The first thing to say is that hourly paid teaching is exploitative. The headline per/hour fee looks ok until you realise it doesn't cover much beyond the actual hour in the classroom. The terms and conditions are usually shit and other than a library card and computer login few fringe benefits. People doing this long term who need the money can understandably end up feeling very bitter, so I'd only see it as a future if you can walk away easily, if it gets too much.

How easy is it to come by? Depends on the sort of universities near you. If they are research-led with large PhD programmes, then a lot of the hourly paid work will go to their own PhD students, so you'd need to have a specialist area that not many others can / want to teach to be assured of regular employment. There are though universities that use a large pool of casual labour and have relatively few permanent staff. These are normally identifiable by a refusal to list their staff on the website - here chances are reasonable but they also tend to be places with money issues so sudden closures of programmes can be an issue.

An EdD I think would limit you to education departments - are there enough healthy ones near you? On your other questions yes a fulltime contract would mean working through the summer so not ideal for your plans, and yes the competition for Eng LIt is ridiculous. Not sure about the Education market for lectureships - I have a feeling that might be different because of the QTS training element.

Hi Mutant,

I think you need to think more about the reputation of the lab / supervisors than the university (although the department's REF2014 score will give you a reasonable idea of how the Open University are rated for research in your subject). I know the Open University has found finances tough since the changes to their funding regime about 5 years ago, so I think asking questions about whether the necessary equipment is there / is there a project budget for whatever supplies are needed etc would be a good idea (if this is a research council grant funded project that all should be fine - if a university funded studentship worth checking). Secondly have a look at the publications coming out of the lab - does it look ok in terms of quality and quantity and have previous PhD students published? Thirdly, does the university offer the training that you might need - it doesn't seem to be a BBSRC doctoral training partner (I assume that's the relevant RC) so that might be worth asking about.

It's worth mentioning that the Brexit campaign leaders are prioritising stopping free movement of people. Switzerland voted to not allow free movement for Croatians in a referendum, after Croatia joined the EU - among the first programmes they were suspended from was Erasmus.

PS Here at least it would be the dean of faculty, not just the review panel, who has to agree the upgrade.

I think it might depend on what the rationale for downgrading you was - I think you might have more hope of reversing a decision based on non-progress, if you can now show acceptable progress, than a decision that the project itself was not PhD-worthy for example. I also think that the support of your supervisory team, and maybe whoever is in charge of PhD students in your department would be important i.e. I wouldn't just spring the question out of the blue at the review meeting but test the waters first and see what they think.

I did find mine quite different to a PhD - for context I'm a social scientist and had a Marie Curie two year postdoc. The PhD, I'd agree with treeoflife was definitely much less stressful, but I think I actually enjoyed the postdoc more. What was different for me:
1) no supervisor - at first I found the independence quite hard to deal with. I had moved to a university system where pastoral care for students was non-existent and so there was no support for postdocs. You were just meant to know what to do - be an instant professional researcher. When I adapted, I liked this bit - I was fed up of being a student (my impression is that in a lab the transition is less sudden).
2) Always needing to think about the next job is stressful. In the social sciences you hopefully transition to a lectureship after a postdoc, but the statistical odds are heavily against you. That means being under real pressure to publish fast and well, and get as many things on your cv as you can. I wrote and published more in one year of my postdoc than I did in my entire PhD. Networking becomes crucial and learning to look confident even if you don't feel it...
3) I was interacting and teaching (not much, just an MA module) in a different language. Although I'd studied abroad before in the country and spoke it well, I found that quite tough at times.
4) I found it odd being sort of between the PhD students and the permanent academic staff. On the one hand, I found it uncomfortable to hear the PhD students bitching about their supervisors as they were now colleagues (and you start to realise quickly that a lot of it is very unfair), but on the other, I wasn't meant to attend staff meetings as they were for permanent staff. So I ended up stuck in the middle.

