When I think about the possibility of doing future research, it is followed by doubt that there is anything valuable I could contribute to academia.
But maybe I am subjecting myself to a version of the “Pompeii premise.” In archaeology, the “Pompeii premise” assumes that findings are perfectly preserved from the past; a moment frozen in time. Simon Holdaway argues that this is untrue, just like in research. Processes keep occurring and the existence of people make changes, one way or another.
Confucianism, although an age-old Chinese tradition and philosophy, will be interpreted, used, and thus reconciliated to modern settings differently to when it originated during the Warring States Period. As Melissa Inouye suggests, people’s ideas of moral good can reflect power relations in a certain environment.
There is also a need for archaeology to address the theoretical positions relevant to the discipline today, such as the role of post-processualism in saying that material records are subjective when inferring human behaviour.
Vision Mātauranga, at its core, adapts indigenous knowledge to innovative research (or arguably, the other way around).
In relation to my own academic interests, I’ve overlooked that social sciences have developed in response to social changes. Sociology has its foundation in the industrial revolution; how modernity changed the way society was fundamentally structured. Gender studies and green chemical science are relatively new fields of study that have started because of the need for new questions and stories to be explored and validated. There are paradigms to be broken even within existing disciplines. These are the contributions an amateur researcher has the potential to make, and each passing generation after them.
