As I'm a bit behind on my research update posts, I figured I would combine the first few weeks into one post and talk about the larger picture of how things have been going. As I continue with my research, I plan to give more focused (and timely!) weekly updates.

These first few weeks have been a steep learning curve. I spent a little over a week developing my research question. I changed my research topic and focus somewhat significantly from my original proposal, so the first chunk of this research period for me entailed exploring relevant literature and narrowing down my topic to a manageable question that still covered everything that I wanted to include. I've really come to learn the importance of building a research question. In the past, papers I've written for classes generally come with at least some guidelines. With my Laidlaw research, however, I am entirely on my own in terms of deciding what and how to research. My mentor has been particularly helpful with this and really has emphasized the importance of forming this question early on. Her biggest advice is, as I'm researching and outlining my paper, to always tie any information I include back to the question directly.

One challenge I've been facing is that my mentor and I have both begun to notice a slight lack of recent literature on this specific topic. There are many articles in the 1990s and early 2000s, around the same time as the First and Second Intifadas, but there are very few scholarly articles on grassroots feminist peacebuilding in this region in recent years. I've found a few very useful journals and have also explored literature that pertains to the Sarah & Hajar Accords in 2023. Overall, I was intimidated by this obstacle, but after talking with my mentor, I realized that this is a phenomenon to explore and discuss in my research. I'm interested to do a bit more research and see if within the peacebuilding space discussions involving or about women tend to only appear in the context of a major event rather than being a constant factor. 

For the upcoming week, I plan to finish gathering the last few sources I need and to finish a detailed and specific paper outline. As I am making my outline, the biggest thing I need to remember is that I have to stick to my question. In my research, I tend to read something interesting and go on a deep dive that is typically at the very least tangentially related to my research, but doesn't often pertain directly to the question I'm trying to answer. Therefore, my goal is to continue working on being focused and concise in both my researching and outlining.