4. How to Find Your Problem Collective

Identify Researchers Who Share Your Problem

You are not the only person who cares about your Problem. It disturbs other people too. Some, driven by the same existential irritant as you, are busy at this very moment asking their own questions, gathering their own sources, identifying their own cases, and formulating their own projects. They might call themselves historians, philosophers, archaeologists, economists, anthropologists, performance studies scholars, classicists, literary scholars, artists. They might work on the 1800s or the ancient world. They may live in Bogota or Baltimore or Beirut.

Some are already dead. What you call your Problem was their Problem long before. And you have something to learn from them. Those who are still alive, or have yet to be born, have something to learn from you. Whoever they are, wherever they are, you need to find them. But how?

If libraries or bookstores were organized according to problems, rather than topics, their shelves would not be labeled “Current Affairs,” “Children’s Books,” “History,” and the like. Each section would be named after the underlying problem shared by a set of authors, regardless of genre.

Imagine walking through the door:

YOU: Pardon me. Where is your section on authors-who-wonder-if-authentic-self-expression-is-possible-in-a-world-permeated-by-institutions-that-seek-financial-gain-by-selling-us-the-fiction-that-self-expression-requires-the-consumption-of-their-products?

BOOKSTORE CLERK: It’s in the back-left aisle, right next to authors-who-wonder-if-the-seemingly-universal-concept-of-deception-can-be-examined-through-culturally-specific-interpretive-matrices-rather-than-subordinated-to-Eurocentric-ones.

YOU: Thanks!

As we all know, this is not how bookstores are organized. Nor libraries, university departments, government agencies, corporations, or museums . . . You’ve just spent considerable effort moving away from topics and toward questions and problems, only to arrive at a disquieting truth: the world at large is organized according to—you guessed it—topics. Dreadful as it may sound, you now find yourself back in the vague and all-too-familiar world where you started.

You are back in Topic Land.

What to do? By now you have a strong sense of what disturbs you, and yet the mainstream organizational logic of everything around you returns you to those overarching “topics” that bear no direct connection to problems. Within our topic-centric world, how to find the community of researchers who share your Problem? How do you find your Problem Collective?

Problem Collective is a concept for envisioning the various problem-centric intellectual connections and affiliations we can discover and create during the research process.

A collective is a grouping of individuals who share an interest or enterprise. A Problem Collective is—you guessed it—a grouping of individuals working to solve the same research problem whether together or independently. You could call it a gang, a tribe, or a community—the metaphor isn’t important. What matters is the appreciation that this group is comprised of individuals, each with their own personal “center,” and that its membership is dispersed and decentralized—so much so that members may well be unaware of one another’s existence. This collective is not an ideological faction bound by shared dogma. It is not a militia or a cult.

Problem Collective is not another name for a profession, a department, a field, or a discipline. Fields like history or political science contain members of various Problem Collectives (as we’ll discuss in chapter 5), but they are not Problem Collectives themselves. While members of fields and disciplines share many things in common, fields and disciplines themselves are not defined by a commonly held problem. One great virtue of finding your Problem Collective is that it can free you from disciplinary silos, professional identities, and the reflexive conservatism that convinces you that your research agenda must fall within the boundaries of your Field.

A Problem Collective is a community whose members—whatever their background, field, or discipline—find themselves compelled by a common, profound problem. This problem typically cannot be reduced to anything exclusive to a single time period or place. Someone concerned with a problem related to loss or freedom or equality or meaning could work on any number of cases of that problem. They might just as readily write a work of philosophy or a children’s pop-up book. Problems—especially those that tap into universal themes—can trouble people from all dispositions, worldviews, politics, and walks of life.

A Problem Collective might be small or large. It includes members of your Field—including you, of course—and members of potentially many other fields too. (We’ll say more about fields in the next chapter.) Given that members of your Problem Collective can be dispersed widely, and given that they rarely wear identifying badges, finding them can feel daunting. This chapter offers you several strategies for doing so.

But why take the effort to find such a collective? Why not just work solo? Or why not just stick to your Field?

When you find your Problem Collective, it gives you

• questions you’d never considered before,
• a vocabulary you were unaware of,
• perspectives and vantage points you did not know existed,
• techniques you never knew about, and
• a sense of validation and community.

A Problem Collective reminds you that it is OK to worry intensively about the problem that, until now, you perhaps thought was unique to you.

