Week 2

This week I did the readings a bit flustered, ready to give up, due to the feeling that I was very much not the audience Luker was writing for (as expressed in my previous post). However, I persisted, and eventually made it to the appendix, where I discovered, to my delight, pages on exactly the thing I was struggling with while reading the book – the fact that I had no specific research “case” in mind. Reading this appendix really helped me move forward in my thinking about how I will question my interests in order to find this necessary information.  One of the main issues I am having right now is figuring out what I’m academically interested in in a *specific* way. I think I do every now and then, maybe even often, get interested in things this way, like thinking “I wonder why this is, someone should do a study on it”, but I can’t for the life of me think of what any of those are right now. And the few I can think of are not “social science” topics, they’re humanities topics/ways of thinking about things (ie. more opinions than things you investigate, for example “I think there is a communication immediacy inherent within visual art” (interest = (how) do art objects communicate?). So my next steps will be to take these jumbled artsci thoughts and figure out how to form them in to questions that could be researched using some social science methodology. I will use Luker’s appendix suggestions to work this out with the broad topics of identity and communication.

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