The unconventional academic – my post-doctoral journey comes to an end

“Your vibe isn’t of someone who works on Excel spreadsheets all the time.”

This was said to me by a friendly post-graduate student at the last academic conference of the Oxford-led ATTUNE project, on a sweltering day in London at the end of June 2025. A project where for five years, a large group of academics across the UK have worked with and for young people to explore their experiences of childhood adversity and mental health via creative arts.

Dr Chloe Farahar speaking at the ATTUNE conference in June 2025. Chloe on the train to London with disability assistant & partner, Stephen. Close-up of Chloe’s makeup that day.

At this conference, I spoke alongside fellow academics about what we found during the art workshops with young people of all sorts of backgrounds, from the youngest 12-year-olds up to 24-year-olds. I followed established academic Professor Nicola Shaughnessy – Nicki, and my boss to me – after she spoke about the importance of the arts as not merely art, but an integral and important form of “data” and science in itself.

Then it was my turn to speak to a few slides about the “dry” Excel spreadsheet that was the sum of years of work on framework analysis – a qualitative method that none of us had used before. This method allowed us to collect our young participants’ voices in a huge spreadsheet that could be “mapped” with any questions we had: “what did our young participants think constitutes adversity?” and “what experiences or factors that happen after adversity change whether young people have good or bad mental health later?”

As I stood there, I realised our carefully planned talk hadn’t gone to script. Nicki hadn’t spoken about her project journey – something she’d told us to think about, and which I had decided I would just “wing” on the day, with no notes ahead of time.

So, I joked to the crowd about how my notes weren’t needed, dumped my notebook on the table, and focused on holding the microphone whilst moving through the slides. Except, now my journey was on my mind, and I’d just mentioned it to the room, so I might as well talk to it first – sticking to the plan I’d had in my head…

Dr Sylvan Baker, the engaging keynote before our talk, had spoken of conventional academics working on young people and the power disparity in research with participants. As I listened, I must have looked disinterested or bored, scribbling notes in my notebook (which I’d remembered to bring for a change), I was thinking about my post-doctoral journey and how I was an unconventional academic in nearly all senses.

And so, as I stood there letting the audience of academics, students, schools, organisations, parents, and young people know that I was now going to speak to the “dry” data and Excel sheets (waits for laughs and titters), I thought about those notes anyway.

What unconventional looks like

I told everyone in that room how, listening to Dr Baker talk about conventional academics, I reflected on how I was an unconventional academic on an unconventional project. How this project had felt far more interdisciplinary than I imagine most projects that call themselves such – having as we did people from psychiatry, arts practitioners, and oddball neurodivergent social psychologists who have no idea where they fit in the world, let alone academia 👀.

I told that room that I am an unconventional academic because I am a psychologist who wrote a terrible play that I used for my PhD. I know it’s terrible because I don’t come from an arts background, and when my dear mentor Professor Shaughnessy read my play, she had lots of critique for it and its terribleness (loud laughter from the room, and a mortified Nicki).

I am an unconventional academic because I am innately neurodivergent.

I am innately combative and challenging for others to work with.

I have experienced childhood adversity myself, and I struggled at times to hear from the amazing young people on the project re-telling their adverse experiences.

I have pushed and been pushed by the nature of the project – but never by the amazing young people I met.  

These weren’t just personal characteristics I was listing – they were the very qualities that shaped how I approached this research. My lived experience meant I could sit with young people’s difficult stories in ways that felt authentic to them. My neurodivergence brought different ways of seeing patterns in the data. My combativeness meant I pushed back when traditional methods felt at odds with what we were trying to do.

The spreadsheets that aren’t dry

Then I spoke about the Excel spreadsheets and how they’re not dry at all – they are the voices and quotes of 74 young people with whom I did art with and who trusted me to be interviewed about their difficult life experiences. Each cell contained a fragment of someone’s story, their insight, their raw and real adversity, and strength and vulnerability.

It was back to Nicki then, to talk about how art and typical data collection methods create a “third space” – where art and science come together to create something far more than one method alone could achieve.

In the breaks throughout the day, something unusual happened. A number of students and established academics came to speak to me – something that doesn’t happen often, probably due to my Autistic neutral face that tells people “don’t approach me, I’m intimidating”.

They wanted to know more: to speak about the work we’d done and how I’d managed as a disabled person; advice on how to work with Autistic children; and could I come speak to Cambridge University in September, exactly how I’d done today – “humour and jokes and all”.

“What, even though Autistic people ‘aren’t supposed to have a sense of humour?!'”. Both laugh.

One PhD student wanted to know how we’d approached such difficult topics with our young participants without being too direct – I will send them our interview prompts for inspiration.

What comes next, uncertainty

I have no idea whether my hopes and plans for my next steps will happen, not least because I am struggling daily with extreme fatigue and worrying about pain from early-onset osteoarthritis. I have plans, but my body often has its own ideas about what we’re capable of. I even write this two days after the conference, absolutely exhausted from one day travelling to and from London to attend.

But perhaps that’s what unconventional academic life looks like – not following predetermined career paths, not fitting neatly into disciplinary boxes, not pretending that our whole selves don’t show up in our work.

Maybe the next chapter involves more conferences where I dump my notes dramatically and speak from the heart. Maybe it means finding new ways to bridge the gap between lived experience and academic knowledge. Maybe it means continuing to challenge what we think research should look like, sound like, feel like.

And so, I don’t have a vibe that tells you much about who I am, or what I am capable of. I have ideas, I have plans, and I will have to see what unconventional means of doing them I can push to happen – one unconventional day at a time.

But I’m beginning to think that’s exactly the kind of academic the world needs more of.

Dr Chloe Farahar (they/them – Autistic)

---