5. How to Navigate Your Field

Finding your Problem Collective is difficult. Finding your Field is simple. Your Field finds you.

The main reason for that is because fields are typically connected to topics, in the broadest sense, and those categories make a claim on you. Your Field pulls you back into Topic Land.

Fields have their own journals, professional associations, newsletters, and myriad other institutional apparatuses that call out to interested parties. Universities are organized into departments, most of which are named after fields, like chemistry, economics, computer science, classics, English, or Asian studies. A School of Population Studies or an Institute of Gender Studies might be organized by collective, but these modes of organization are more rare in most institutional settings. The field-collective dynamic is part of the ongoing push and pull of intellectual life in the modern academy.

A field is different from a Problem Collective in that it is defined by a scope of activity or research targets. A collective is defined by a shared intellectual agenda or array of concerns. If your research project is on the history of the cuckoo clock, you are unavoidably part of the field of Germanic studies, given that timepiece’s connections to the Black Forest, but your Problem Collective might be scholars of material culture or the history of technology.

Or let’s say you’re in a Department of Art History and you want to write about the contemporary artist Xu Bing, known for his installation Book from the Sky, made up of scrolls printed with over 4,000 “fake” Chinese characters. You might find yourself talking to linguists, curators, calligraphers, graphic artists, computer scientists, historians of woodblock printing technology, scholars of script cultures, or scholars of “nonsense” poetry. Among them, your intellectual kindred might be people curious about how and why artists use familiar cultural forms to challenge expectations about aesthetics and intelligibility.

Your Collective is like your friends: you share interests and you choose to spend time with them. Finding your Collective is a process of self-affiliation. Your Field is more like your family: the senior members existed before you did, they claim you as one of their own, and—like it or not—you live with them and have to spend a lot of time in their company. Your membership in a field is not entirely a matter of choice, as it’s partly assigned to you. You can of course renounce your Field, spurn its values and conventions, but people might still remark upon the resemblance.

People tend to view their families through their own identities. Some never realize that their family members have other identities too—as members of other collectives. Children don’t always think about their parents’ engagement with their profession; they take it for granted that a parent goes to work and then comes home to play with them or pick them up from school. But the parent may spend many or most of their waking hours working on problems that have nothing to do with their child. They may participate in institutional cultures, associations, voluntary affiliations, advocacy groups, or other organizations whose reason for being is to solve a problem the child might not even be aware of. When we discover that our parents have been spending so much time working on something else, besides raising us, we see them in a new light and ask: Who are these people, really?

One of the central question of this chapter is this: How do you deal with the differing problems and interests of members of your Field?

Why, when they do their own research, do members of your Field not necessarily write for you? As you now realize, they are likely writing for their Problem Collective. If you wish that your Field would strive to know you on your own terms—to know what your Problem is—stop to ask yourself: What’s their Problem? After all, for institutions it is the field that comes first. And yet, for the scholars who make up any specific field, it is their Problems that come first. This is one of the internal contradictions that make fields both dynamic and frustrating places to be.

Your Collective helps you to get to you.

Your Field helps you to outgrow yourself.

Identify the different Problem Collectives within your Field and you’ll understand better how your Field works, and how to make your Field work for you. Being a member of a field isn’t just getting a membership card and becoming a passive conduit of its values and conventions. You get a role in helping the field to evolve.

Find the Problems within Your Field

Fields have multiple advantages, including topical coherence, and various institutional structures such as journals, conferences, associations, bibliographies, and funding bodies that support research and learning in a particular area. These institutional structures make it easier to find sources, facts, and other researchers connected to a topic. They continually produce and codify knowledge, establish and refine conventions, and perform quality control on the research output of their members through peer review. Problem Collectives lack these supports, and that is one of the reasons they are so much harder to identify and connect with.

Fields also have limitations whose effects on the researcher range in severity from inconvenient to debilitating. As they develop conventions, they also grow blind spots. Received wisdom can devolve into cant and discourage innovation. Doctrines can emerge, due to undue deference to—or self-promotion by—authority. Junior researchers may feel like they have to follow the herd, and reflexively suppress their own interests and ideas.

