Some Ideas for the Postgraduate Research Day: Becoming a Professional Researcher

Some ideas for the postgraduate research day: becoming a professional researcher.

Part 1: Becoming a professional researcher: institutional framing

1. ‘Becoming’

This is a continual process, beginning with the PhD and continuing on throughout a career.

2. ‘Becoming a professional researcher’ can be understood as response to/transformation of the scholarly sphere. What I’d like to emphasise today is the idea of research as (in part) a continual, thoughtful calibration of what one does to preexisting and continually shifting body of circulating discourses.

3. But first, some basics:

The institution you are enrolled at understands ‘becoming a researcher’ in terms of certain benchmarks. Some of these you have explored in the skills audit. Others are forthcoming in your probation activities and, later, in the PhD.

What you are expected to do for probation:

Evaluate skills and address weaknesses

Give a presentation

Present written report

Defend it in a viva

What you are expected to do on the probation report: present

A viable research question

A critical literature review situating the proposed research

The proposed method, a work plan

A critical justification of the project

(Sometimes: preliminary findings)

What you are expected to do in the PhD:

Make an ‘original contribution to scholarship’

4. Some key elements here:

Study of pre-existing research

Dissemination

(Area/materials/texts to be investigated and) research question

Methods employed

Findings

Theory with which to interpret them

5. I see these as three pairs:

(a) Study of pre-existing research / dissemination. You acknowledge and seek to intervene in the sphere of discourse to which you will make a contribution.

“Not texts themselves create [academic] publics, but the concatenation of texts through time. Only when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and when a responding discourse can be postulated, can a text address a[n academic] public” (2002: 90).

(b) Area to be investigated and research question / methodology. Seemingly straightforward, but surprisingly difficult. What do you want to investigate, and what do you want to ask about it? How will you do it? I expect that many of you will arrive at moments when you discover that what you are doing does not answer the questions you initially posed or investigate the materials you planned to look at. Conversely, you may arrive at a juncture when what you are doing necessitates a different question and a different object of research.

(c) Findings / theories with which to interpret them. This too might seem to be straightforward. You find what you find, and then bring a familiar theory to bear upon it. But in fact what becoming a researcher often means is finding that the new evidence makes demands on the theory, forcing a reformulation of it.

6. It also seems to me that the second two pairs can be framed within the first. So, we can speak of original contributions to research emerging in the form of research questions, methodologies, findings, or theories.

Part 2: Exercise

1. Some of the foregoing ideas is often easier to rehearse with the work of other scholars than with our own—and the more so the more esteemed the scholar. What I’d like you to do in an initial exercise is to pick a scholar you are familiar with, and, in a single sentence, attempt to sum up one of the ways she or he has contributed to what I am calling the ‘network of scholarly circulation’. What influential idea did she or he introduce or popularise? What object of research was explained, what theory introduced, or what methodology developed?

Theory

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities suggested that the nation and nationalism in their modern forms emerged in the Americas through ‘print-capitalism’, that is to say through the circulation of mass-mediated accounts (especially in newspapers) of other persons, geographically distant yet sharing a common narrative space and moving through time together.

Contribution: moved away from concepts of the nation as a group of people who share cultural commonalities and towards an idea of the nation as a group of people who, with the help of mass-mediated stories, imagine one another to share a common narrative space and time.

(b) Small-group discussion: present your sentence to another student from another discipline. Clarify it as necessary.

(c) Larger-group discussion. Present your sentence to the larger group, elaborating if necessary the relationship between their chosen scholar and their field of cultural production.

2. BD response

(a) One of the things you’re probably already doing, as part of your literature reviews, is developing the ability to summarise arguments succinctly. This is one of many skills you cultivate throughout the PhD and your later work as a researcher (and it may be taken up by Graham Harvey in another session of the conference);

(b) It is possible of course to pull some of these ideas apart. All of us work with, and respond to, the work of others. The very act of making an appropriate and effective contribution typically means making use of ideas, methods, theories, and questions that already exist.

Part 3: Recapitulation of some main points

1. ‘Original contributions’ are knowledgeable responses to ongoing discussions: appropriate-and-effective interventions in a network of mutually referential performances and publications.

The ‘Original contribution’ is an intervention in a pre-existing sphere of discourse.

2. ‘Becoming a researcher’ involves (in part) the continual process of calibration to this sphere-in-motion. It involves understanding yourself in relationship to a network in which particular questions, methods, findings, and theoretical work circulate.

Understood from this perspective, scholarship does not only mean setting out certain questions, methods, findings, and theories, but also, and simultaneously, positioning yourself relative to other (past and future) research publications, and to the ways they (will) pose questions, use methods, set forth theories, and present findings.

Part 4: Exercise two

1. What I’d like you to do now is to consider your own work, focusing on three areas, time permitting:

Areas/materials/texts to be investigated and research questions to be posed

Methods employed

Theory

(We’ll leave out findings)

Divide into groups. Look first at research questions, second at methodology, and third (time permitting) at theory.

What will your work contribute to the present field of cultural production in the area in question? Don’t worry if you are not innovating in all areas; indeed, it would be remarkable if you were. Scholars often make use of established methods and theories.

2. Small-group discussion

3. Larger-group discussion.

4. BD response

(a) At the very least, the preceding might be understood as a kind of instrumental exercise in self-promotion. At conferences and on the job market you will regularly be asked what you work on, and it’s best to have a short answer ready.

(b) Understanding ‘becoming a researcher’ as a permanent state. One continually comes to understand what it is one is saying and how it relates to other precedents.

(c) In fact, you are likely to become more aware over time of what your arguments are or have been.

Consider the following passage from the opening of Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the subaltern speak?’

Now consider her succinct summary of the same idea in an interview published in 2011 (Feb. 5) in The Hindu.

‘[When] the subaltern speaks there is not enough infrastructure for people to recognise it as resistant speech.’

Part 5: If more time left over

General topics

(a) Becoming a professional researcher: the importance of contact with other researchers. Conferences.

(b) Becoming a professional researcher: working through the elements in the skills audit. Understanding these as activities in process rather than benchmarks to be passed. Cases in point: complying with ethical requirements, knowing current work in field.

Notes to self: required at viva

A project report

Mini-viva on the project report

A summary of their skills audit progress to date

An oral presentation in a public forum

Project report contains

A viable research question

A critical literature review which situates the proposed research

A research proposal including an outline of the proposed method, a work plan and a critical justification of the project

Application

The topic or area to be investigated

The issue, research question or hypothesis that is to be tested

The likely methods and techniques to be used in the investigation

The relationship of the proposed research to the published literature and current research in your field, and an indication of the contribution your thesis would make