Starting a New Research Project

I’m starting a new research project!

fascinating, I know.

OK, it’s the project for which I obtained my Junior Research Fellowship from lovely Homerton College, and said Fellowship started in October, so it was high time I began working on the new project. But I’ve had a monograph to write, as you may remember (yes, it’s almost done, yep, oh, thank you very much, that’s very kind of you, we’ll talk about it again when the peer-readers get back to me saying it’s a huge pile of rubbish), and courses to teach, and essays to mark, and books to read.

So the project had been pushed back until NOW. And NOW it’s really got to start because, well…

… because I’ve been invited to present some results from it at a symposium, erm, next, erm… year term month week.

WHAT?

YesIknow. ButIhaven’thadtime. Andwhoareyoutojudge. Anyway, that symposium is on a tiny part of what the new project entails. SO THERE.

My new project as a whole is about cultural and literary representations of child precocity. Nope, it’s not narrower than that yet; I haven’t even reached the narrowing-down stage, it’s that early. But I know it won’t be solely a children’s literature project; I’ll be foraying into other discourses (aw no don’t cry, I’ll still write about children’s books sometimes). I want to be able to jump from Matilda to Ada in the same sentence.

So how do you start researching something so vast? Frankly, I’m not completely sure. I’ve been thinking about it for months, and though thinking doesn’t technically count as research, it organises it. I’ve settled for a number of areas I need to investigate first to lay the foundations of the project.

Some of them I’m already familiar with (children’s literature, philosophy of childhood and education, sociology of childhood); others, less so.

One of them – psychological and sociological research about actual ‘precocious’ children – is completely outside my comfort zone. I don’t generally look at anything to do with real children (why on Earth would anyone). But I need to be able to analyse the discourses of these two fields of study, because scientific studies, discoveries and texts surrounding things contribute, of course, to social, political and cultural representations of those things.

Another one – ‘straight English’ scholarly research about representations of precocious children in literature ‘for adults’ – is, on paper, outside my current field, but I’m comfortable with it. The only danger I face is lack of legitimacy in the eyes of ‘straight English’ researchers, since most of them don’t think children’s literature scholars can actually read anything else than children’s literature (in fact, some doubt that we can even read children’s books). But my study will remain firmly within Childhood Studies, not English.

Finally, there’s another field I’ll need to get acquainted with – visual culture, which ranges from cinema to fine art. No biggie, right? I might eventually discard visual representations of precocious children if the task becomes too daunting, but it would be a shame, because there are so many of them. Again, it’s not my field at all.

Those disciplinary boundaries are a pain, because despite the emphasis laid on multidisciplinary research projects by universities, I don’t have the feeling that they are very popular among academics – especially people in very canonical disciplines. Philosophers, English Literature scholars, Historians don’t like it very much when other people dare to ‘do’ interdisciplinarity with ‘their’ discipline.

(They might look at your funny little hybrid subfield and tell you things about it (that you’ve known for twenty years), but the other way around is more controversial.)

Of course there’s always the danger that you might look like the person who pops into another office in the Ivory Tower and says ‘Do you mind if I borrow that tool of yours for a minute?’ having barely read the instruction manual, so the tool breaks, and whatever they were trying to operate with it breaks, and worse, they don’t even realise anything’s gone wrong.

Fingers crossed this won’t happen (too much) with this project. I have three years (well, two and two-thirds now) of full-time research that I can use to study those areas seriously and methodically, and acquire the legitimacy to branch into other fields of childhood studies (as well as, of course, to get to interesting conclusions about the whole of existence.)

Starting this new research project is looking a bit like walking into relatively hostile countries on a more or less forged visa, and pretending not to notice the locals’ suspicious glances. I’ll let you know if I manage to earn their trust while stealing their treasures.