The following entry has a few purposes: (1) to fulfill Clifford's request for a post regarding issues/questions we have about collaborative research, (2) to take a first stab at reflecting on a very busy few weeks of field research, and (3) to show the development and maturation of our thinking process as we are, heading into the final week of this program, moving away from the data collection stage of our research (see previous blog entry) and approaching--with a melange of excitement and apprehension--the synthesis and analysis stage.
Although I have been involved in academic group projects before, they have rarely been on the same caliber as the research in which Emily and I are currently engaged--one that has presented for me an unprecedented hybrid of ambition, complexity and intensiveness. During some times, the journey has been fun and rewarding; during others, it has been exhausting and challenging, even frustrating. It has always, however, remained stimulating and insightful. The ups and downs, the paths that would lead down lush roads of information and the ones that would suddenly become dead ends (which, I guess, provides its own kind of information), gave us first-hand awareness of the peaks and valleys of field research.
The time we have spent on our project has provided an even deeper learning experience, however, because of the particular dynamic of our research: unlike most other groups in this summer's Honors in Amsterdam program, Emily and I have been almost exclusively partaking in collaborative research. We have been working together essentially every step of the way, a process that we found critical for our project and one that, consequently, has provided us with many strengths. Yet, at the same time, our intensely collaborative research has presented challenges as well. On the one hand, it brings both of us great comfort and confidence to have each other's support--intellectually, motivationally, and even physically (all those grueling bike rides around, and a bit outside, the city!). But on the other hand, no matter how much we have done together, we have come to realize the clear, and very real, presence of our individual experiences and reactions to various situations and locations. Emily's experiences in the various places we have encountered have sometimes been quite divergent from mine, and the converse holds true as well.
In such, the question that we originally had regarding collaborative research was the following: Can each research partner inject her or his personal experience, or does this compromise the sense of "distance" from the work that researchers should have? Yet, upon asking this question, Emily and I were able to actually answer it ourselves: In truth, both sides have to be included to show the complexity of the topic. And thus, our divergent experiences, far from serving as impediments to our final paper, ultimately serve as primary evidence that helps drive a thesis on the dynamics of insider/outsider.
As our little Q&A session above has shown, Emily and I, although tackling the issue preliminarily, have come to realize that our distinct experiences are by no means "problematic." In fact, they serve as prime examples in a poignant discussion on group identities and how these identities pertain to the insider/outsider and the self/other. Therefore, it is this realization--that our identities were being negotiated in different ways during different situations and locations--that has led us to focus our thesis on the dualistic process of inclusion and exclusion performed by communities [which, by the way, fits quite well into one of the conceptual frameworks with which we began our project, David Biale's discussion of the self/other dialectic--that a group's identity (particularly that of a minority) is created and recreated through a combination of simultaneous separation from, and interaction with, the "other"].
Consequently, the questions that we would really pose in regards to collaborative research are the following: When research partners are engaged in heavily collaborative research (i.e. no one person is investigating a certain part of the topic by oneself), how does the group go about formulating a coherent, synthesized product that reflects differing experiences? How can the final product retain integrity and sincerity while having cohesiveness? Furthermore, where--meaning at what point in the paper and/or presentation--should these experiences be presented?
