I’ve just drafted my Participant Letter—the letter I’ll send to initial contacts to try to find participants. After writing that, though, it seemed funny to only have that one letter—after all, what do I send to participants who maybe hear about my research from someone or to people who’ve been recommended as possible participants? So, I also drafted a letter to send to actual (possible) participants, with a bit more detail about my project, confidentiality assurances, what I need from them, what I’m aiming to do. I added some language which emphasized their power in participating as I tried to make it seem like they had a great opportunity to shape the outcome of this research and, thus, also trying to make my research sound worthwhile to give them a reason to want to participate. Ugh. I like the letter and am happy with how it’s turned out, but who can know how well it will or won’t gather up research interviewees!
If I listen to fellow students, it’ll take me another 4 months of thankless hounding to make any progress. It’s hard to remain distant from what they say. I fall into it and start to feel like what they say is truth, like it’s not just their perspective or their experience but ‘the way it is’ for everyone, all the time. I suppose that’s part of the immersive quality of living and working in an environment—perhaps I’m being immersed in the British pessimism for which this island is so famous? I’ll tell myself that as a way out of it and cling vehemently to my American positivity. I never thought it was American as much as I thought it was a result of my mother or my own disposition, but some of the darker varieties are much more willing to attribute it to my national origins, so it seems only fitting that, living here, I should do the same. What does it matter, anyway? I am as I am because I am—doesn’t matter much why, really.
Although I guess I only think that in relation to myself, seeing as how my entire project rests on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind the way Muslims think of themselves and their own place or belonging here in Britain.
Perhaps that is what we (an American woman and 1.6 million British Muslims) have in common—a need to express or re-express who we are in the face of others’ expectations or assumptions about us. If I can write about that without sounding too poetically saccharin, I may be able to position my interest in this project as striking right at the core of me and, therefore, being wholly relevant and justifiable.
Although, on that note, it seems ridiculous that we, as social scientists or general inquisitors of the world, should have to ‘justify’ our interest in terms of being rooted in our personal positions in the world. I can’t be interested in my project ‘for the sake of knowledge’ or ‘because it seems interesting’ or even because ‘theoretically it seems puzzling and I’m into theory’. All of those answers are still met with eyes which say, “Yes, but there are many things which are interesting or could lead to new knowledge—what is it about THIS project that brought you to it?” It’s a bit like trying to answer why I like the colour green or what made me fall in love with my soon-to-be husband. Apparently, I keep giving answers about how tall he is and how he always offers to get me my sweater from upstairs even though I haven’t complained of being cold and, while nice, those are only surface answers. What is it about his soul, my life, our experiences that made an ‘us’? I always find that to be relatively unanswerable. ‘Relatively’ because I try to answer it—I trace my triumphs and losses, I overlay his onto mine, I attempt to draw out some explanatory trajectory of two unrelated paths which then meet—and I always feel, somewhere in the middle of this explanation, that I’m just drawing an impossible picture for people who insist they can see. And so it is with this project. Or so it has been up until now.
Today I sit and find myself staring at a possibility which could explain (to others) what it is about THIS project that made me fall in love with it—that drew me to it, that led me to dream it up, that drives me through all the confusion, self-doubt and joy it brings me.
This is a good day.
