It might sound stupid: You know you want to embark on a research project, you might even know you want to pursue a career in academia, but you just can’t settle on an Honours/Masters/PhD project. In addition to asking the three key questions in research hack #2, I want to help you by providing a cheat sheet of the most common types of research project in the arts and humanities.
To read all the research hacks posted to date, please click here.
Most research projects in the arts and humanities conjure with three elements: people (usually theorists or authors), topics (big questions or themes), and movements. These three elements can be combined in the following ways:
|
Form |
Example |
|
What person P says about topic T |
Jean-Luc Nancy and Community |
|
What P1, P2 and P3 say about topic T (more suited to PhD than Honours or Masters) |
The Question of Ontology in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricœur and Jean-Luc Nancy [this was my own PhD topic!] |
|
What person P says about related topics T1 and T2 |
Marx, Capital and Religion |
|
What P1 says about P2’s work |
Badiou’s Beckett |
|
What P1, P2 and P3 say about P4’s work (more suited to PhD than Honours or Masters) |
The poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé in the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Quentin Meillassoux |
|
What P1 and P2 say about each other’s work |
The Relationship between the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou |
|
The relation of person P to movement M |
Badiou and Phenomenology |
|
Using movement M to address topic T |
The Mind-Body Question: A Phenomenological Approach |
One of the recurring problems of postgraduate research proposals is that they try to bite off more than they can chew, so use the table above to focus down your research question to something that can be attempted within your word limit. As a rule of thumb, most initial proposals require the advice “Attempt less, and do it more rigorougly and thoroughly”.
The table above also helps you to plan your research career. For example, an Honours or Masters project of the type “What does P1 say about T1?” would naturally lead on either to “What does P2 say about T1?”, “what does P1 say about T1, T2 and T3”, or “What does P1 say about P2?”
Do you have any further tips for arriving at a feasible research topic?
CC Image courtesy of Clare & Dave on Flickr
