Luker's "Bedraggled Daisy" immediately brought this to mind. I think (hope?) that the author of the Ph.D. Dent may have had his tongue planted firmly in his cheek when writing it, the thoroughly demoralizing line "keep pushing" in particular. Still, it seems that the Ph.D. Dent may serve as an accurate representation of Luker's conception of canonical research and a contrast to the image of her Bedraggled Daisy.
I'm happy to see that the Bedraggled Daisy is working for some of you: I've been dutifully following the exercises that Luker provides at the end of each chapter though, to be honest, I haven't much benefitted from them -- the Bedraggled Daisy included -- despite my best intentions. Like Gabby I'm a natural inter-disciplinarian (or multi-disciplinarian, though these are slightly distinct in my mind but that's a post in itself) though I do value time spent in deep focus on a single subject: I wrote a thesis on a very specific subject as an undergrad (a particular image that Nietzsche used discretely throughout his writing) and it turned out to be one of my greatest accomplishments. Regardless, I'm finding it difficult to find that focus this time around and I've found that the Bedraggled Daisy has only compounded the problem.
Of all the exercises that Luker has proposed, her insistence on establishing a research question has been the most helpful for me. I don't normally frame research projects in terms of a guiding question but, at Luker's insistence, I'm attempting to do so this time around. And though it hasn't been a clear success just yet, the contortions that I'm forcing my mind to go through feel like good exercise. I've been asking myself questions like: how do things like contracts and agreements inhibit or constrain creativity, innovation, and rational behaviour? Is the info-glut phenomenon compromising our capacity for meaning-making? Is our ability to engage in productive, creative play being inhibited in the 'Information Age'?
Each of these questions reflects some aspect of my research interests (interpretation, meaning-making, play, and the contemporary limitation thereof) but none adequately encapsulates all of these interests. Still, I feel like this line of questioning is circling around something and that I'm getting closer to articulating a strong research question. That said, I'm sceptical that I'll be able to find a single, stable question that will guide my research from beginning to end, though I don't think Luker is necessarily advocating such a question. Is anyone else struggling with the research question?
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