It took you 16 months to get your PhD approved?!?

It must have been a disaster…or something else.

So, this week, I’m in the UK and if all things went to plan, I graduated and officially received my PhD last Saturday. This has been a decade-long endeavor. There are so many milestones on the way to this moment that writing in anticipation of my March 28 graduation, I wonder if it will feel anti-climactic, or if I will just sigh in relief, or cry getting all my emotions out from what has tested my mind, soul, and spirit every step of the way.

But one thing that made this process longer happened from the point of a successful oral defense or viva voce that crawled along like a turtle for 16 months.

You see I submitted my PhD thesis in December 2023 for examination. I was successful in my viva voce in May 2024. But it wasn’t until September 2025 that I received final approval for my thesis to enter the Cambridge library. I graduated (hopefully) on March 28.

So I was in “PhD maybe” land for 21 months from submission to approval and 16 months post-defense to approval. I bring up arduous delay between submission and confirmation because THIS. IS. NOT. NORMAL. For anyone I’ve known at Cambridge (Lucky me, I’m the reason one faculty has “new protocols” which is a recognition that my work didn’t get handled very well.

But I tell you about it, not for sympathy, I need none (and I should have my degree in hand by now). But because the delay is directly related to what is and isn’t true and if we are able to see the humanity in others.

In Cambridge, the examiners, the ethics committee, and a whole slew of academics could not reach consensus on whether or not the photography I took and included in my thesis should be approved. The delay was not about the writing.

I was instructed to blur the faces of all human beings in the photos throughout my thesis. The questions at hand are about consent and capacity to understand. Now any research project goes through ethics reviews and approvals and I successfully completed all of them. And yet, this is the communication I received from the university…

The examiners remained concerned, particularly as the young women might not appreciate the implications of their photos being available publicly. They were also not convinced they would understand the implications of AI.

The examiners questioned whether or not young women could “appreciate the implications of their photos being available publicly” and they were concerned that they would “not understand the implications of artificial intelligence.”

Honestly, just think about that…the question revolves around adult human beings’ understanding and ability to give consent and capacity to understand artificial intelligence.

Blur their faces. Make them invisible. Make them anyone, everyone, a stereotype, a monolith.

Now in all fairness, I have deep respect for the assessors of my PhD. They are highly accomplished academics who have spent their careers advocating and researching so all children have access to a quality education. Their work is rightly influential and I admire them. And if they were here today, they might very well argue that I was at fault in not adequately explaining the implications of photography publication or AI. Who knows. But I disagree. 

To me it smells fishy. It is suspect. You see, I did my research and lived in Karamoja - in Northeastern Uganda - one of the poorest regions in all of Africa. And since any written word has existed about Karamoja, Karamojong people have been treated as objects of study and even their humanity has been questioned. Little academic research or journalism has been done to actually understand them as human beings, our equals. But there are the classics that treat them as objects of study and intrigue for their “obsession” with cattle. And Karamojong women, up until my work, have been wholly ignored in research as if they have not even existed.

And so, to get back to the ethical questions at hand…firstly, questioning an adult woman’s ability to give consent is simply insulting to her humanity. It reminds me of how the British during the colonial era “deliberately preserved the Karamojong in a pristine and raw state” creating a “human zoo” for British expeditionists to visit in the same way we might take children to visit animals in a zoo today. Those are published quotes. Someone thought about that quoted language, wrote it down, typed it, reviewed it, and submitted it for additional people to review and approve. Those are real quotes and tell you something about how the Western gaze not only exoticized human beings, but dehumanized them. Again, those quotes were published.

And the dehumanizaing language above might be old but discrimination and dehumanization die hard. In 1980 during the Karamoja famine, a UNICEF worker in Kampala was quoted as saying, “The Karamojong have been primitive for a long time. Let them starve.” In 2017, a Ugandan taxi driver in Kampala asked me half-jokingly and half-seriously if the Karamojong had tails. But more seriously, he was concerned for my safety because he couldn’t fathom that the Karamojong were anything but “violent”, “uncivilized” and “savage.” His words, not mine.

Knowing this history, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to question if some academics could truly see the humanity in the Karamojong women who took part in my study. And I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a faculty of education in a world class university to approach contemporary anthropology with more sophistication and human beings with less paternalism. I get the debates around consent, anonymisation. I understand the power dynamics. But it feels too colonial to me, protective more of the university and its reputation than allowing for a nuanced understanding of different ethical codes and norms across cultures. It does not feel protective of women nor honors their fully capable intellectual capacity.

And when it comes to AI, I’m not sure that more than a few of us might understand the implications of AI to be honest. We’re all learning. But I also know AI might be able to cause far more damage to the globally-renowned academics asking these questions than it would to many women in this study who live their lives offline.

You see, whether some academics are simply removed in the metaphorical ivory tower from the common person or if they hold unconscious or conscious prejudice, I cannot ignore the outright questioning of the intellectual capacity, the full humanity of people who have not always been and still today are not seen by all as fully human and our equals.