Much of the work you did in part 1 of this book to become a self-centered researcher has prepared you to overcome or avoid these common pitfalls. Again and again, whether working with a single source, an array of search results, or just pen and paper, you have been listening to yourself and been honest about when you feel that visceral current of electricity.

In this chapter, we offer several ideas and methods for the following:

• Navigating a vast field of knowledge efficiently, while never losing sight of your Problem
• Making best use of the resources of your Field, especially members of your Field who are also members of your Problem Collective
• Avoiding common traps—conceptual and methodological—that researchers fall into in interacting with their field

Among those mistakes is to view a field as a topic that is merely a collection of subfields, or subtopics, that are more specific and thus have less to do with one another. Again and again, we have seen students think to themselves: I just need to “narrow down” my topic—then I’ll have a project. But, as we said before: You cannot narrow your way out of Topic Land. (And Subtopic Land is worse.)

This is why we encourage you to view your Field not as a collection of subfields but rather an assortment of Problem Collectives. Adopting this mindset allows you to look beyond the specific cases to see the problems shared by researchers working on radically different topics. You will learn to take advantage of the incredible resources of a field without getting trapped in Topic Land.

Make this mental shift, and you will fundamentally alter your relationship with your Field.

Read Your Field for Their Problems: Reimagining the “Literature Review”

Let’s start by rethinking a common way of navigating a field: the “literature review.”

The “lit review,” as it’s often known, is a required component of academic theses, articles, dissertations, and books. This is the section near the front of a thesis or article where the author asks and answers the question “How did we get here, to the problem at hand?” (“State of the field” articles have a similar agenda: to synthesize ideas and analyze their research implications.) A literature review establishes your authority to conduct a study by demonstrating that you have read all of the relevant studies on a particular topic or problem. You trace the threads of an intellectual genealogy, identifying the debates, theories, revelations, and transformative ideas necessary for a reader to appreciate the agenda of your study. You are not just compiling a chronology or a list of publications. You are making an argument that your research extends from or builds on those earlier efforts and addresses a new part of the problem.

In chapter 2 we advised against justifying your project by claiming that it fills a “gap in the field.” Now we will show you how not to be a gap filler. A field, after all, is not a leaky dam that needs a hole plugged to keep it from collapsing, or a garment that needs mending. It is more like an ongoing conversation at a party that you have just joined, and no one will be impressed if you just take up space. What they want from you is ideas, expressed in an engaging fashion, that will help improve their own ideas.

Literature reviews are notorious for being a boring slog. They’re hard to write and sometimes even harder to read. And for you, they might now be even harder. Having just read several studies by other members of your Collective—works that inspire you because they speak directly to the core of your Problem—you might feel less than excited to read across an entire field, including parts of it that are remote from your project. It can feel like the intellectual equivalent of doing one’s taxes—a duty, rather than a pleasure.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to remedy this feeling. Given that every field is made up of researchers from different Problem Collectives, your job in the lit review is to listen to these other collectives, to acknowledge how members of other collectives bring their own agendas and values to bear on your topic, and to consider their findings in the light of their Problems (not yours).

Interacting with other collectives gives you a better sense of your own values. You learn to respect other collectives, and to avoid the mistake of thinking that if someone is asking different questions about the same topic that they’re simply wrong. It may be that they just have a different agenda and are trying to solve a different problem.

Consider this scenario: you’re at a conference for your Field and you are watching a presentation that pertains to your topic of research—and you find it boring.

A thought immediately crosses your mind: This colleague is dealing with my Problem, but poorly.

This is a “selfish” response, not a self-centered one. For a self-centered researcher who is aware of Problem Collectives, the response instead would be, This colleague seems to be dealing with the same topic as me, but through the lens of a very different problem than mine. I wonder what their Problem is?

A new set of questions emerges: How might their work, and their Problem, help me and mine—and vice versa? Are there things they’re seeing that I’m not?

