Personal history_Yurim

Personal history + skills + crack (problem / challenge)

 

Questions of something happening in your life makes you think about what’s going on in your surroundings, society and the world.

I was curious how others live outside my boundary, going outward to ‘discover’ or ‘explore’ unfamiliar out there, not here, when I was younger. I like reading maps, travelogues, and watching movies, which are inspirations for exploring new, unknown world.

Since I became outsider overseas for my study, I gradually became to wonder how I became who I am and how it is related to where I am. After I became a mother, I was perplexed by realising my position as a female for the first time in my real life. When my life puzzles me, it becomes my curiosity and desire to understand it better. If this puzzle is not only my own, but if it resonates with others’ live stories, it becomes cracks and can be a starting point for doing research or doing arts. And how we look at these cracks can also affect the lens and the methods of how we do research.

Then, how do we tackle down these cracks? For doing that through research, it requires some skills. Basic knowledge of skills might be acquired through some training, like methods training. However, in practice, it is often that you might feel like being in battle barehanded when you really DO research. From the scratch, finding and pinning down a problem, connecting your research with the literature, collecting data through personal interactions with ‘real’ people, interpreting data, articulating findings from data and communicating your research with other people, your personal skills learned through your life and plus research skills trained or acquired through experiences are used together, whether consciously or unconsciously. In this process, it is not clear to clarify what skills are required and how they can be acquired. It’s very much connected to a researcher him/herself and his/her life experiences.