Hello everyone!
Before I start, and before you take
a look at my daisy and think that I have really overthought the exercise and
ended up with concepts and ideas that are not related to the research I talked
to you about in my previous posts (!!!), I just want to say that I have decided
to change my research topic. I have been missing anthropology ever since I
graduate from my bachelor’s degree and I am trying to incorporate more of that
background of mine in my current studies.
That being said, I started the
bedraggled daisy with an open mind, after reading your posts and not being sure
how useful it would be. Well… how difficult can it be to draw a daisy? I think
that was the hardest part for me! Even if my change of heart regarding my
research topic has been recent, I already had a very good idea of where I was
going before doing the exercise, which I think is one of the reasons why I was
not as good as an exercise as others from Luker’s book. Luker’s book has been
surprisingly helpful for me, even more so in the past few days when I decided
to explore a different topic and had to start my research from scratch. Before
I started reading the book, I thought to myself, well, I have read other
research methods books and I never felt that it really helped with research,
except for giving me a good knowledge of research concepts, so why would this
one be different? I am still not sure how, but it is different, since I have
been able to come up with a new, yet strong research topic more quickly than I
ever did in the past for any research project.
Back to the bedraggled daisy
exercise, even if I think that it was not blown away by its helpfulness at
first, I think it is a great way to summarize your research’s “big ideas” and thus
explaining it to others. And I think that is where I can find the usefulness of
the exercise for me: ever since I have been “doing research”, I have always
used sounding boards to help me improve my research projects. I talk about my
research to people who know the field, but also to people who are completely
foreign to it, and I am always amazed at the ideas that come out of these
discussions. For me, the bedraggled daisy and the connections I see between the
petals are obvious, but I am curious to see if shown to someone else, new
and/or better connections may come up. Actually, I might try that, and I will
let you know about it!
I hadn't thought of the daisy as a summary! That's a good way of conceptualising it. I didn't find it useful in the way that Luker intended, but it definitely forced me to flush out my topic.
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