More than this, even, finding your collective empowers you and gives you license to pursue a line of inquiry that is not bound by field or discipline. By bringing you into communion with researchers, present and past, living and dead, all grappling with your same concerns, it reminds you that you have every right to engage with the works of luminary thinkers. You can speak with whomever was or is preoccupied with the same concerns as you.

A Problem Collective also challenges you, revealing that the true purpose of studying such figures is not merely to do well on your final exam, to appear learned, or to expand your mind in some vague kind of way, but rather because maybe, just maybe, one of these thinkers holds part of the key to solving your Problem.

Suddenly, you have no reason to be intimidated by famous, brand-name thinkers. You also become immune to the prejudices of people who dismiss concerns about theory and methodology as “academic,” in the pejorative sense—the same people who talk about the “life of the mind” as if it were detached from “real life.” You can now reject such artificial distinctions, because you know that a problem, and the quest to solve it, are as much a part of real life as you are.

But let’s be honest about this: it can take time to grasp the problem that underlies your many questions, and then to find members of your Problem Collective. Months sometimes, even years. And it’s easy to lose oneself in “the literature,” in all of the good ideas and compelling agendas already out there. The techniques introduced in this chapter will enable you to cleave to your Problem, even as you spend more time engaging with the works of other researchers.

In order to find members of your Problem Collective, you first need to confront one of research’s most challenging puzzles: What does the world call my Problem?

TRY THIS NOW: Change One Variable

The goals: To distinguish between the problem and a case of the problem. To identify which components of a research question are “indispensable” to that question, and are thus most indicative of the underlying research problem you are trying to solve. You will then be better able to identify other studies that share your Problem.

Is there a way, if not to force fortuitous discoveries to happen, at least to increase the likelihood that they happen sooner?

The answer is yes.

This exercise will help you to distinguish between the problem that you care about and cases of that problem, which might be multiple. If you can make this distinction, you will be better able to identify your Problem in other people’s studies, especially by members of your Problem Collective who are not part of your Field and whose cases of your Problem might, on the surface, look utterly dissimilar.

Begin by writing down your research questions as specifically as you can, in whatever form they are currently in. Each question should contain as many of the following variables as possible:

• Time
• Place
• Agent/Subject
• Object
• Hypothesis

Here’s a hypothetical example:

How did the Black Panther Party influence North American popular culture during the 1970s, if at all—and what does this influence or lack of influence tell us about popular culture of that era?

Overall, this is a solid question (even if it does rely for the time being on that slippery word “influence” that we discussed above) because it includes specifics for all of the above variables:

• Time: 1970s
• Place: North America
• Agent/Subject: Black Panther Party
• Object: [North American] popular culture
• Hypothesis: The subject had several cultural influences on the object during the time period; which were the most significant?

At the same time, however, it is not necessarily apparent what the problem is that drives this question, and thus what the Problem Collective is that the researcher would benefit from discovering. One could easily imagine this question being posed by a community activist, a comparative literature theorist, or a media studies scholar. The underlying “problem” here might pertain more to questions of media or of race or perhaps of the distinction between “popular” and “fine” arts and culture. Depending on what the real problem is here, any number of researcher communities might be the Problem Collective.

Starting with this formulation of the question, we can use a technique that involves changing the question methodically, one variable at a time. As we do so, we pay close attention to our own mental and emotional reactions to each permutation, to see how our attraction to or concern for the problem intensifies, diminishes, or remains unchanged.

Let’s begin by changing the place variable:

How did the Black Panther Party influence South African popular culture during the 1970s, if at all—and what does this influence or lack of influence tell us about South African popular culture of that era?

Did anything change inside you when you changed this one variable? What about the following:

How did the Black Panther Party influence European popular culture during the 1970s, if at all—and what does this influence or lack of influence tell us about European popular culture of that era?

What happened this time? What about this:

How did the Black Panther Party influence Soviet popular culture during the 1970s, if at all—and what does this influence or lack of influence tell us about Soviet popular culture of that era?

Did anything change inside you when you changed this one variable? Did your excitement for the question dissipate or increase? Perhaps it hovered around the same level? And then comes the most important question of all: Why? Why does the history of the Black Panthers in, say, North America exert a powerful magnetic pull on you, but the same question posed about the Soviet Union, Europe, or South Africa falls short? This would imply that your concerns might fall less with the Black Panthers per se than with something about North America. If so, is there an aspect of your real question that you have yet to articulate? Are there missing pieces to your question—something that needs to be added to your question to make it a more faithful representation of your real concern? (Keep in mind: all answers to these questions provide useful “self-evidence” with which to orient your research.)