The advantages of the latter approach are obvious: you’ll be better able to harness the productive friction between field and collective to create new energy, and to change them both.

These are the processes that can enliven the blandly titled “literature review.” Your job in navigating your Field is to bring together scholars, some who are just entering the profession and others who are long dead, into conversation with one another about a set of questions and concerns that together add up to a survey of the most compelling and important research on your Problem.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when evaluating sources, which apply equally to those written by members of your Field and your Collective:

• Be skeptical. Just because something was published in a peer-reviewed journal or a book doesn’t mean it’s watertight. You shouldn’t be groundlessly contrarian, but neither should you take the words of experts at face value.
• Be fair. Represent every source’s merits and shortcomings accurately.
• Focus on the author’s concerns, not your own. When you write an evaluation of a particular piece of writing, focus on the points of greatest salience to the author, not to you. In other words, focus on what they were trying to achieve in writing this study instead of selfishly scavenging it for parts. There is nothing quite so unfair as a review that heaps criticism on points that were, in fact, of minor significance to the author’s main goals.

Think of your Field as less a set of commandments to be followed uncritically than a set of propositions to be tested, refined, modified, reordered, and added to. This is where you come in.

Be skeptical, but avoid the rookie mistake of scoffing at the authorities just for the thrill of it. The satirical weekly The Onion captured this tendency with the title of a fictional book: Wendel Spencer’s Schools Are Not Failing Our Children: How We Took a Commonly Held Opinion and Declared the Opposite. Your Field does not need more posers.

Likewise, a field does not (or should not) tolerate people who bully or harangue their colleagues. In contests of ideas, it’s the ideas that matter, not their proponents. When you are evaluating a source, keep your focus on the research, not on the researcher. Doing so will help keep you unprejudiced, and you’ll have no qualms about giving praise or censure where it’s due. It’s always incumbent on you to represent other people’s ideas in good faith.

TRY THIS NOW: Start Your Own “What’s Your Problem?” Bookstore (aka Organize Your Field into Problem Collectives)

The goal: To sort studies in your Field by the problems that motivate instead of the topic they are “about,” by arranging a small number of secondary sources into “problem sections.”

In chapter 4, we asked you to imagine a bookstore where the shelves are organized according to the problems that propel each of the authors’ books, not the “topics” each book is about. Instead of a section named, let’s say, Philosophy—with books about German philosophers on one shelf, Greek philosophers on another, Indian philosophers on a third, and so on—this “Problem Bookstore” would have sections called (again, let’s say) How can humans authenticate religious scripture or other works from antiquity? Or perhaps How to make sense of evil? Or maybe How can we teach ourselves and others to act morally?

Well, the time for hypotheticals is over. Now your job is make this bookstore a reality (albeit on a small scale) using the books you plan to read for your research. Here are the steps:

