Reading this text brought me back to many slightly less than fun conversations I had with my advisor while writing my senior undergrad thesis. He was a much more methodologically traditional anthropologist than I wanted to be, and we chafed a lot in terms of thinking about what ethnography should and can be. I was (and still am) deeply invested in collaborative, activist anthropologies and, to his chagrin, actively resisted coming up with my own research question. Instead, I would plant myself on a little soapbox and tell him that I refused to create a research question that wasn’t forged in dialogue with my collaborators (he could call me an idealist, I would call him overly conservative… which was ultimately a very generative endeavor).
To an extent, I still stand by my (over)idealistic approach–– shooting for the stars and whatnot can be helpful in moving towards collaboration. The nuance I was missing, however, is that sometimes you need a question to get started. Murchison’s second chapter speaks about the processes of finding a topic, while the third chapter moves into the actual creation of a research question and research design. I still am grappling with the point where engaged ethnography meets exploratory research, as I fear that formulating a preliminary question based on my perspectives, goals, and expectations would result in a less engaged project later on as I share my thoughts with collaborators. In truth, this is the bind I’m stuck in right now–– earlier projects of mine have had community connections already built in, as service and personal relationships predated research. Now, as a graduate student, I’ve been transplanted into Nashville, and I don’t have the roots to begin a collaborative project right off the bat. Which would be fine and dandy, except there is a pressure to begin fieldwork as soon as humanly possible, and I begin to feel like any research I would do would be research for my own sake, not to benefit and support the community organizations that I hope to work with…
Apologies for the quick tangent, but the Murchison chapter very much brought up the conversations I’ve been having with myself lately. How do you get started doing activist, engaged research when you’re weary about creating research questions (even knowing that they will shift, change, and grow)?