Now let’s change the place variable back to its original setting, and change the object variable instead:

How did the Black Panther Party influence North American feminist movements during the 1970s, if at all—and what does this influence or lack of influence tell us about the feminist movements of that era?

Any change? How about the following:

How did the Black Panther Party influence North American filmmaking during the 1970s, if at all—and what does this influence or lack of influence tell us about film of that era?

What happened this time? Now how about this:

How did the Black Panther Party influence North American attitudes toward gun control during the 1970s, if at all—and what does this influence or lack of influence tell us about gun control debates of that era?

Every time you change one variable (and make sure to change just one at a time) the process is the same as before. Ask yourself: Better, worse, the same, and why?

Obviously, you’ll need to use common sense in making substitutions. It would be meaningless to ask about the Black Panther Party’s influence on North American popular culture during the 1950s, since the BPP was founded in 1966. Each substitution should result in a question that is meaningful and plausible. Skip those that seem absurd or untenable: some variables just cannot be changed. But if you do find yourself wondering about the influence of Black political movements on North American popular culture during the 1950s, perhaps your research question should not focus on the Black Panther Party, but on its antecedents.

Each time you change one variable, ask yourself these questions:

• Do I care more or less?
• Is something lost or gained?
• If I had to guess, why have things changed (or not)?
• Is the way I wrote my question as honest and comprehensive as it could be? Is this my complete question, or is it missing a variable?

Write down, next to each “changed variable,” a few notes that capture what is going on inside your mind. Feel free to write briefly, or at length. Either way, make sure to record what happens to your interest each and every time a variable is changed.

As always, be honest with yourself. If, after changing a variable, you detect that you don’t care anymore, or that something is lost, don’t pretend to be concerned when you’re not. If you are interested in the history of gender inequality in Spain, but not the history of gender inequality in Canada, just aim your research efforts in that direction.

On the other hand, perhaps you are interested—even excited about—gender inequality in both Spain and Canada. What this tells you is that your Problem is likely not primarily defined by geography, and so you may have many cases to choose from.

Imagine that your initial question centers on the history of child abuse in post–World War II Seattle. Say that the moment you change the variable child abuse to elder abuse your feeling of concern evaporates. Is something wrong with me? Am I a bad person? No. Honesty here might be uncomfortable, even painful, but you need to acknowledge to yourself (and any Sounding Boards) that, while as a human being and citizen of the world you are concerned with elder abuse, as a researcher trying to identify your Problem you are not. For any number of reasons, the problem that haunts you in life is particular and specific—and this is entirely OK. Write down this self-evidence and change a new variable.

By contrast, should you discover that the history of both child abuse and elder abuse concerns you equally, then this is a major clue that your primary concern might not be with any specific stage of life (childhood, adulthood, etc.), but rather with the lived experiences of, perhaps, populations or communities generally regarded as vulnerable.

To test out this possibility, we encourage you to invent new variables if you need to, either to be inserted into your revised question alongside the others already there, or perhaps to replace one already there. If the “stage of life” variable (child, elder, etc.) turns out to be potentially irrelevant, perhaps try different permutations with a variable about something like “condition of life” or “security level”: vulnerable, stable, invulnerable.

Would you be equally interested in studying the history of child/elder abuse as, say, instances of abuse involving victims who are middle-aged, able-bodied, and who hail from a country’s ethnonationally dominant group? If not, then this would seem to confirm the notion that “vulnerability” is not merely “interesting” to you, but the very heart of your research problem—in other words, that it must be present in any question you pose in order for you to feel satisfied and compelled.

After you’ve run through a series of permutations—by changing existing variables, or adding and playing with new variables, take stock of the process by categorizing all of your variables into these two categories. As always, do this in writing.

• Negotiable or fungible variables. These variables can be changed without influencing your level of interest. Perhaps for you, geography is negotiable or time period or the specific agents involved.
• Non-negotiable variables. These variables, when changed, lead to the evaporation of all interest, even when (ostensibly) your topic is still present. They have to be there.

Now comes the key step of producing self-evidence, the crucial moment of introspection that this entire exercise is preparing you to reflect on, in writing. Ask yourself these questions:

• When I see this list of negotiable versus non-negotiable variables, what does my Problem really seem to be?
• Why is it that I seem unconcerned with some variables being changed, while others seem sacred?
• When more than one “non-negotiable” is left over, which one is dominant?
• Which is the problem, and which is the case of the problem? Put another way, is X a case of Y, or is Y a case of X?
• Does my question, the way I first posed it, really capture my Problem, or is it simply a case of my Problem?
• If the latter, might there be a way for me to rephrase my question such that, while it remains as specific as before, it comes closer to articulating the core issues in my work?

