An Ethic of Care
The night that Tia gave birth to baby Tyrone, I went home to my flat, locked the door and sank into the bath. Thoughts raced around my head as I topped up the hot water several times, turning the tap on and off with my toes. I didn’t want to get out of the bath because I didn’t know what to do next. I’d seen a fair bit of contemporary homelessness by that point and found it to be unjust, understudied, characterized by gallows humour and ugly, in equal measure. Tyrone’s croaky voice rang in my ears. ‘She had to score, Marmite! She don’t want to go back.’ As I lay in the bath, I felt exhausted. I couldn’t decide whether to wimp out entirely, go to my old boss at the BBC and grovel for my job back, or stick with it, make contemporary homelessness the subject of a PhD and embark on serious fieldwork and doctoral study. I still couldn’t decide the next morning so, after walking the dogs at dawn, I went straight back to bed where I spent the entire day reading P. G. Wodehouse and eating toast. It was John Schofield, later my doctoral supervisor, who eventually persuaded me to make contemporary homelessness the subject of a PhD. When you write a postgraduate research proposal it is important that your research question is clearly articulated. The research context should be cogent and the theoretical novelty of the proposed research should be robust and convincing. A central element of the proposal should be a clear indication that you have thought carefully about any ethical implications that might arise from research and taken measures to address these. I duly wrote a research proposal in which I addressed these points and explained that I had fully considered the ethical implications of working with vulnerable homeless adults (and all homeless people are vulnerable by dint of the fact that they have nowhere safe to call home).