Write a description of your research project and address the following issues.

Deadline: 16 September Friday 18:00 

1. A short introduction describing your own research project (include the project working title)
2. What is the gap in existing knowledge and/or practice – or what is the currently unavailable insight, missing experience, understanding, absent production – that you are trying to address?
3. Why might your research project be of relevance to others? Given that your topic of enquiry is very important to you, is there any reason to think that it might matter for someone else?
4. What concrete tasks will you undertake in pursuing this research project
5. Is there an important aspect of the research project which the previous questions – 1 to above – do not solicit?
6. Identify an example of practice within your domain–by another person or group– that you recognize as an example of an enquiry, a research process being advanced in some way. Provide a link to, or digital documentation, or some other form of access or connection to the work so that others in the class group may access the example in some way.
7. What are the three most important existing sources of knowledge on – or as close as possible to– your research topic?
8. Identify an example of a description or statement of research method –by another person or group– from your own broad area of concern.

ABOUT THE SUBMISSION

• Please submit as a word .doc or rich text format file by uploading into the google folder for task #1 (provided during the start-up class).
• Please name the file "firstname-surname-methods_task1" so we can all identify to whom each document belongs.
• Please include links to any practical documentation, audio visual or images that you wish to share.
• Word count: No minimum, but preferably less than 1,750 words

• Everyone in the group will be given access to each other’s text. We will then do a random allocation (names picked out of a hat in sequence). Each participant will be asked to prepare a short introduction of another participant’s project. The purpose of introducing each other's work in this way is:

  • To share an active understanding of the different research concerns and processes that are mixed together in the room
  • To focus on the communicative task of naming and disclosing a project that can at least be partially described by a short introductory text
  • To make it a little easier to start a discursive community when we are interacting both face-to-face and at a distance, and meeting several new people for the first time.

MORE ABOUT THE TASK

Expansion of the items listed in the writing task.

1. Write a short introduction describing your own research project (include the project title). The emphasis is on communicating for the non-specialist and making it possible for someone to “pass on” your project ideas in a basic but accurate way.
2. What is the gap in existing knowledge / practice – or what is the currently unavailable insight, missing experience, understanding, absent production – that you are trying to address? This is about giving us a sense of what is not already known, or understood, or already done that you are proposing to respond to in some way. The suggestion is that the research is oriented to a lack of something or to a knot of not-quite-understanding that you are working on. This question uses a model that posits a body of existing knowledge / insight / practice, and something missing from this, that you are in some way hoping to engage and address. This may not be how you think of your current work. (For example, sometimes we think of our work as a task to produce an artefact or expression that doesn’t exist already.) However, the pedagogical task set by this question is to experiment with thinking in this specific way and trying to construct or re-construct your research task as a task of contributing new insights / knowledge / understanding into a body or bodies of existing knowledge and practice. This is not simply duplicating or reproducing existing insights and ideas and understandings, but rather proposing something that has some degree of novelty or difference with respect to what is already in circulation within a given body of knowledge. The important thing is to try and answer this pedagogical question on its own terms first, and then we can talk about how we can change the pedagogical question to invite response in terms that may be located within your own immediate working concerns.
3. Why might your research project be of relevance to others? Given that your topic of enquiry is very important to you, is there any reason to think that it might matter for someone else? Another way of thinking this question is: “What’s the point?” or “What’s the purpose or need for your research enquiry?” or “What difference will it make, when your enquiry concludes?” or “Why bother?” This question format is also a very specific formulation. It is asking about a rationale that is not simply located in “my” subjective desire to do something. The task of the pedagogical question here is to try and imagine the research concerns as if they mattered to someone else other than the one who is doing the research. This again may not be how you think about what you are doing. That’s ok. The question is part of a learning task to help refine our different understandings of the “what” / “why” / “how” of our research work.
4. What concrete tasks will you undertake in pursuing this research project? Some tasks that we do, such as: register in a university; attend a start-up meeting; have meetings with a supervisor; take different courses; and attend conferences; have a kind of generic quality to them. All of us, as doctoral students, tend to do these institutional and general concrete tasks. However, these tasks do not really tell us anything –in their generality– about how the specific enquiry or exploration that we are doing will be advanced. This question is trying to target and focus on the tasks and activities that you imagine or anticipate will help get your particular project done. It might be something like: making a prototype; or experimenting with a material or process; or doing a trial workshop; or analysing an artefact or composition or performance; or listening to/reading/viewing a defined body of existing work; or examining/exploring an archive; or interviewing someone about some topic… The goal of this question is to develop some concrete sense of what actions are projected as being useful actions for getting the enquiry to go somewhere, to move on, to develop, to get to another place or stage in the process. This question is a question about what are you going to do concretely. It is part of the question of how are you going to do the enquiry. It is one entry into the question of “method”, of how something is done. It tries to avoid more abstract themes (for now at least) and push for descriptions of action or practical doing.
5. Is there an important aspect of the research project which the previous questions – (i) to (iv) above – do not solicit?
6. What are the three most important existing sources of knowledge on – or as close as possible to– your general topic? (This is about identifying where existing knowledge may be located. It can be done by indicating specific cultural works, academic sources, or individual/collective practitioners or research centres/networks … or indeed in whatever way allows you to inform others about: (a) where existing knowledge connected to your research topic exists; and (b) what are the current ways in which that knowledge is available to you and to us – your colleagues.
7. Identify an example of practice within your domain–by another person or group– that you recognize as an example of an enquiry, a research process being advanced in some way. Provide a link to, or digital documentation, or some form of access or connection to the work so that others in the class group may access the example in some way.
8. Identify an example of a description or statement of research method –by another person or group– from your own broad area of concern or domain and provide a link to, or digital copy, of this, so it can be read by your classmates. This could be a method statement from an already finished PhD, or a research project in your domain, or from a classic/historically important or influential work that you find of general interest. Each person in the group will be asked to read TWO such extracts, so it would help if the extracts are not over long (maximum 3,000 words approximately; no minimum applies.)