05 Haziran 2021, Cumartesi
saat: 21:16
I have a startling amount of white hairs coming in right now, and while it’s honestly fine because I think it does not look bad, I’m like… "wow. it really truly has been a year, huh?"
But at least I’ve been making some good progress on the summer research program, and I am excited to revisit my dissertation topic again in a more thorough and detailed way with the help of my undergrad RAs!!! and I also finally took care of a tedious and time-consuming admin task that I’ve been putting off for weeks, which is such a relief! I finally feel so calm and centered.
Also a bit unrelated but I realized Political Science (TM) has fully corrupted me. I hear legal scholars rave about their research on something abstract af, or narrow, or purely historical, super fun and interesting, and my first thought is “Ok, but why do we care?” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I keep telling my RAs that they should answer the "so what?" question right off the bat as well, but I guess I need to remember that interesting research has inherent value. At the end of the day, my favorite stage of research labor is when I am still figuring out the shape of what I want to talk about and I am just in magpie mode, collecting and reading anything that strikes my interest and squirreling it away, because who knows!! Sometimes I publish in journals from other disciplines just for that reason: I am like "must I argue? is it not enough to simply collect my little facts, and share??" Still, I have questions: how tf do you get funding for the type of research that's super interesting but not quite "relevant" or argumentative ???? How do you present it in a grant application or annual review ?? Or a job talk ??? “Well I don't know if there is actually something to find at all, I’ll just snoop around and play detective” does not feel like something that would convince a committee??? I don't know, it seems unnecessarily complicated!
Random thought of the day: If my research had a soundtrack, it would be some crazy Oriental Remix of the Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, crescendoing into Bella Ciao.
