Research and the Polis

Photo Credit: Sara Bell

Last autumn, I was about to fall off of the stepping stool in the Avery Library stacks when I found the report. Titled Morningside Heights: A Sketch Plan, the slim volume from 1958 detailed the then-confidential neighborhood strategy of Morningside Heights, Inc., a coalition of local educational and religious institutions known today as the Morningside Area Alliance, or the MAA. I was doing research for a feature in The Eye, Spectator’s magazine, on the history of housing activists’ relationship to institutions in Morningside Heights.

I wouldn’t have qualified my work at the time as research in the same way that I discuss research for a class, but it was, really, just with different stakes. On the one hand, I was looking to create a theory on a very small scale, rooted in a series of immediately local, fairly-recent events: this was not meant to be, for instance, a case study to support some larger theory of town-gown relationships in New York City. Plus, the research didn’t feel ivory-tower in the same way that more academic research does because it didn’t have some sort of official scholarly impetus: it was just a question that I had about the neighborhood, that I thought was worth discussing in a public forum.

On the other hand, my reporting was rooted in a much older and larger question, with more immediate consequences than many academic debates. How does a polis work? How do we shape a polis for the kind of community we’d like to live in? It was the same question that we had considered in the first class of Contemporary Civilizations a few weeks prior, rendered hyper-specific. Good investigative reporting requires critical analysis and careful research: no question I had about the history of the neighborhood had a simple or easily-interpreted answer, just as no book of the Republic had left my class with a straightforward conclusion. The Core likes to sneak up on you in this way, I find, and it ended up directly shaping the questions I was able to pose for Morningside Heights today: it helped me have a tangible impact on my own polis.

I’d propose that neither that smallness of scope nor that immediacy of consequence pulls my work away from the kind of research we describe in academic settings; if anything, it demonstrates the blurriness of those boundaries, and the pedestal that we might put research on unintentionally as some higher—i.e. more remote—form of thinking. Of course, research has rules and methodologies, but so does journalism and other forms of investigation, be it about a text, an idea or a community. It took that classic moment of college student glory—finding the right book!—to make me realize that my distinction between curiosity and research hadn’t been founded on an intellectual dichotomy but rather on a sort of distinction in status, and realizing that made me more self-assured in the capital-R Research that I later ended up undertaking for my courses. Asking a question that had little to do with my academic field, and instead much more to do with my day-to-day experience, ended up helping me gain my footing, stepping stools aside.

 

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