You're doing a postdoc at the moment right? If I've remembered that correctly, it would perhaps be worth seeing if you could arrange an informational interview with someone with a PhD on the administration where you are, and ask how they got started and at what level - if that person would be kind enough to look at a sample application that would obviously be useful too.
I think you are targeting a particular geographical area - one issue might be whether there has been a restructuring / redundancies recently. A lot of the admin jobs where I work are going to insiders on redeployment after their existing posts ended. It would be hard for an outsider to match them in terms of experience. If that is the case, maybe getting in at a lower level might be necessary. I wonder as well whether there are some areas where PhDs are more welcome than others - I have two acquaintances who took this path post-PhD and both started in research administration, although they later both moved to other areas.

Hi, I was fairly fluent in the ones I used but have a few suggestions based on my experience:
1) Try to find online dictionaries with a discussion forum that are used by translators - this for German is a great example http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_de.html - for technical phrases these sorts of resources are a lifesaver when you need a precise rather than a rough translation!
2) Ask friends if they know any native speakers of each language and get their contact details. You might need something translated at some point and even if it's paid work, I've found the rates an acquaintance would charge are so much cheaper than an agency.
3) Google translate is not reliable for any of the languages I speak well enough to know - worth it for a quick overview of a text but use with extreme caution.

@AOE26 I did go into academia but most of my cohort didn't (either didn't want to or the academic jobs market didn't work out for them), we got on well and largely stay in touch. As far as I can tell, the most successful ones got their first job by using the PhD as proof of their research skills (nearly all in policy-related jobs) but then progressed on their own merits not directly because of the PhD. I don't think any have published academically since leaving academia but the value of academic publications in most non-academic jobs is probably not worth the effort. I think for social scientists like these, the selling point of the PhD to the outside world is either the research methods skills you have, that are valued by e.g. market research, places using big datasets etc, or for a few the empirical knowledge gained through fieldwork e.g. knowledge of a particular group or country.
For Hugh - a couple did go into university admin roles, and after difficult starts are doing well now, but from what they say you have to be very careful to come across as genuinely enthused by the career possibilities, as otherwise you can get tagged as 'failed academic desperate to stay in a university' and then promotion opportunities are less good.

Accepted pending minor revisions sounds fine to me. I'd leave the draft work off the cv until it's submitted somewhere, as it looks like padding otherwise, but it's ok to outline what you are working on in a cover letter and say what the target journals are in a paragraph on your research trajectory.

I think I'd think about the following:
1) How is the PhD examined where you are? Do people fail or is it a system where if you've jumped through the hoops and got the required number of publications, regardless of the quality of the thesis, you'll pass? If so, given your location issues and your background in HE, can you build a scientific network outside the institution and manage to jump through the necessary hoops that way? Or is non-completion likely if you stay put?
2) Do you hope to have an academic career in this current country and if so are jobs awarded on merit or patronage? How much would transferring burn bridges in that respect?
3) Do you have any reason to think things would be better at another university in the current country (i.e. are your issues local or pervasive) or were you thinking about distance learning options?
4) Is lack of an ethical approval process likely to be an issue in terms of limiting the journals you can submit to? From your description, it's not clear whether you will be using human subjects and so whether the informed consent issue is a massive thing or not. I put this last because how important this is would vary enormously depending on what you want to do.

I think then it would be worth investigating a leave of absence for the reasons IntoTheSpiral gives. I'm not convinced you see that another university would be that happy for you to register to finish off at a later date, you see, so if you can keep the candidacy at your current place alive, I suspect that's going to be easiest.
Regarding the operation, have you asked if the NHS would refer you to get it done elsewhere in the EU if the waiting lists are that long? There was a recent story in the guardian about someone doing that.

How much of the thesis have you got written?

Is there anyone at Birmingham with recent experience of Ugandan fieldwork? If so, I'd suggest meeting for coffee. If not, I think I'd be looking for anyone at a UK university who has - I suspect there may be big differences between what should be possible and what is possible and the personal experience would be most helpful. Africanists tend to be nice people!
On medical insurance, you should ask the university insurance office whether there's a policy covering postgrad fieldwork (there is at my uni) - and what exclusions there are. I don't know if you've done the health and safety forms yet (and do them well in advance and thoroughly!) but that might set also limits on what you can and can't do.