This is not an instantaneous process, so go easy on yourself. You may not end up discovering your Problem right away through this experience. You can’t force your mind to make such a profound discovery. But this exercise should bring additional clarity to the questions-to-problem work you did in chapter 2.

The key is to get yourself in the habit of assessing which variables matter most in your research questions. Get in this habit, and your mind will start to help you unconsciously. Long after your first pass at this “Change One Variable” exercise, your mind will continue to change the variables on its own—while you brush your teeth, while you walk to class or work, even while you sleep. You’ll find discoveries happening much faster and more clearly than before.

The next step in that discovery process is to turn outward, and seek your Problem in the studies of other researchers. Now that you can distinguish between problem and case of the problem, you can identify kindred spirits in other fields. If you realize that your Problem is not limited by region, then expand your search to those who work on other parts of the world. The same is true for time period, discipline, and so on. Too many people, when trying to find their Problem Collective, limit their search to just one part of the bookstore, so to speak. Seek out members of your Problem Collective, using keyword searches and category searches. When you find a fellow Problem Collective member, look in their bibliography. Chances are you’ll find more leads.

COMMONLY MADE MISTAKES

• Making substitutions that are far too small, and choosing new variables that are far too similar, to meaningfully test the importance of the variable to your research interests
• Skipping the steps of assessing which variables are negotiable (meaning that the revised question is of equal or greater interest to you than the original one) and which non-negotiable (meaning that your interest in the research question drops or disappears if you change the variable)
• Making substitutions that are impossible, illogical (e.g., anachronistic), or otherwise untenable because they are not supported by fact
• Not writing down your assessments of which variables are negotiable or non-negotiable
• Applying the problem/case distinction only to your work, instead of also using it to identify members of your Problem Collective in other fields

TRY THIS NOW: Before and After

The goals: To identify the problem within a topic that most interests you by envisioning your research project within a larger problem-driven story. To then find other members of your Problem Collective who are contributing to that story.

There is another way to accelerate the process of discovering your Problem and your Problem Collective. We call it the Before and After Game.

Imagine that the study you are working on—no matter its actual length or scope—were a single chapter in a book. What might the chapter before it be about? How about the chapter after it? And what would be the title of the book?

Here’s a real-life example of what this game looks like in practice.

A student in Tom’s Modern Chinese History class returned from the archives one afternoon, having encountered a compelling set of sources about the Boxer Uprising in China—a complex, tumultuous, and violent episode in early twentieth-century China that has riveted historians for decades. The sources practically “spoke for themselves,” as the saying goes, recounting a harrowing story of a foreign missionary family living in China, fleeing the violence, hiding themselves in various locations, and ultimately losing a family member along the way—a young child, no less.

“I could tell a really compelling story about this,” the student told Tom.

Unsurprisingly, the conversation between this student and Tom was full of words related to Chinese history. But the more the two of them spoke, the more that other words began to spill out—words that derived from the same primary sources, but which were suggestive of the student’s curiosities and questions that went beyond the Boxer Uprising itself, and even China. Terms and phrases like “hiding,” “refuge,” “fleeing,” and the “circulation of information during times of crisis.”

Tom invited the student to play Before and After. At first, the two tried out the most obvious possibility: that the hypothetical book the student would write would be about the Boxer Rebellion itself. In this line of thinking, the chapter that the student was writing would be the “one about missionaries.” The chapters before and after, therefore, might focus on, say, “Chinese laborers during the Boxer Uprising” or perhaps “foreign diplomats during the Boxer Uprising.” Is this what you have in mind? Tom asked the student. As I narrate this imaginary table of contents to you, are you getting more excited or less? Does it enliven you, or does it leave you lifeless?

Lifeless, the student answered, without hesitation. This was not the main problem that they found compelling.

So they tried again. What if the book was called something like Hiding in China: A Cultural History, Tom speculated. Perhaps the chapter before or after might not be about the Boxers at all, but on other cases of crisis, refuge, and flight in modern Chinese history. Perhaps the preceding chapter might be called “Hiding from the Taiping Rebels,” focused on refuge and flight during China’s mid-nineteenth-century civil war, the Taiping Rebellion. And perhaps the chapter that follows might be titled “Hiding on the Korean Peninsula: War Refugees during the First Sino-Japanese War, 1894–1895.”

A little bit better, the student responded. Still, hesitation.

