Finding and honing your research area

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language. — Marx, 1852 ¹⁾

Finding and honing you research area in contemporary academic settings this is one of the most significant things you can do. Casting aside, for a brief moment, the pompous, imperialist and self righteous wank that is academia the finding and honing of your research area is genuinely important to the conduct of research — socially transformative or otherwise. Why? Not only does it help to be clear about what it is we are doing, but it enables us to precisely rule in, or out, every other aspect of our project. After all, how can we manage a project we have not scoped?

The best way, I can think of, to describe this is through rendering some examples for discussion. I’m going to ideate a few specific research areas through a model that I’ve used with students who have already started their Ph.D. candidature who needed to further refine their area. Notably, here, this does not mean that a completely honed project is required to even begin your research project. Rather, it is a process of simultaneously finding your way, feeling for the project, and doing what can be made to sit right amidst your forebears (and other structural requisites). To stress the point, you do not need to be able to succinctly articulate your project in 100 words from the beginning. To do so would be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Rather being immersed in a subject/topic area first will give rise to where your ideas may fit and will help you to iteratively hone things. Don’t panic if this isn’t coming “naturally” — it will emerge with time, or you’re doing the wrong project! But we’ll get into that in the fullness of time.

For a start point, I am going to offer a project I spent substantial time finding and honing. I was never able to finish this work, due to conditions arising from the hellscape that is contemporary corporate academia, but it offers hindsight which will let us get through an example in record time, making it appear easy. Importantly, this work was not easy — I spent almost two years shaping this project for it to fall over at the execution. I cannot stress enough how important it is to take your time finding your way in this space, not taking easy answers, and reading voraciously, or at least summarising voraciously.

The project

In 2018 I was working with a cluster of schools in a remote area in Australia. As a jack of all trades and master of none, I wanted to understand the demands on teachers in remote settings, to understand the changing nature of work, and to explore policy and implementation where the context, the people, and the students do not fit the mainstream.

There are a few elements here which I believed would be advantageous. At the time, there was very little contemporary literature on most of the key contributions of this project:

• Remote Australian context: there was a dearth of contemporary literature on teaching in the remote Australian context, yet a modicum of corporate and government interest in better understanding how to support the regions — an election winner, I suppose.
• A captive audience: remote schools simultaneously serve as something of a captive audience for research, and my involvement in working between a handful of them meant that I was enabled to access these audiences in a para-professional capacity.
• Demands: broadly, it is reasonably well understood that teachers are under pressure to perform, similarly to academics, and to jump through pointless policy hoops. This has profound human and professional affects which illustrate contradictions in capitalism.
• Nature of work: by understanding the “fringe” it felt as though I could understand some of the more extreme tolls of contemporary teacher’s work.
• Policy & people: a space for exploration of the structure and agency theme amidst sociological literature, and another angle to probe the nature of work, labour, and capital.

If you’re thinking: yeah that seems like there’s something to that, well, so did I. Again, here, I want to stress that I did not arrive at this short list of topics and key ideas overnight. However, you may already see where we should start reading, talking, and learning in order to fully understand this work.

The next few steps are not really linear, rather they emerge from a combination of existing experience, reading, guidance, and pragmatics. In the next few sections let’s identify a SOCK, consider some theoretical framing, and think through some key logistical points. At this stage we are still missing a few pieces in this puzzle, and maybe you’re already seeing the direction this is going, but let’s step through my interpretation and the space I was carving for this project to continue our example.

There’s a deeper dive on a significant original contribution to knowledge elsewhere, so for brevity let’s look at a statement of significant original contribution for this project.

• Tailoring a theoretical framework: By synthesising insights from Marxist theory, sociology of work, and educational policy, I will develop a novel framework for understanding the demands on teachers in remote Australian contexts. This framework will integrate concepts such as the contradictions of capitalism, the changing nature of work, and the role of structure and agency in shaping teachers’ experiences.
• Providing new empirical evidence: Through unique access to a captive audience of remote schools allows me to gather original data on teachers’ experiences, challenges, and strategies for navigating the demands of their work. This empirical evidence will shed new light on the realities of teaching in remote contexts and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the issues faced by educators in these settings.
• Critiquing of the policy narrative: By examining the gaps between educational policies and the lived experiences of teachers in remote schools, this work will challenge dominant narratives about what works in education and highlight the unintended consequences of top-down reforms. This critique will contribute to a more robust understanding of how educational policies are shaped by broader social, economic, and political forces.
• Extending Marxist analysis to remote education: While Marxist theory has been applied to education in general terms, there remains space for a more focused analysis of how capitalist contradictions play out in remote Australian schools. By examining issues such as unequal resource allocation, teacher’s labour, and the commodification of education in these specific contexts, I will extend Marxist insights to craft a deeper understanding of the structural forces shaping remote education.

unfinished.

• Creating a SOCK.