Afterlives - Alasdair
Yesterday we discussed how we know when our work is finished. For me, the projects I’ve been involved in aren’t, in my mind, really finished (albeit to various degrees). This is at least partly a function of my personal circumstances - I’m now a teaching-track academic (with little workloaded time for research) and a part-time academic (I have a 4-day-a-week contract). These circumstances mean that outside of teaching, department/faculty leadership roles and admin, my research time is very constrained.
Without much time to collect data, but wanting to still do research, I have become a practitioner of secondary data analysis. Or someone who revisits past projects to write new analysis but also make new methodological contributions, research methodology being a particular interest of mine. This is particularly the case for my public space research, for which until recently I’d not been able to explore the methodological dimensions and implications as much as I would have liked. This is a happy afterlife for me - the methodological aspects of my public space ethnography had been really significant to me when I conducted the research, but were deemed of secondary importance (even a distraction) by my supervisor. Left to my own devices, however, and through serendipitous developments (such as the launch of the ‘thinking with method’ section of the human geography journal Area), I have been able to express my methodological thinking on qualitative public realm research. In a sense an afterlife, in a sense a rebirth.
My other projects live on in other ways. The research on the public health impacts of free bus travel for young people in London is ‘finished’, though the topic of free bus travel has had a recent resurgence, and so the research occasionally takes on a new lease of life in policy debates. My desk-based, more theoretical research on socio-spatial networks bubbles under the surface, as something I write about and one day still want to do. My research on the lived practices of masterplanned developments still deserves an overarching publication - changing jobs and covid stalled this work, but I hope one day to ‘finish’ that project by doing it justice with an overarching paper. Maybe this summer…!
Being open to where work comes from (thinking of the ‘personal histories’ theme too) warrants further attention. What is the previous life of what we do? And how do projects inform our next bits of work, but also endure?
New projects are time- and -resource intensive, and structurally just aren’t options for some people. In these cases, and others, project afterlives can enable research contributions (though we should take care to ensure these are novel contributions).
