Thus far, I’ve talked to such a variety of people about my project including:
- IR Theorist
- Comparativist
- Migration/Global Studies scholar
- Southeast Asianist
- Religion + Development Studies scholar
- Archaeological Anthropologist
- Literary/Queer Studies scholar
- Medical Anthropologist
- Development Professional
Almost all of them claim to be interdisciplinary in one way or another. The thing that strikes me most about talking to people from such a diverse set of backgrounds is not the insights that they have each offered to me, but the variety of ways they expect me to present my project, reflecting a variety of ways scholars believe scholarship should be practised. Some expect an empirical puzzle, some think that I can work out the empirical puzzle along the way, some think I need to do more lit review, etc etc.
It has been extremely tiring trying to present my project to such different audiences, and more importantly, trying to see where each is coming from. The people I’ve enjoyed talking to the most about my project are those who try to see the potential of my project and offer suggestions/resources to improve it. I think the rest didn’t have that much to say, but felt it necessary to, and so did so by saying something generic about an idealized mould of scholarship and pointing out how my project doesn’t fit that mould.
a moz quixote 