Locating your Community: Academic Discipline and Research Thematic

Dr Brainerd Prince

The bags are packed, the water bottle shut tight, and the rucksack firmly secured on the back. The researcher, all tooled up, is ready to begin her climb.

She is very clear in her head about what she wants her research to be upon. The theme and the problem she wants to address, over the months, has become ‘crystal clear’ or so she thinks. The activist in her doesn’t want to climb the academic mountain, but the researcher in her is curious, and the questions do not stop haunting her mind: has anyone else looked at this problem before? Is this an old problem and just new for me or is it genuinely a problem that no one else has addressed? Furthermore, while the theme and problem seem to be clear, the ‘how’ to research them seems a little blurred.

‘Off we go’, she exclaims, as she trudges on the narrow mountain path, with every step taking her higher and away from the bustling city. She ‘looks up’ the academic mountain and ‘finds’ clusters of lights at various points on the academic mountain. She realizes that she needs to find her own academic community. Her academic family, whose language best suits her aspirations, and whose conversations have a bearing on the theme and problem she wants to address.

It is time for us to move behind the metaphor of the academic mountain community and explicitly see what this entails for a researcher.

The researcher immersed in city life has a city language about the problem she wants to investigate and has even abstracted a theme that she is interested in pursuing. However, all problems can be looked at from different perspectives and what we thought was a singular problem has many dimensions. Academic research requires us to predominantly address a single dimension of the problem even if one must look at the problem holistically. Here I would like to introduce the language of the three Ds and the process of library search.

The metaphor of climbing the academic mountain, in the real life of a researcher, translates into the activity of library search. The goal is simple –to identify the three Ds for one’s own research. The three Ds are – Discipline, Discourse and Debate, and this can only be accomplished through a robust library search. In research, this will also yield two other tangible outputs, namely, the research thematic and relevant critical bibliography.

Perhaps we have all been to physical libraries. I remember the Delhi University and JNU libraries I visited during my undergraduate days – dimly lit, slightly dusty and the librarians who were the gatekeepers always in combat mode. It appeared as if they didn’t want you to go in and read, leave alone borrow a book. 

This was in sharp contrast to the libraries I visited during my postgraduate studies, both in Pune and Oxford. These libraries were not just clean but had life. Bustling with students, tables filled with open books, and librarians busy helping students, it almost seemed like a knowledge industry. Many university libraries around the world continue to depict this latter kind of library life.

However, times have also changed, and now when we think of a library, it is the laptop that first comes into our mind. We have electronic libraries with huge depositories of electronic academic resources.

We already mentioned common electronic gateways through which one can conduct a library search. For example, WorldCat, Jstor, or University search engines, like SOLO of Oxford University.

You have a theme from the real world that has caught your deepest research interest and now you want to do academic research on it. In order to do that, you need to first find out the academic vocabulary for your theme. Some call it academic jargon. It is the technical vocabulary that captures your theme. However, there are different registers of technical vocabulary depending on the discipline of study. Let’s take an example – if you wanted to research the poor children under the bridge, then ‘children under the bridge’ may be considered as your theme. However, this theme could be represented by different technical terms depending on the academic discipline within which you want to do the research. It could be ‘child rights’ if you wanted to research it under the academic discipline of political studies, ‘child homelessness’ if under the social studies discipline, or ‘child wellbeing’ or ‘childhood trauma’ if researched under the discipline of child psychology. These technical terms given by disciplines are what we call thematic. So, our first job is to find the equivalent thematic for our research theme from within the discipline in which we want to locate our study.

In the academic mountain metaphor, you are climbing, and you see various clusters or small communities of people each of which represents a discipline of study. By doing a library search, or by spending some time at each of these communities, you will soon discover the community in which you want to pitch your tent and locate yourself. Furthermore, by listening to their conversations you will find the thematic, the technical term they use for your theme.

The library search is done through what we call ‘cursory reading’. In the academic mountain metaphor, it means walking up to each community and standing around them and listening to their conversations. Not listening very deeply but listening just about enough to recognize if they are talking about your research theme. It is this form of listening that we call cursory reading.

Cursory reading requires four techniques and skills: Searching, Scanning, Skimming and Speed Reading. Using the various electronic gateways, we search by putting in our theme word or phrase. We keep putting in related words. The search results we get, the long lists of books, we quickly scan, to begin with just their titles, we are listening in, trying to recognize if our theme is addressed by any of the sources that turn up in our search. 

If my theme is the drinkability of water or purity of drinking water. I put these phrases in the search bar and see what type of academic sources come out. Very quickly as you scan the titles you will find the term ‘potability’ of water. Bingo! You have found your thematic!Sometimes it takes more time than this and you need to skim through the academic sources you have collected through your library search. 

Imagine a physical library, you go to the shelves and pull out the books that you think are relevant, and then you pile them on a table by the window. Once you have a pile, you scan each book by reading the information on the cover page, the preliminary pages – who published it, when was it published, the content page, index of key terms at the end of the book. You read the blurb on the back cover, the preface and the introduction, very quickly. Within a few minutes, you know if this book is relevant to your research or not. This is what we call skimming through a book or a source. Scanning is looking at the big pile and sheerly by looking at the titles, you make a smaller pile of relevant books. Skimming is when you go through the book quickly, in order to make sure if that book is really relevant or not. You might read the opening and closing paragraphs of chapters. Speed reading helps us to skim faster. Speed reading is the training of one’s eyes to not follow one word at a time but take in a bunch of words at one go, with each glance.

At the end of this cursory reading journey, consisting of searching, scanning, skimming and speed reading, one discovers a few fundamental elements of one’s research: one’s research thematic, the discipline in which one wants to locate their research, and a critical bibliography of texts with which one could begin their research. 

In our academic mountain metaphor, we visit various communities of scholars seated at various locations on the mountain, until we find the community which speaks about our theme. We pause, pull a chair, and sit down and join this community. In the metaphor, searching, scanning, and skimming are all translated into the act of listening to the various scholars of this community and identifying those with whom we want to have deep conversations. 

In some sense, we have arrived at our academic home in the mountain. We have located the research community or the academic discipline in which we want to locate our research. We have found the special phrase, thematic, they use to talk about your theme. You take off your shoes, warm yourself along with these newfound friends by the fire and for a moment, you forget the chilly breeze whipping your face and the solitude that awaits you amongst this company of strangers on the mountainside.

Dr Brainerd Prince is the Associate Professor of Practice, and Director, Centre for Thinking, Language and Communication, Plaksha University.