Daniel's PhD in Sociology made use of ethnographic methods with crack cocaine users in South London over a period of 12 months. The PhD was undertaken part time over a period of five years as Daniel worked as a contract researcher in the London area.

Introduction: The status quo of academic life for the foreseeable future

So, you got your PhD well done. No small feat. You beat the odds; you defeated the isolation and inevitable lack of support on top of other personal stuff you may have had going on for you at the time. You probably took on exploitative teaching and admin responsibilities and buttered up senior academics in the process to get yourself into some temporary academic position. Well done. You bided your time, took on the extra favours like doing the seniors’ jobs at times, flattered them, and cited their publications. You came across as ‘the future’, someone ‘breaking through’ who had immense potential to … just continue this ridiculous cycle just to get noticed in academia.

In these early exploitative roles in which you could not stop saying ‘yes’ to more work, you were encouraged to do the leg work for aimless and almost inevitably flawed research proposals which were either destined to be rejected or change almost nothing in society. The research seemed to have a good moral and social purpose, but the funder rarely seemed to shortlist your team. You reasoned you were unlucky and spent months rejigging your proposal only to receive bad news once again.