one year, so it is an incredibly fortunate scenario. The outline/abstract of the grant is as follows:
“The proposed programme of research explores moral injury and moral repair within a workforce – critical care nursing – during what the British Academy (2024) have termed the “covid decade”. It seeks to develop public engagement between nurses and the public contributing towards organisational learning and, in turn, collective resilience of a profession. To do so the fellowship will build upon previous research conducted by the PI to: a) explore the long-term effects of moral injury within a workforce and its implications both for the individual and the broader organization; b) consider the attempts at moral repair within a workforce in an effort to heal the emotional wounds created by moral injury; c) share the findings with the public through an art installation co-designed with critical care nurses on moral injury/repair so to improve the public understanding of the profession whilst contributing to its resilience and collective preparedness for future crises.”
The project builds on the research you can read about here, that my colleagues and I carried out during the pandemic. It does feel, after all, like that period is some kind of forgotten dream that we know happened but is slipping away in our collective memory. This grant is an effort to understand how key workers – in this case critical care nurses – have remembered this period, how they have tried to heal the wounds they experienced but also how they can envisage some kind of future, either in or out of the profession. The awesome part of this grant is that the emphasis is placed on public engagement so assisted by my fantastic colleague Jess Hendon (hendoncreative.com) I designed an external engagement programme that clearly caught the eye. Jess’s company website states that she “want(s) to ensure your research makes an impact in the real world”. And she is certainly great at what she does. We asked ourselves what would be the best way to convey what these critical care nurses experienced during the pandemic and how they have tried to heal themselves since. We settled on the idea that working with an artist who could convey their words and actions into some kind of material representation would be a great way to capture all this in an interesting and original way. To display it in not only art galleries but also hospitals so that people visiting could be reminded of the lost “covid decade” and these courageous nurses’ roles within it. I have had a few comments since the award of the grant that suggest that respect for the nurses is well known and widely shared (i.e. “what are you going on about Martyn”, “this is all obvious stuff”) but this ignores the counter narrative (increasingly dominant) that the nurses tik-tok’d their way through the crisis and were just doing their jobs that are always difficult. Or worse still that they were part of some conspiracy that actively sought to hide the “truth” or staggering worse even still (as we learnt in our interviews in the original project) that nurses were responsible for killing patients with midazolam (a common sedative that is used in hospital settings). For these reasons alone, the project seems essential to ensure that we remember the nurses and the service they provided properly. It should shame us all as a society that we not only failed to recognise the contribution of these people fully either in word or, perhaps more importantly, in substantial pay rises that never emerged.
I look forward to sharing the results of the project here in the coming months. If anyone is thinking of applying for this fellowship next year then please do feel free to get in touch and I am happy to share my application, chat about ideas and what worked well for me.