What if the word “China” didn’t show up in the book title at all? What if the book was about a cultural history of hiding, focused on times of war and conflict, but not limited geographically to Asia or any other specific part of the world? In that hypothetical universe, the following chapter might take place in South Africa, during the Boer War, or elsewhere.

Yes! Suddenly, signs of life returned to the student’s face. This was getting closer to the student’s problem.

The point of the Before and After Game is not that your Problem should “become” the one recommended by your Sounding Board—that would be fatal. Do not “settle” for a suggestion, even a well-meaning one. Neither is the goal of the exercise to dramatically expand the research project to include an immense number of additional, complex case studies.

Rather, the goal is to set in motion a thought process in which the researcher begins to examine and reexamine their questions from multiple perspectives and in multiple dimensions. Once a researcher learns how to carry out this exercise for themself, without necessarily talking to a mentor or a Sounding Board, they will be equipped to oversee the brainstorming process independently, rapidly iterating an untold number of imaginary tables of contents and book titles. Eventually, one of these ideas will “catch,” and the researcher will understand what they are really after.

Now it’s your turn. Follow these steps:

1. Envision your study as a chapter in a research book focused on your Problem.
2. Write down a sentence describing your study, as best you can summarize it. Use this as a placeholder title for your “current chapter”—the project you are actually working on.
3. Now imagine a logical progression of a broader, book-length study delving into your Problem: What would be the titles of the chapters that precede and follow yours? Write down a chapter title for each of them. If you want to go further, think of what additional chapters of this hypothetical book might focus on.
4. Give that book a compelling and descriptive title.
5. Now come up with at least two (and ideally more) alternate scenarios. Repeat the above steps, coming up with titles for the current chapter, the preceding chapter, the next chapter, and the book.
6. For each hypothetical book, fill in a chart like the one shown in table 8.

Table 8. PLAY BEFORE AND AFTER

Book title:	_________________
Preceding chapter:	_________________
Current chapter:	_________________
Next chapter:	_________________
Excitement level:	_________________ (low/medium/high)
Why this response?	_________________ (Here, take as much space as you need to assess, describe, and speculate about how and why you responded the way you did to this envisioned scenario.)

You can benefit from this exercise whether you are writing a term paper for a class over a few weeks or working on a much larger project, like a graduate thesis or a book, since it forces you to think through your orientation within the vast world of a topic, and to make sure that your approach is driven by your Problem.

As always, pay close attention to how you yourself respond to the scenario, and get your thoughts down in writing. Get that EKG machine back out, and hook yourself back up. Do any of these hypothetical books call out to you more than others? Why do you think this is? Are there any “obvious” book titles that, for whatever reason, don’t speak to you? Why might this be? How might this help you refine or revise the way in which you are describing your research project to others, and to yourself?

Answering these questions gets you, again, closer to your Problem. But it also helps you to envision, in a problem-driven way, how your current research project in the making might intersect with other conversations. As in the cultural history of hiding during times of war example, the case represented by the primary source was related to China, but the problem was not, and this opened up many possibilities. Use your results from Before and After to think about the directions you might go beyond your Field to find members of your Problem Collective. Write them down, and start searching.

COMMONLY MADE MISTAKES

• Talking yourself into “liking” a hypothetical project that your mentor suggests or that seems to be the “obvious” choice because it is related to the topic. Avoid the power of suggestion, and trust your instincts. If you find yourself hesitating, take note of that.
• Ignoring an instinctual feeling of disinterest or boredom in a hypothetical project, or not taking the time to consider why you feel aversion to a potential project choice. Dislikes can be instructive.
• Based on this envisioning exercise, feeling like you need to undertake a major project whose scope is far beyond what you can realistically accomplish. Remember that the goal is to pinpoint the problem that excites you so that you can find other members of your Problem Collective. Again: write, search, write!

TRY THIS NOW: Map Out Your Collective (Secondary Source Search)

The goal: To use one secondary source from your Problem Collective to find many more Problem Collective sources.

Now that you’ve completed the “Change One Variable” and the “Before and After” exercises, you are in a great position to venture out and actively search for your Collective. In “Change One Variable,” you identified which variables in your question are optional, negotiable, and fungible, and which are absolutely essential and non-negotiable. Likewise, even though you feel compelled by your question the way it is currently articulated, nevertheless the “Change One Variable” exercise revealed that there are certain other variables that, while you may not end up researching them, would also be compelling to you—suggesting that the boundaries of your Problem may be more expansive than what your question might suggest.

