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How to Get Involved | OURatNU | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: How to Get Involved
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This summer I will be traveling to Vienna and London
... Kampala, Uganda
... all over the east coast
... South Africa
... Kurdistan
... studying political organization in Irish and Jewish American communities
... collectively produced art in communities
... John Quincy Adams' ambassadorship to Europe
... implementation of the affirmative action policy for women in politics
Intro
The very most important thing about research is that you have to find
something that you actually care about that sounds totally obvious but in fact isn't.
There is something personal behind every research project. No matter how formal it
might seem, no matter how rigorously constructed it is, no matter how large or
small it is.
I had a colleague years ago that always used to ask people when they were
presenting something from their research, "what in your gut really turns you on
about this?"
It wasn't a research project for a long time, it was a personal quest.
It was something that I felt strongly motivated to try to figure out about my life.
There is this sense of a process figuring out what your own stake is and then from
that you go off and read what other people have written, learn what the debates have
been from following footnotes and seeing who has been arguing about what.
It is probably best to start with what other people have thought about that idea
rather than doing it by yourself. Why not use the help of the generations if you can
get it? Don't reinvent the wheel.
Go on your hunches about the kinds of questions that have been asked in the past
and the sorts of questions that have been ignored.
That doesn't mean it is all, "ugh, the answer... I can't do anything about it..."
there still may be new situations and different contexts and additional questions
that you can pose about it, but at least you have a good foundation.
See what kinds of answers people gave to this kind of question.
Are those good answers? What kind of reasons did they give to this kind of
question? What kind of connections did they make between the question that you asked
and other questions?
The process of narrowing it down is one of defining a specific question that is
answerable.
Steer away from a sense of questions that have received all of the attention and
figure out the questions that you think people really need to ask.
Start with a question, you come up with an answer, you get dissatisfied with the
answer, you have to become more careful, you become more careful, that leads to
another question and other answers before you realize you are narrowing it down. You
are making much smaller claims than you were originally making.
Sources turn up in amazing wonderful ways and, as a scholar will attest, the sort of
things you can learn in the course of your research are infinitely better
than what you can make up yourself.
I love to tell my students that the world is filled with data.
Data is not the problem.
Seek out sources that people haven't used and be persistent about it. Write letters,
bang on people's doors, really do not take no for an answer. You can get access to
the most extraordinary sorts of sources.
If it is a research project, there needs to be something other than just you
involved because it is apt to be a combined effort
The idea though that thinking outside the box, entertain the possibility that other
people outside your discipline, other literatures outside the narrow literature
you are looking at, and it might be interesting how they have approached
this question.
Research is about creating knowledge ultimately,
and there is nothing more fantastic.
Philosophical research does not take deep insight and brilliance. If it did, I would
not have succeeded. What it takes is perseverance, hard work, and a sense of a
question that you really are burning to answer.
There are lots of different stories we tell about why we are doing a project.
There's the kind of story we tell in order to get a grant for it, there's the kind of
story we tell in an advising situation, or with a mentor to say well, this is how I
think it works, but you are not held to it because you're just talking it through.
Then there's the story that is in many ways just as real as the others, which is
this deep personal thing about why this for me now.
The great thing is to realize at the end of it, you begin with an idea, you begin
with an interest, and here you have got a product and that product is something of
yours. Your identity is on it and it is a product that you can show the world now.
... to study multiculturalism as it relates to music programs in the suburbs.
... China's relationship with developing countries.
... how kids acquire language.
... characterizing molecular membranes from molecules I am making in the lab.
... how music affects the brain in older adults.
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