So, I did not blur the faces. This debate and my standoff are finally resolved – there are no photographs in the thesis. And that makes me sad for the women who wanted to be seen. Even moreso, I can’t help but wonder how the photographs would have enhanced the reader’s experience and brought the region as a whole and each individual highlighted a little bit more to life, a little bit more relatable, a little more like us, a little more human.

And if you’re wondering…are the pictures exploitative, poverty porn…do they misrepresent the full lives of the women? I don’t think so. And the human beings in the pictures, and the people in the community do not think so either.

There is a picture of three sister-wives in the family compound preparing tobacco for snorting (which is down by adults to curb hunger and save food for the children). These three sister-wives got along well, shared a bond, and always sat in order of their marriages when talking with me. The first wife, Lucia, always sat closest and talked the most. I used this picture when elaborating what life was like in Karamoja for many women who have not had access to any schooling.

During my visit to share the work (thus proving consent) I have a picture of Lucia when she saw the soft-bound draft. Lucia really liked the photographs and what was written about her (the other wives were out of the compound when the photo was taken). You see, like any researcher who really cares on a human level for the participants, I went back to show these women their stories in context. We translated the thesis section about them and read it to them. My research assistant and I showed them the pictures so they could understand the photos and the writing in context.  And actually, Lucia looks quite jolly and joyful at seeing herself in print. Lucia just couldn’t imagine that SHE was important enough to be in a book. She was and she is.

There were also some school photos. One is a photo of two girls resting in my office after classes finished. The second is of a girl studying as she waited in line to fill her bucket to bathe.

All pictures taken of students do obscure their faces but it’s down creatively in the angle of the shot. I did this out of protection knowing that the consent the girls gave while in high school might change later in adulthood. I didn’t just willy-nilly take tons of pictures and want to plaster faces all over the thesis without any meaning or context. And all the photographs (both in school and out) offer a glimpse at real-life, everyday scenes.

Even more important is that ethically, I attempted to strip away some of the power I had over the girls by allowing a small group of the students to help me select which photographs might be most representative of their school experiences.

Meeting a group of now-college women in the summer of 2024 and showing them the softbound, they expressed gratitude and appreciation for being seen and being of enough value and that a stranger from a highly esteemed Harry Potter university would spend years with them and return again to share the finished product with them.

They wanted to be seen. Doesn’t everyone want to be seen?

And there was a photograph taken from behind the head teacher at the assembly speaking to the student body with blurred students in the background – they were blurred in the original photograph so that the head teacher is focused – as an artistic choice, not a haphazard after-edit.

Do you wonder about the head teacher’s take? Well, she’s a highly educated, experienced and effective school leader who now sits on governing body of her religious congregation in Rome. I think she has as much capacity as anyone to understand the implications of AI and public dissemination of my work.

Her answer? She would have preferred the thesis to have no anonymity of the congregation or any individuals unless they requested it. And why? Because she is proud of the work they do, the lives they lead, and she wants people to know who they are.

Consent, a desire to be seen, and the function and purpose of anonymity are perceived differently in different cultures and well documented in academic literature on ethics. What is important here is not a question of if university academics knew this. They did and they do. What is actually important is to reflect on the difference between intellectually understanding that there are multiple ethical codes across various cultures and actually allowing yourself (or your university) to be humble enough to accept someone else’s ethical code. I’m not the only person who’s read an article (or many!) on cross-cultural ethics. And so, from where I sit, the university’s decision to ignore the ethics by which participants live is an inappropriate exertion of power over their stories and lives.

My philosophical perspective, methodology, writing style, and inclusion of photography aims to align with the culture I entered and offer an enlightening look at how education affects and changes young women who are the first in their families to go to school and deserve to be the focus of humanizing research.

I wrote what American anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod coined an “ethnography of the particular.” One story of one place at one time to learn about one particular situation. By design, an ethnography of the particular is not meant to generalize. Rather it is designed to bring dignity and humanity to people about which we know little. The uniqueness of each person within their culture makes it particular, but these ethnographies also implore us to create connection to people previously unknown to us through our shared human emotions and experiences. An ethnography of the particular offers people the opportunity in research to be real and specific, main characters and co-authors, not objects of study, nor archetypes.

Outside of research writing, I am normally very guarded in how much and to whom I share and talk about my research or life in Uganda because I lived in one remote, deeply poverty-stricken region where the lifestyle and culture of the community is very different from anything we know in the West. And I fear that the stereotypes of where I lived - the inevitable poverty pity and the likely exoticizing of a nomadic lifestyle could become the single takeaway for an entire continent of 54 nations, thousands of cultures, millions of human beings.

But I am confident in you, my dear reader, to see nuance and complexity. Our work in education and research is to have courage, and our teaching must be sophisticated enough to allow for nuance and complexity as well as incomplete and unfinished stories.

These photographs were of one moment in time. They are rich with detail and can tell us so much. But they are also just artifacts from one moment in time of lives unfinished and stories incomplete.

We are all unfinished and incomplete. So who are we becoming? Who are you becoming? Our lives might be finite but there is still time to become more fully human and see others with more empathy, more humanity.

You know, I have the photographs still. And I’m shopping a book based on my thesis. I’m saving the photographs. And soon enough, I will honor those women and let them be seen in visual form.