As an Arts student, the question of ‘future research’ and ‘where you are going with your degree’ seems to be forever hanging in the air around me. Dr. Thomsen’s lecture made me realise, however, that this is a rather backwards way of approaching a future in scholarship and academia. The flowchart he showed us near the beginning of the lecture which mapped out his research process began with his “lived experiences” then split into “questioning” and “prior research”. I did manage to pick up throughout the course of last year that lived experiences and positionality play a key role in the research that someone produces, but attending Dr. Thomsen’s lecture helped clear up for me just how far into the research process those lived experiences are (and for the lack of a better word) “allowed” to affect it.
A part of me had been under the impression that you were meant to take your lived experiences, decide on a topic or area of research which interested you, then switch to some sort of neutral researcher mode where you were no longer swayed or influenced by personal life events. Then Dr. Thomsen told us his life story. He began, as expected, with his family and upbringing, but he did not stop sharing details of his life when his research began. Instead, he explained to us how his moving to another country, and even his breakup with his then-fiancé continued to evolve his work, until he ended up with a dissertation title which was much different to what he had started with. He put up no resistance to the things he was learning about the world outside of the classroom in everyday life altering the course of his research process, and it led to a wonderfully personal yet still academically invaluable piece of work.
I remember someone asking in class if Dr. Thomsen thought his writings had the potential to spark large scale change in the laws or culture surrounding homosexuality in Korea. He replied with a smile that this was doubtful, though he did hope the messages he was communicating, both on his topic and his methodology, would inspire future researchers in some way. This is where I think his quote about “every piece of scholarship carry[ing] a genealogy of knowledge” holds a lot of importance. The amount of scholarship and academic writing that exists in the world today is astronomic, and it is unrealistic to imagine any one of them causing a massive cultural or historical shift in the real world.
It seems then, that perhaps research of this kind is meant to be more of a passion project, where the researcher gets to gather seeds from both their lived experiences and from the scholarship of others that they have chosen, to create their own little garden. The garden may not be world-famous, or even exceptionally revolutionary, but it is our own, grown in our own soil, and maybe, just maybe, it will someday provide the seeds to jumpstart someone else’s garden.
