Research as Reimagining

2019 Morningside Lights: Island procession on College Walk. Photo Credit: Isabel Wong.

I attended my first thesis presentation sitting on the couch. The university had sent many of us home in March. Now it was May. Instead of facing the blank page, commencing battle with my final papers, I opened Zoom, settled into the cushions. A couple weeks prior, I had decided to conduct thesis research, enrolling in Senior Seminar. Uncertainty is an unending prickle though, and I hoped the presentations would reassure me.

Instead, I was mostly surprised. While what I understood as academically acceptable to study widened, the expected way to present narrowed. I had imagined passionate, ringing voices. Storytellers revealing findings and endings, but also knots and confusion, sudden potholes that sent them flying. A big, conclusive finale, but only after recounting the collecting and funneling and sanding, the bits of grouse the stories stewed in, whose richness, weeks later, would continue to tug at my stomach.

Such imaginings, I recognize, are naïve and grandiose, particularly during a pandemic. Yet the pandemic had fueled them. Despite affecting every presenter, only one acknowledged its presence. Everyone defined terminology, showcased analytical lenses, summarized conclusions. The presentations felt rigid, structured, the potential for stumbling written out of existence, each presenter reading from a script.

Perhaps the pandemic hadn’t altered anyone’s research, but other encounters must have. Each day wakes with the potential to change one’s viewpoint. Conversations cause backtracking, new archival material can push one ahead. So much of research, I’ve come to believe, is captured in the process’s tensions and turns, yet the presenters had edited out such twists.

The Zoom call ended, as did, eventually, my assumption that everything would return to “normal” by my senior year. Even without a research topic, I am aware of once smooth roads turned rocky. NYC’s resources are no longer a subway ride away, rare books and manuscripts no longer up the stairs. Printing pages of articles, outlines, drafts will occur at my expense.

I recognize the loss of undergraduate research resources is a privileged disappointment to hold, particularly now. With cases and inequality continuing to rise, we must follow lifesaving measures. While I can accept regulations, wear a mask, keep my distance, making peace with what I had expected and dreamed of, but must now let go of, is harder.

After receiving President Bollinger’s reopening email, I asked my advisor about taking a semester off, talked with friends about their plans, discussed with my parents staying on the West Coast with my grandfather. I re-read emails, scoured policies, searched through FAQs, then scheduled more conferences, called friends again, took a finer-toothed comb to the emails. And with each search, each consultation, call, and question, I was forced to reimagine. To visualize myself graduating later or attending classes zero, three, six time zones away. Each question led me to a different future, allowed for and closed off different possibilities.

Through this process of searching and re-searching, I realized that all this research I was doing was also an exercise in reimagining. That research is reimagining. Not a creation entirely from scratch, but rather a shift in form. The taking of what exists, of what is or did happen, and reimagining it on paper or in a presentation or through a play.

When I decided to pursue thesis research, I said I would let questions lead the way. To do so is to embrace uncertainty and let go of past paths, the tendency and desire to settle into reassurances. I must make room for the unknown, and in that wide, open space, reimagine. Each datum, interview, text holds many possibilities, and it is the researcher’s responsibility to follow each one through. Imagining where each will lead requires one to question what others have explained away and taken for granted, propels one to dig up root causes and examine them for assumptions. Sometimes dirt gives way to mud, but other times these exertions bear fruit, become Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, help reimagine a more inclusive, representative Core.

If research is truly a process, not simply a product, then perhaps our presentation of it should include the grueling hike, not just the end view. We can learn what kind of father, husband, king, and man Odysseus is from a single epithet, or we can learn who he is through his travels and trials. Each decision he makes reflects on his character, alters the course of his journey. Research is its own odyssey, each choice marking adventure. Tell me a story of reimaginings.

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