One of my students dropped in yesterday to ask what I thought their key research question was. It may sound odd to ask someone else this question, but students actually drop in with this problem fairly often. Different things make it difficult to articulate a research question clearly at different points in the research process: in the beginning, students often struggle to isolate out a researchable question from their much broader intellectual interests, and so often need help “finding” a proper research question that connects to broader interests in meaningful ways; later in the research process (the student who dropped by yesterday, for example, is in the final stages of their thesis write-up), the problem can become that the student is so mired in the details that they have lost the sense of the proper level of abstraction for communicating their work to other people.

What was particularly funny to me about yesterday’s incident is that, only a few hours before, I had myself been asked what my main research question was – and had ummed and ahhed and basically started babbling about various research findings – even though I know full well that research findings aren’t the same thing as the research question. Fortunately, one of the findings was sufficiently interesting that it attracted interest and drew the conversation off into a tangential discussion – and everyone conveniently forgot to track back to the original question that I had flubbed…

So, when my student dropped in yesterday wanting me to remind them what their research question was, I was in the process of trying to remember what mine was… And I couldn’t help but notice the contrast between the fact that I was able to articulate my student’s research question immediately, off the top of my head – even though, after some concerted thought, I still hadn’t come up with a current formulation of my own question that I liked… One day later, I still haven’t…

So I’m thinking that I need another me – someone with that proper combination of distance and engagement with my project, such that I can drop into their office without warning on a random afternoon, and ask them what it is, exactly, that I’ve been doing these past eighteen months, and have them give me an answer in which I can clearly recognise my own work… ;-P Absent this option, I’ve decided to terrify myself into answering my own question, by booking myself in for a presentation in a few weeks at which, among other things, I’ll need to give an overview of my research project that tries to explain how the whole thing holds together.

I should note, in case there is any confusion, that I do have actual, formal, written research questions that had to be approved as part of my confirmation to PhD candidature – I’m not really talking about those questions… ;-P I’m talking about something more like the organising narrative structure that unites the thesis – the account of why the thesis casts light on interesting things, and of why someone might choose to look at those interesting things in this particular way. (I realise that this presupposes that the thesis does cast light on interesting things, but there are some convenient fictions we must all embrace… ;-P)

At the moment, I have a few disparate threads running through my work. Two of these threads are relatively concrete (at least, as concrete as I tend to get…) and tied very specifically to my primary research: One of these relates to the ways in which a series of policy initiatives, relating to planning and to local governance more generally, were informed by a specific understanding of what capitalism is, how a capitalist economy works, and how a government ought to act, if it wishes to facilitate good outcomes within a capitalist economy – an understanding that I believe is flawed in interesting ways. Another relates to a practical and pervasive tension between: planning policies directed toward creating certain kinds of ideal communities that do not currently exist; existing historical communities caught up in the planning process; and nostalgic idealisations of community marketed by developers and, at least to some degree, “bought” by housing consumers moving into new developments.

Woven through these are more abstract theoretical interests, many of which have been explored in other ways on this blog: How can we best make sense of a concept like “capitalism”? How can we understand the historical emergence and resonance of new ideals (for the PhD project, I’ll focus primarily on ideals of community, and on the challenge of what it might mean to create cohesive communities within a dynamic social context)? Can a better understanding of some of these issues give us a clearer sense of what the planning profession might be able to achieve, and where it is likely to fail?

My sense from trying to talk about these sorts of issues yesterday is that these are not perceived as research questions, so I’m not hitting the right level of abstraction in explaining what my project is about. I’m also not hitting the right level of abstraction when I dive down into method – when I say, e.g., that the project is examining the impact of a massive and rapid development process on two existing historical communities, and one new development, and that my work largely relies on documentary evidence, but that I am also spending a great deal of time hanging out in the communities I am researching, and interviewing select members of those communities, as a means of sensitising myself to what the documentary evidence might mean, and also as a way to fill in some gaps in the documentary material, etc. The first sets of formulations are, I gather, too abstract; the second, too concrete.

So, what is my question?