1. Choose six to eight short secondary sources (articles or book chapters—not entire books) in your Field related to your topic. By this point in your research, you have compiled a preliminary bibliography of studies on your topic. Your Sounding Board has probably made some suggestions as well. Don’t fret too much over the selection of studies. As long as they are serious works of scholarship, and as long as they are “about” your topic, that’s all you need. You can always add more later.
2. Using table 9 as a model, write down the topic of the first study in your list. Here is the place where you can write generalities, such as “ancient Greek philosophy” or “Buddhism.” This should be pretty straightforward. You should be able to identify the topic even before reading the study, using the introduction of the article or chapter (or even just the title).
3. Now write down the specific case that the study focuses on. Perhaps it’s a study of medieval Buddhist architecture in Japan, or a specific element of ancient Stoic philosophy. Again, this should be pretty simple, since the case will likely be mentioned in the title or the opening pages of the study.
4. List the specific questions that the study poses. Here is where things get more precise, and where your close reading skills will pay off. Just as you did earlier with your own research—where you brainstormed and refined a host of small- and medium-scale questions that together started to “add up” to a broader project—here is where you try to identify the small- and medium-scale questions that comprise the study you’re reading. If you’re lucky, the researcher will articulate their questions clearly and explicitly. But you might have to “reverse engineer” the author’s questions, based on the explanations they are providing, and the claims they are making. Identify as many questions as you can, striving to find at least ten.
5. Try to identify patterns among those questions. Once again, this part of the process is exactly the same exercise that you did before, only this time you’re focusing on someone else’s work, rather than your own. Analyze the list of the ten-plus questions you’ve found, and ask yourself: If I had to venture a guess, what does this author seem to be concerned about or preoccupied with? What seems to be driving them? Pay attention as well to the questions that the author doesn’t seem to be asking—questions which, for you, seem like obvious ones, but which don’t seem to be addressed in the study. All of this is “self-evidence”—remember that?—only this time, the “self” in question is not you, but them.
6. Try to identify the problem. Now that you’ve created an inventory of questions, and analyzed the patterns that comprise those questions, you’re ready for the hardest but most rewarding part of this exercise: to try and see past the author’s case study, and identify the deeper-seated problem. Write down a one-sentence description of this problem in as general terms as possible. It goes without saying, we hope, but be sure to avoid conflating the author’s case with their Problem.
7. Repeat steps 1 through 6 for the other studies in your list.
8. Once you have completed this process for most or all of your studies, try to identify any themes or patterns that connect the different authors’ Problems. Do any of the different problems you’ve identified seem related somehow? If not, don’t try to force things. It’s OK if there are “one-of-a-kind” questions. But if there are ones that seem to share something in common, try to group them together. Now try to give a name to these broader Problem Collectives (you may need to adjust your description, broadening or abstracting it a bit, which is OK). The groups you end up creating—and the names you give to them—will become the sections of your Problem Bookstore. Once you have them, you’re ready to open your shop and welcome fellow seekers!

Table 9. ORGANIZE YOUR FIELD INTO PROBLEM COLLECTIVES

The point of this exercise is twofold. First, as you learn to sort your Field into different Problem Collectives, you will become far more efficient at navigating your Field, and far better at understanding (and remembering) the arguments and facts you’ve read. When you know the problem that motivates someone’s work, not only do you gain clarity about how you should be reading that work (e.g., discerning which parts are key to a person’s argument, and which parts are mere side notes), but you also have a much clearer sense of where in your own brain you should be storing and organizing all of the arguments and information you’re encountering. A scholar’s problem is the architecture of their argument, the skeletal structure, the grid. Without it, reading even the most rigorous work of scholarship can sometimes feel like being overwhelmed by a tsunami of facts and arguments.

There’s a second reason, as well: you’ll develop a kind of magical power, the ability to connect with fellow researchers on a deeper, more meaningful level, by seeing what they are really working on, rather than just the place, time period, and so on where their research in based. What you are going to find is that two genealogical studies of (let’s say) the exact same Middle Eastern royal family, or three sociological studies of the exact same favela in Rio de Janeiro, may be motivated by entirely different problems. Similarly, one study about Rio may be propelled by the exact same problem as one about a Middle Eastern royal family. Cases and problems are not the same thing.

To be clear, as your list of secondary sources grows for your project, we are not advocating that you make an exhaustive catalogue or a comprehensive re-sorting of every study in your field. (You’re not really starting a bookstore.) But we do believe that this mindset leads to a much more effective (and, frankly, enjoyable) research process. Simply put, knowing the problem at stake, whether in your own work or in the work of another, makes navigating the ocean of studies easier.

COMMONLY MADE MISTAKES

• Sorting studies by topic or subtopic, instead of by problem
• Sorting studies by case, instead of by problem

TRY THIS NOW: Change Their Variables

The goals: To gain an understanding of how topics, problems, and cases of problems work for other researchers. To learn about the research problem of a mentor, Sounding Board, or peer by interviewing them using the “Change One Variable” exercise from above.

Distinguishing between the problem and the case that exemplifies the problem can be difficult. You’ve probably discovered this while doing the previous exercises. You’ll also have realized why seeing beyond the case to the problem is so valuable, and why it is helpful to have multiple strategies for doing so.

