Last week the trainings and discussions we had cut across the disciplines. How does the interdisciplinary nature of this program, the fact that students are focusing on such a diverse range of projects, help you think about your project and/or your academic interests more broadly?
The interdisciplinary nature of this program has helped me realize that meaningful work in any field is never done in isolation. Understanding a particular issue often requires drawing from multiple disciplines that are interconnected. Although my project is rooted in sociology, I have found myself reading literature in race studies and economics as well. These fields influence and shape one another, so approaching them separately would remove important nuance from my research. Engaging with diverse academic perspectives has pushed me to think more holistically about the problems I am trying to deconstruct.
As you begin your individual research projects this week, do you anticipate any challenges in getting started? If so, what are they?
Yes, one of the main challenges I faced was beginning with a broad research question that compares two regions, Jamaica and Ghana, which are geographically, culturally, and historically distinct and were colonized by different European powers. This made starting my literature review especially stressful, as I had an overwhelming number of sources to sort through. Narrowing down and synthesizing this material has been difficult, but it is helping me refine my focus and clarify the specific questions I want to ask.
Hi everyone I'm Wiann a rising sophomore at Columbia College studying Economics and Race & Ethnicity and I'm excited to do research in the Sociology of gender this summer with Laidlaw!
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I definitely agree with your perspective that meaningful work in any field is never done in isolation. Even in my heavy-science polymer chemistry lab right now, I find a lot of connections between the reviews I read and the humanities-based readings I had annotated in UW: Climate Humanities. Understanding my work as a polymer chemist also necessitates understanding the humanities-based aspects of the implications of my work. Though my work in the lab contributes to helping the environment, it is definitely not enough, and this knowledge pushes me to look outside of the narrow scope of my project into more solutions for climate-based problems.
I also really empathize with narrowing your research question. Currently, I have two or three main components to my research question (lol) that I will need to (somehow) condense into a more narrower question that targets one part of the problem the synthesis is attempting to amend.