Now is the time to put this hard-won self-awareness to work by running new keyword searches—this time in a search for secondary sources. If your question focuses on the history of child abuse in Seattle (to use our previous example), and yet you would be equally interested perhaps in studying the same topic in Toronto, Turkey, or Tel Aviv, then go ahead and try to find studies carried out in other geographic locales. Read those works, and see how you feel as you read them. Are they enlightening? Does your EKG reading spike?

And if you know, by way of the “Change One Variable” exercise, that you could also imagine yourself doing work on elder abuse, go ahead and run searches for this topic as well. Get your hands on these books, articles, documentaries, works of art, and more. What happens when you read these materials?

Just like the very first exercise in the book—“Search Yourself”—your objective here is twofold:

1. To read these Problem Collective books and articles, understand their arguments, and take notes
2. To read yourself as you read Problem Collective sources, to see what kind of impact, if any, these works are having on you

If they are not having an impact on you, then this gives you a clue that perhaps this author, however interesting their research is, might not be part of your Problem Collective. But if you do notice your pulse quickening, and your mind racing with new questions, this suggests that perhaps you have made a discovery after all—even if the book or article in your hands seems to have nothing to do with your case.

We cannot tell you when this discovery will happen, how long it will take, or if it has indeed taken place. Only you can answer these questions. But we will tell you this: if you have been working through all of the exercises in this book so far, and if you have been producing and analyzing all of the necessary self-evidence, chances are high that, by this point, you have the requisite skills of introspection and self-awareness. And this self-awareness—this work of taking notice of yourself, trusting yourself, writing “self-evidence” down on paper, analyzing it, and then deciding your next steps based upon your new insights—will accelerate the process of discovering your Problem Collective.

And remember: it only takes the discovery of one book, one article, one documentary, or one lecture to throw the doors wide open.

Truly, once you discover even one piece of writing by a member of your Collective, from there the process of discovering other members—dozens, hundreds—becomes easier and faster. Every new study that deals with your Problem will also yield further sources in its footnotes, endnotes, and bibliography. Read the table of contents, the abstract, the introduction, the conclusion. Skim the body of the text. Comb through the footnotes and the bibliography. Take note of any title that jumps out at you, no matter whether or not this work has any surface-level connection to your case. Indeed, the fact that these books and articles don’t deal with the exact same thing as you—the same place, person, or time period—is precisely the point. That distance helps clarify that the problem you are so passionate about is not limited to a time and place but, rather, is shared by researchers working on very different topics.

Add all of these sources to your own research bibliography, then get your hands on every one of them you can, and go through the same process with each of those new sources. Repeat this process until you feel confident that you have made enough connections to begin some serious reading, starting with the most promising works. And as you read through these works more closely, and as you discover the ones that really do seem to be tapped into the same problem as you, ask yourself the following questions over and over:

• What does this author call my Problem?
• What is this author’s word for the thing that disturbs me?
• What vocabulary does this author, who clearly seems to be kept awake at night by the same gnawing question as I am, use to describe themself, whether professionally, intellectually, or otherwise?

Write down the answers to these questions. Indeed, write down anything that comes to mind, because this is a rare and joyous moment: the moment when you find your fellow travelers. These are the people who are going to help you, inspire you, validate you, challenge you, and enable you to find your voice.

COMMONLY MADE MISTAKES

• Not using the results of the “Change One Variable” exercise in this keyword search
• Dismissing your instinctual feeling of interest in or attraction to a secondary source because, on the surface, it doesn’t appear to be directly related to your case
• Not writing down your answers to the three questions about how the secondary sources you find describe or define your Problem
• Giving up early, or not repeating the process of analysis and introspection with multiple secondary sources
• Only examining secondary sources that are in your Field, meaning that you likely have not significantly changed your variables in the “Change One Variable” exercise

Rewriting for Your Collective

Now that you’ve found your Problem Collective, the next challenge is to write for them—or, really, to rewrite for them. We encourage you to try this out using your draft research proposal from chapter 3, but you can also apply the same techniques to any other piece of research writing you have in draft form, such as an essay, an abstract, a conference paper, an article, or a grant proposal—even a speech or presentation.

This process begins with two steps:

1. Identifying the Field jargon you may currently be using (perhaps unconsciously) to talk about your Problem
2. Eliminating this “insider” language from the description of your Problem so as to make things comprehensible to people outside your Field in language they’ll understand

Rewriting for your Problem Collective is not as simple as it sounds. Consider these three challenges. First, members of your Collective may know little to nothing about your subject matter. They may know nothing about your time period, your subjects, your region. They may be entirely ignorant of your Field, and they certainly won’t appreciate its jargon—a point we’ll return to in a minute.