This exercise turns the tables on “Change One Variable.” In chapter 4, you changed one variable at a time in your own research question to see what this revealed about your Problem. Now, you are going to ask another researcher—a mentor, Sounding Board, or peer—to do the same thing aloud with you so that you can learn more about their topic, their case, and their Problem.

If that person is in your Field, great—you’ll learn about how the topic-problem-case dynamic affects someone else working on similar subject matter. But this is purely optional. The key thing is to learn how to pinpoint the driving problems in the research world outside your own mind. This process should be empowering, and strengthen the bond between you and a fellow researcher.

Here’s what to do:

1. Give yourself a refresher on how the “Change One Variable” (COV) exercise works. You’ve covered a lot since you did it yourself, so reread that part of chapter 4.
2. Introduce the exercise to your chosen interviewee in a way that presumes no prior knowledge on their part of how the COV exercise works. You can describe the goal and the procedure to them yourself, or just give them an opportunity to read it in the book. Explain that, having gone through COV yourself, you’d now like to interview them about their research, using the same technique. Explain that this interview is part of your own self-training. In addition to learning more about their research, you also want to practice distinguishing topics from cases from problems in other people’s research. Make it clear that this conversation is confidential, and that you will be taking notes only for yourself.
3. Prepare for an informal and nonjudgmental conversation. Your job is to listen, to ask clarification questions, and to write things down. You’re already experienced with writing self-evidence; now you’ll be the stenographer writing down the self-evidence of someone else. Bring pens and notepads and—don’t forget—the list on page 131 to keep track of which variables changed and how your interviewee responded to each change.
4. Start things off by asking questions that prompt your interviewer to identify their topic, and then produce a question containing all of the relevant variables that they think best encapsulate their core problem. For example:
- • What do you work on? (Topic) (NOTE: If their response is “I work on lots of things!” just have them choose one representative project for starters.)
- • If you had to put what you work on into a question, what would that be? (NOTE: If they produce a nonquestion [“I work on the question of poverty”—see page 47], tell them that this exercise requires a real question. Give them an example from COV, if necessary, or ask them to choose a question from one of their studies.)
5. Write down their description of their topic and their full research question. Take your time here—read the question back to them and ask if it’s complete. Remind them that the rules of the game require the question to be as comprehensive as possible, and include all of the relevant variables. It does not have to be elegant.
6. Once they confirm that the question is complete, you start changing variables for them, one by one, and writing down the results. How did this variable change affect your EKG—your level of excitement? If you had to guess, why? This is the meat of the exercise, which will take the most time and—in order to work—require that you let nothing slip past your Noticing radar. Again, be nonjudgmental, but interrupt and politely ask for clarification if you hear any of the following:
- • Abstract, high-level, theoretical, or vague language (You mentioned Concept X. What does that refer to, specifically, for this particular case?)
- • Jargon, insider-speak, or acronyms (I didn’t understand that term. Is there a more common version?)
- • New words spilling out when you ask them why that changed variable made them feel more or less excited than before. DO NOT LET THESE PASS BY UNREMARKED. Call them out. This is the moment when people feel some pressure to justify their choices, and when revelations might occur without their realizing it. This is also where an attentive listener is a researcher’s best friend. You’re the Sounding Board now. Play what they said back to them, and prompt them to greater precision. (You just said a word that isn’t in your research question. Is that a key variable in your study? If so, how would you rephrase your research question?)
7. When you feel like the interviewee’s responses to the variable changing are getting you both closer to the problem, shift gears. Share with them what you noticed and ask them to speculate about the problem that might explain the pattern in their excitement. (Here are your responses to these variable changes. You said that these variables could be changed, meaning that you’d be interested in those cases too, and these other variables couldn’t, meaning that they are somehow central to your agenda. If you had to guess, what would you say is the underlying problem that you are concerned with in this research project?)
8. Hopefully your conversation will be an insightful and enjoyable one. In any event, be sure to thank your interviewee for their time!

