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.

Research - what to choose?

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?

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CC Image courtesy of Clare & Dave on Flickr