Second, the things that impress your Field might not impress your Collective. Maybe their Field answered those questions already. Maybe they have a different consensus about how free will operates in democratic societies, or about which environmental threats to the planet are the most pressing. Maybe scholar X’s study launched a thousand dissertations in your Field but is virtually unknown to your Collective. Or, for whatever reason, members of your Collective simply find the preoccupations of your Field . . . well . . . not preoccupying.

Third, your Field’s hang-ups and taboos don’t concern your Collective. One faction in your Field claims that freedom fighters brought about that regime change; another insists that the government was toppled by terrorists. Your Field agrees that you should never question the validity of theory Y, or should always refer to subject Z with a certain nomenclature, but your Collective has no such inhibitions. You might well discover later that members of your Collective are weighed down by other baggage. But, in any case, you are likely going to have to write for your Collective in ways that your Field doesn’t demand of you.

What your Collective will demand is that you keep the problem front and center. Freed of your Field’s bugbears, you can stay focused on the problem you’re trying to solve. It should drive the flow of your prose, the structure of your argument, and the words you use.

Every field has its own shorthand, its thieves’ cant—the jargon that makes outsiders either wince or go blank. You can’t talk that way to your Collective. You simply won’t make yourself understood. This is one of the reasons that finding your Problem Collective is so important: to make connections, you have to step out of your Field’s echo chamber.

Imagine you have to miss art class one day and ask your friend to video-record the class session for you. Unfortunately, your friend ends up recording only the audio, and what you hear the instructor saying is this:

As you can see on the left side of this painting, the second figure is looking menacingly at the figure here. But over here, we can see that the figure’s expression is placid. Take note of this, because we will return to it.

You’d be lost, and for good reason.

For people inside the room, pointing at things while speaking about them is a natural and effective way to communicate. People outside of the room, however—including smart people—will struggle to make sense of it. Which painting is the instructor pointing at? Who is on the left side? Who is the second figure? Where is “over here”?

“Pointing-while-speaking” is essentially what all of us are doing when we write as if addressing only members of our Field.

Consider the following sentence:

After a brutal civil war between the GMD and the CCP, the latter emerged victorious, going on to form the PRC.

To a historian of modern China, the sentence above is completely straightforward. For everyone outside that field, the sentence looks like secret code. It conceals rather than reveals.

So, when writing for your Collective, start by killing your acronyms:

After a brutal civil war between the Nationalist Party of China (Guomindang) and the Chinese Communist Party, the latter emerged victorious, going on to form the People’s Republic of China.

Here’s a made-up example of another type of Field writing that keeps everyone else (and perhaps even some Field members) outside the room:

The findings of Park and Williams refute Wendell’s influential hypothesis.

Rephrase to bring your Collective inside:

The excavation of tenth-century Norwegian graves containing knives and forks alongside humpback whale bones disproves one scholar’s influential hypothesis that Vikings ate only shrimp.

So that’s what you were talking about!

Insider language is of course valuable—even essential—in certain contexts. Used among experts, it eliminates redundancy and speeds the conversation, allowing them more time to delve deeply into the more complex aspects of their work. You do not want a thoracic surgeon to explain every specialist term. Nor do you want the operating room to be populated by those who need things explained in lay terms.

Insider language is, nevertheless, anathema to the early phases of the research process. Unlike the emergency room, where life-or-death decisions must be made rapidly and efficiently, the early phases of research benefit from slowing down and decompressing language. Translating from specialist to lay language is a necessary part of writing for your Collective.

The reasons are simple. As you already know, the people in your Collective will likely not hail from your same Field or share your same topic. They will share the underlying problems and disturbances that motivate your research, but they will simply not know what your Field-specific code words mean. This includes not just nouns, but also verbs like “intervene” and “negotiate,” which—especially when used in a metaphorical sense—often beg the questions of what exactly is being done, and how. Replace those terms with a full description—gloss them so as to equip your fellow Collective members with the basic information they need in order to make sense of your research orientation. Help them to understand your questions and recognize you as part of the same Problem Collective. Express your question, problem, or disturbance with reference to specific places, time periods, personages, and institutions.

Give them the context, and they will be able to help you push your work further. Remove acronyms, abbreviations, and shorthands so that a fellow Collective member can share ideas or pose questions that stress-test your assumptions and help lead you to a breakthrough.

