A Creative Act of Service
There is a quiet truth about doctoral research that rarely makes it into prospectuses or supervision meetings: completing a PhD is not, at its heart, a technical problem. It is a creative, relational, and deeply human undertaking — and the conditions that allow it to flourish are wide-ranging.
Universities offer a great deal to their doctoral researchers. Alongside that provision, there is room for something complementary: dedicated space for the creative, reflective, and community dimensions of the work. Which is why, in May 2026, we have introduced PhD Journeying an initiative that exists to hold that space — working in harmony with the institutional support researchers already receive, and adding to it rather than standing apart from it.
A Partnership rooted in Practice
PhD Journeying is an initiative developed through a collaboration between Radically Hopeful — an academic and community publishing venture — and Meredith R. Jones, a professor, author, and psychotherapist. It brings together two orientations that rarely sit side by side in doctoral support: the scholarly and the psychodynamic. The strategic and the soulful. The structural and the deeply personal.
We piloted the programme in October 2025 and again in February 2026, running online workshops with cohorts of PhD researchers drawn from across disciplines and career stages. Demand outstripped capacity from the very first call. A waitlist formed immediately and has stayed with us ever since — which told us something we had already suspected: researchers are hungry for this kind of space.
What we believe
At the centre of PhD Journeying sits a conviction we hold without apology: a PhD is not merely an academic requirement. It is a creative act of service — to knowledge, to community, and to the world.
When researchers lose touch with that truth, the work becomes heavier than it needs to be. When they stay connected to it, something shifts. The writing moves. The thinking opens. The path ahead, however long, becomes navigable again.
Our mission is to help PhD candidates stay connected to their core motivation, take honest stock of where they are, and rekindle the creative sparks that brought them to the research in the first place. Our vision is a landscape in which every doctoral researcher — whatever their background, discipline, or stage — has access to the creative, reflective, and community tools they need to fulfil their research potential and share their work with the people who will most benefit from it.
What this means, pragmatically
Each session runs for two hours — long enough to move past surface-level thinking, short enough to hold sustained creative attention. They're held online, in small cohorts, and designed to be both reflective and generative.
A typical session might begin with a prompt that invites researchers to reconnect with what drew them to their work in the first place. From there, we move into structured conversation, creative practice, and honest inquiry — drawing on scholarly tradition and psychodynamic practice in equal measure. Sometimes we're mapping what's blocked. Sometimes we're re-seeing what matters. Sometimes we're simply making room for the fact that a stuck chapter is rarely just a stuck chapter.
The work is held together by our SPARK framework — See the Vision, Plot the Path, Amplify Strengths, Remove Barriers, Kindle Community — but SPARK is a scaffolding, not a script. What researchers consistently tell us is that the sessions themselves become one of the most sustaining parts of their doctoral experience: a cohort that takes their work seriously, prompts that open thinking rather than narrow it, and space to move through what's stuck with others doing the same. We hold the creative vision seriously, and we hold the practical reality alongside it.
PhD Journeying is also designed to help universities do what they most want to do: support researchers through to completion, publication, and meaningful impact. Completed PhDs. Published work. Research that reaches the people it was written for. Contact us if you would like to discuss a flexible plan for PhD Journeying for your researchers.
Radical hope, as we practise it, is not the opposite of pragmatism. It is pragmatism with its roots showing.
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