COMMONLY MADE MISTAKES

• Making all the same mistakes listed under the COV exercise in chapter 4, including changing variables too slightly to make a difference to the fundamentals of the research project
• Not explaining the goals and procedure of COV in advance of the interview
• Being too shy or deferential to ask follow-up questions or clarification questions
• Not writing things down

After your interview session, take stock. How do you feel? How did COV go for both of you? Was it easier or harder than you expected? Did you notice when your interviewee slipped in a new variable? Did you find yourself staying nonjudgmental? Would you want to do this again, with them or with someone else?

You certainly will have gotten to know your interviewee better. Maybe you’ve even helped them to get to know themself better. Your gentle probing, and challenging and naive but persistent questioning, may well have helped them to become more self-centered researchers. You hopefully will also have made the pleasant discovery that one of the best ways to be a student is to be a teacher or mentor. This is getting over yourself in the best way—by making a habit of helping other researchers become more centered on their Problem.

Through the exercises you have just completed, you have accomplished a major mental leap. You have separated the field-specific case—with all its specificity and field jargon—from the generalized problem, which cuts across the grain of one field and extends into other fields. This mental change liberates you from the narrow view of a field as mere Topic Land, which mistakenly believes that studies are relevant to one another only if they share a topic. You now have techniques to determine what really matters to different researchers in your field and how to diagnose the problem within a study that might or might not articulate it clearly. (Of course, you might encounter studies that lack a problem and remain stuck in Topic Land, but you can make these useful to you too.) You have gained a better appreciation for the problem that motivates the research of your Sounding Board or another researcher you trust. And for your own research explorations, you now know why you need not—and should not—just stay “on topic.”

Beyond your current project, you have gained a more fluid approach to navigating a field, one that is sensitive to the concerns of other Problem Collectives within it. You have acquired multiple techniques for figuring out which parts of it are most useful to you, while remaining centered.

You’ll never be done with this process once and for all because your Field is not static. It keeps adding and shedding members. New publications keep appearing. And, if you look, you will continue to uncover earlier studies that you didn’t know existed.

Now, having sorted out your Field by Problem Collective, you need to figure out how to talk to the members of your Field.

TRY THIS NOW: Rewrite for Your Field

The goal: Informed by your Problem Collective, to learn to write about your Problem in a way that your Field will understand, and to see your Problem with “Field eyes.”

In chapter 4, you wrote for your Collective. Writing for your Collective required you to eliminate all of the insider language (or jargon) and secret codes that might be easily understandable to those in your Field, but which needed to be rephrased in order to be meaningful to members of your Collective.

Now it’s time to switch audiences and repeat the process, but with a couple of new goals. Your Field, as mentioned above, is populated mostly by people who are not part of your Problem Collective and are uninterested in your Problem. Why write for them? Put another way, what might be the value of looking at your Problem with Field eyes?

When you have to explain your project to someone who doesn’t care about your Problem (or thinks they don’t), several good things might happen. You might, of course, change their minds about the relevance of your Problem. People are not static; they can be persuaded by arguments and evidence, and you might create a new ally. You might help Collective members within your Field find one another through your work. Even if they don’t become members of your Collective, you may deepen their questions for other explorations. In any case, you will change your Field.

Our goal is to make sure that what you’ve written is comprehensible. Look over the first draft of your proposal description and highlight any terms that people in your Field are unlikely to know or be familiar with. These might include the following:

• Concepts and theories
• Key authors relevant to the “Problem Collective” dimensions of your research
• Key debates or arguments among members of your Collective
• Personal names
• Names of institutions or organizations
• Titles
• Acronyms
• Periodizations
• Topics

Highlight your enthusiasms (and other scholars’), just as you did your insider language when writing for your Collective.

