{"id":687,"date":"2012-01-17T17:58:56","date_gmt":"2012-01-17T22:58:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=687"},"modified":"2012-01-18T12:51:32","modified_gmt":"2012-01-18T17:51:32","slug":"impossible-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2012\/01\/17\/impossible-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Impossible Research"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Jesse Wozniak<\/a> jets off to a job interview this week, where he’ll\u00a0talk about his research on\u00a0state reconstruction and the\u00a0new Iraqi police force. Jesse is an advisee,\u00a0Contexts<\/a> <\/em>student board member, and frequent contributor to the Office Hours<\/a> podcasts. All dissertations demand sacrifice, but\u00a0this one posed particular challenges.<\/p>\n

In fact, Jesse’s project\u00a0calls to mind\u00a0what Pierre Bourdieu called\u00a0“the craft par exellence of the researcher: <\/em>\u00a0investing a theoretical problem of far-reaching implications in an empirical object that is well constructed and controllable with the means at hand, that is, possibly, by an isolated researcher, with no funding, limited to his[her] own labor power<\/em>.” Doug Hartmann loves this passage, as it\u00a0simultaneously conveys both the\u00a0enormity of our task and our power and capacity to get it done.<\/p>\n

The “theoretical problem” of civilian policing and state reconstruction certainly has far-reaching implications. I couldn’t be 100% sure, though, that\u00a0the “empirical object”\u00a0of contemporary Iraq training academies was\u00a0quite\u00a0so\u00a0“controllable with the means at hand.”\u00a0And, despite\u00a0a fine\u00a0academic record,\u00a0Jesse had\u00a0a tough time\u00a0securing funding for his ambitious dissertation plan —\u00a0observations at training academies, interviews with officials, surveys and interviews with recruits in training, extensive archival research, and some very costly plane tickets and living expenses.<\/p>\n

While he put in several grant and fellowship proposals, most reviewers and funders simply viewed the project as impossible<\/em>. How could\u00a0a single graduate student\u00a0possibly secure\u00a0human subjects approval, gain clearance from the Department of State, learn a new language, live and travel extensively in a war zone, and gain repeated access to the officials and recruits he planned to interview and survey?<\/p>\n

Well, now he has done\u00a0the impossible\u00a0and returned with data in hand. When\u00a0he didn’t get\u00a0funding,\u00a0this “isolated researcher”\u00a0was undaunted \u2013 he simply took on extra teaching and all manner of additional work so that he could self-fund the project. The proof,\u00a0of course,\u00a0will be in the pudding that Jesse is still preparing.\u00a0Having seen the materials he brought back from Iraq, however, I’m confident that\u00a0the hard work and fearlessness will pay off in a terrific dissertation and book.<\/p>\n

In some ways, we’re fortunate to work in a field where isolated researchers\u00a0can still\u00a0learn so much by the sweat of their brows. And while a couple\u00a0years of cushy dissertation funding would have made Jesse’s life a whole\u00a0lot easier, I’m guessing that something real and true has been gained in the struggle.<\/p>\n

* The quote is from page 156 of Pierre Bourdieu’s 1988 “Program for a Sociology of Sport” in the Sociology of Sport Journal <\/em>5:153-161.<\/span>
\n** The photo is from Ben Brears’ photostream, licensed as Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic<\/span> (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0<\/span>) under\u00a0creative commons. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesse Wozniak jets off to a job interview this week, where he’ll\u00a0talk about his research on\u00a0state reconstruction and the\u00a0new Iraqi police force. Jesse is an advisee,\u00a0Contexts student board member, and frequent contributor to the Office Hours podcasts. All dissertations demand sacrifice, but\u00a0this one posed particular challenges. In fact, Jesse’s project\u00a0calls to mind\u00a0what Pierre Bourdieu called\u00a0“the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/files\/2012\/01\/impossible.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":697,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions\/697"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}