Wednesday 16 May 2007

"Mid term review"

What have I been doing since 15th January 2007? It's now 4 months that I've started the PhD and I would do some things differently if I would have to start again.
Until mid February I tried to improve my research proposal, with little effect I would say. Since then I'm working on the literature review, which is due next week.
I need to say that I depart from certain assumptions which make my research question topic relevant. And I have not yet dared to search for the articles which could render my question insignificant. What would I do then? So I just read the papers and reports that further my impression that only mediocre things have been researched and nothing relevant really has been done in my area of inquiry. I proceeded like this for a long time, when I discovered that it is actually much more enjoyable to read articles with positive news. But my search for positive action reports has started so recently that it will be hard to be included in the literature review, and I will continue to keep the real impression of being an old chaotic "anti-tudo" / against everything reactionnaire.
But it is in fact impossible to read all the relevant literature when analysing such a complex topic as agricultural marginalization, and I would need to read 24h non-stop until the end of my PhD if I wanted to get a reasonable grasp. Yes, exagerations are also part of my literature review, they make reading it more amusing, but certainly scientifically less accurate.
I chose to work on the "reconstruction task" rather than the deconstruction task (e.g. on bringing the real dirt of industrial farming and agricultural politics to light), because my bad character instinctively drives me towards deconstructing everything (if someone would offer me red roses I would immediately mourn they come from hydroponic agiculture, yes!). Therefore I don't need to built deconstruction and critical thinking into my research. However, I think this tendency of mine is not very original, but rather too widespread.
I still find it hard to have my little agenda and to keep it for me. I want to say things straight forward and naively believe that rational argumentation may lead to the best outcomes...
Well, maybe you're interested in knowing what I'm actually planning to do. I want to do a hard data driven part to make sure my work doesn't become completely messy and unreliable and I also want to do a very action-oriented agroecological approach thing. Isn't that clear enough?

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