TRY THIS NOW: Find and Replace All “Insider Language”

The goals: To identify language in your writing that make sense only to members of your Field and to rewrite so that you can connect with members of your Problem Collective.

We highly recommend that you do this exercise not on the computer but on paper, using a set of highlighters, preferably in at least five colors. The exercise involves three steps.

Step 1: Read your Field writing with Collective eyes

Print out a copy of your draft research proposal, and then highlight every instance of “insider language” you can find. Use different colors for different types of insider language, for example:

• Blue, for every time a person is mentioned by surname only, or without any introduction when first mentioned
• Red, for jargon and technical terminology that is presented without definition or explanation
• Orange, for any adjectives or adverbs that obscure more than they reveal
• Green, for every event that is referenced but not identified or explained briefly
• Yellow, for acronyms

You can create your own categories as well.

If you choose to do this exercise on the computer, you can color-code using a text highlighting tool. We recommend using colors because doing so makes the patterns in your language obvious at a glance. (“So much yellow—I’m clearly overusing acronyms!”) But you can also make such distinctions using different fonts, notations (numbers, letters, symbols), or any mark-up code that suits you.

The figure below provides an example in monochrome. A page that starts out looking like the one on the left will end up looking like the one on the right.

There is no prize for producing the cleanest page. Now is the time to find and flag as much of this insider language as possible, as doing so will help you to sharpen your thinking about how to communicate more effectively with your Collective.

Step 2: Rewrite your way out of your Field

Now that you have annotated your document, rewrite just those parts that you’ve highlighted. For each, do the following at first mention:

a. Individual. Provide the full name, preferably with a brief biographical description.
b. Institution. Describe it in sufficient detail.
c. Technical term. Remove and replace with a description of the phenomenon or principle. If it is necessary to retain the term, define it.
d. Adjectives and adverbs. Find any words that are secretly trying to “smuggle in” judgment statements—words like traditionally, normal, obviously, scientifically, clearly, and irrational—and replace them with language that is more specific, open-ended, and transparent.

e \ Event. Briefly explain what happened, and any relevant context.
f. Acronym. Remove and replace with the full name, or a brief description.

Remember, the overarching goal is not just to avoid obscuring things, but also to demonstrate what needs to be demonstrated. Your commitment is affirmative.

COMMONLY MADE MISTAKES

• Neglecting to highlight obscure or Field-specific adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, in addition to the obvious nouns
• Using only one highlighting color (or font or notation style or other unique identifying mark-up technique), instead of several, which can help you more systematically and precisely identify your habits of using insider language
• Replacing Field terms with different Field terms, instead of with language comprehensible to a nonspecialist

SOUNDING BOARD: Does the Lay Version of My Proposal Make Sense?

Now that you’ve systematically identified all of the various types of insider language in your research proposal, replace those terms with language that could be understood by a lay (nonexpert) reader. Then ask someone who is not a subject matter expert (i.e., someone who possesses no specialized knowledge of your topic) to read that version of your proposal and highlight any parts that don’t make sense to them. You might be surprised: when we get close to our subject matter, it’s easy to lose perspective. Which words or phrases do they find confusing? Can they follow the logic? Which passages puzzle them? Rewrite those sections until they become clear. Your Sounding Board can help you to express your research problem more clearly.

Welcome to Your Collective

Note that we do not call this group a Solution Collective. Members of a Problem Collective might differ radically in how they think the problem can or should be solved. What is the solution to poverty? What is an ideal preschool education? How best to deter terrorism? Proposals vary, but a self-centered researcher can take in stride differences of opinion within their Problem Collective. You can accept with equanimity (rather than defensiveness) that not everyone in your Collective thinks like you. Not all of them are or will become your friends. And this is a good thing. You are not looking for confirmation of your preexisting ideas. You are not looking for sympathy. Rather, you are looking for new perspectives on the problem that motivates you. The self-centered researcher is able to consider various proposed solutions, and methods of finding solutions, with open-minded critical detachment.

Don’t dwell. A Problem Collective is a collective body of ideas, and ideas are mobile and fluid. It is an evolving place to seek new ideas, or to recharge and renew. It is not a refuge in which to hide from your Field or seek validation. Nor is the purpose of finding your Collective to overawe people with your intellectual breadth or interdisciplinarity—such conceit is anathema to Self-Centered Research. The idea is to be searching. You should constantly be leaving (and often returning to) your Problem Collective, setting out into other regions, categories, time periods, and so forth. And remember that this is just a beginning. You might well belong to more than one Problem Collective, and your allegiances may shift from project to project.