This section documents my first Annual Progression, performed by the Northumbria University in January 2021 as an interim evaluation towards the completion of my PhD.
Overall, you have made good progress on your PhD. It is great to see you develop your thinking from the work you were doing before the PhD, into the design work, and now thinking back at how all of this could relate to policy work. While you have done a lot of work, and have a clear plan for the next step, it would be good for you to think more carefully about and to articulate the wider story behind your work: what is the research you are doing, how does it contribute to ongoing academic debates on smart cities, sustainability, waste reduction, etc.? Where does your work contribute in this academic debate? And how does your practical research help you contribute to this debate? In your second year it will be really important for you to write a detailed bit of writing on your methodology and literature review. This should include information on what you're doing, why you're doing it, and what decisions you have made along the way. It should also include thinking about how your literature is shaping this thinking, and finding the literature that gels with what you're doing and that you can put your own research into conversation with. Articulation of the wider story would be important to include in your next progression panel. A part of this is also having a clear plan for your third year: the conversation we had about personal responsibility and wider structural/political concerns may be a good starting point for this thinking. As we were talking about this, you mentioned that you saw technology as a way to engage people in conversation about economic systems and how industry promotes a culture of discarding things; therefore addressing indirectly wider political issues rather than personal responsibility. You also mentioned how you are thinking about your work in terms of bringing communities into conversation to help develop meaningful policies for larger corporations. This is really core to your argument of the PhD, and really interesting and important areas to do more research into. This may be a good starting point for you to find literature and methodological considerations that will help pull together your PhD. We would expect you to have done more thinking and writing about this, to ensure you have much more clarity on these two areas for your second annual progression panel. Overall though, well done! This is an interesting research area and one that has some real potential to help shape how we think about smart cities, technologies, and waste management (all of which are incredibly important areas in our world today!)
Back to reports.