Other benefits to rewriting for your Field are personal. In chapter 1, we mentioned that boredom can be a wonderful teacher in the early phases of a project, and gave examples of the ways it can help you to articulate and conceptualize your concerns. We also spoke about the importance of facing up to your own boredoms without judgment. If, upon telling someone about your concern with X, you are terribly bored by every association—A, B, C, and D—they make with X, you should not judge yourself. Don’t force yourself to be interested in anything, even if it’s Important (with a capital I).

Boredom is back, but this time to help you in a different way. When you rewrite for your Field, as opposed to your Collective, you will, alas, need to venture into what you consider to be the less compelling features or logical associations with your core questions and problems. These will not be encounters with boredom that help you grasp more clearly who you are as a thinker, and what your Problem truly is—they will simply be topics and questions that you are already fully aware of, but just find painfully dull.

This is an essential process, for a number of reasons. Here are two:

1. Engaged readers make better researchers. By engaging seriously and in good faith with such areas and questions, you are engaging seriously and respectfully with your Field mates as members of Problem Collectives other than your own. You have to contend with other agendas. They don’t find these aspects of your work “boring”—for them, this is likely the reason they picked up your work, came to hear you speak, or are bothering to engage with you at all. They find these problems disturbing, fascinating, and worthy of long-term (even career-long) engagement. To dismiss these aspects of your work as uninteresting or unworthy of contemplation, as you can imagine, is no small insult. For some, it would be the same thing as dismissing as insignificant a problem that keeps them up at night, and for some, their whole reason for becoming a researcher in the first place. It is deeply personal. By contrast, a good-faith engagement with these questions is your way of acknowledging and taking seriously that your Field mates may belong to Problem Collectives entirely different from your own.
2. Engagement can lead you to discover and embrace new research problems. Engagement of the kind we are encouraging here benefits your own intellectual and personal growth. Sometimes—although by no means always—the labor of seriously engaging with “boring” issues can subtly transform you and change your own perspective. Sometimes, you even begin to catch glimpses of these problems, seeing them as if through the eyes of those collectives who consider these problems fundamental to their identity. Even better, you find your own way of “translating” these problems into your own language, stumbling upon a wording or a phrasing that, in a flash of insight, suddenly finds you disturbed. You realize that, all this time, it wasn’t the problem itself that was “boring” to you; it’s simply that you had never heard the problem phrased in a way that made sense to you. But now that you have, suddenly you find yourself kept awake at night.

And remember: it is perfectly good and natural if your first draft—even your fifth or sixth—is still inward-looking. The point is that every subsequent edit and draft should move steadily outward, opening up, equipping uninitiated readers, and inviting them into your Problem. Make your Problem their Problem. Disturb them by showing them—in terms they will understand—what disturbs you. Your work needs to make arguments, to be sure, but just as much it needs to equip a reader with everything they need to know in order to understand your argument.

SOUNDING BOARD: Find a Sounding Board in Your Field

A Sounding Board in your Field will bring another perspective to your evolving research project. Consider reaching out to someone who is not at your institution—someone who is not your boss or who has no personally vested interest in the outcome of your study, besides their professional goodwill. They can help you to ensure that your manner of expressing ideas will be comprehensible to your peers. They will help you to identify sources you might have overlooked. They will help you anticipate which questions about your primary source (your cereal box, so to speak) have been asked and answered by others in your Field. Again, show them your research proposal and solicit their response, whether written or oral. And (you guessed it) make sure to say Thank you.

Welcome to Your Field

Membership in a Field can be rewarding. You’ll find that in a field, as in a Problem Collective, groups of researchers develop a certain esprit de corps. Curiosity, relentlessness, and generosity are the ingredients fueling their productivity and inspiration. One of the benefits of a field is the productive friction between the different Problem Collectives therein. Their disturbance becomes your disturbance, and suddenly your own research achieves a new dimensionality for you. You suddenly see a part of your field in 3D.

You are still a problem. Always keep in mind that the scale, ambition, and brilliance of your question is never limited to the scale of the specific project you end up working on. In fact, just the opposite: the more brilliant and resonant your question, the more it will spill out from the confines of your project, often in ways you haven’t anticipated.