Embarking on the PhD journey: What to do first?
Having spent the majority of my adult life as a professional designer I am now embarking on a thoroughly different journey as a PhD student. This post describes the early days (week 1) and my attempts at structuring a literature review.
In professional practice I am an experienced design researcher and have planned and facilitated countless research projects. This has given me some structure to guide my research project, but not nearly enough. I am this week delving into methods and frameworks for reviewing the literature which will help me to gain a better and more defined pathway in these early stages.
In my application I phrased the key research question as
What participatory methods are appropriate for use in sustainable and just transitions in a regional Australian context?
This seemed like a reasonable question and scope. But then Paul Vittles wrote a Medium piece which asked a very simple question and I began to notice the limitations and assumptions built into my question. Paul asked:
“Why do we involve people in decisions?”
My first mistake was not interrogating why I think it is important for people to be involved in the decisions that affect them. Have people said this? Do I have evidence? Why do I think it’s important for people to participate? What assumptions are built into the desire to use participatory methods?
Then I began to ask myself about what could be called ‘authentic’ participation. What does ‘authentic’ mean? Who gets to decide what is authentic? What are the outcomes of authentic vs non-authentic? Is authenticity determined by the outcome itself (ie, it’s not authentic if it doesn’t achieve stated aims)?
The questions started to become broader and broader and I started to lose focus. And then in walked İdil Gaziulusoy and Carol Boyle—figuratively speaking. I had been reading quite a lot of Gaziulusoy’s work throughout my application, but this paper had been put on the backburner. The paper is titled ‘Proposing a heuristic reflective tool for reviewing literature in transdisciplinary research for sustainability’ and offers a model and heuristic tool for transdisciplinary researchers to deal with the complexity of working across disciplinary boundaries (as I could be with my research).
Their model (or is it a framework, tool, method? There’s a paper somewhere to read about that) is based on a 2005 model from Manfred Max-Neef which operates at four levels which describe the types of questions which must be asked in transdisciplinary research.
Gaziulusoy and Boyle use Max-Neef’s model to summarise the levels of knowledge required in transdisciplinary research—systems knowledge, target knowledge and transformation knowledge. Systems knowledge is that which describes the system to be changed. Target knowledge describes the desired position after transformation, and transformation knowledge describes the process of transformation itself.
The paper then offers a heuristic tool and a case study from a PhD to illustrate how the tool can be used to help researchers ‘limit the scope of reviewing and reporting of literature but also to organize and structure the overall research and thesis writing process’ (Gaziulusoy & Boyle, 2013).
The authors caution that the use of such a structured tool can reduce the likelihood of a serendipitous discovery and lock in knowledge to dominant frameworks. The strategies proposed are to first look very broadly so that fringe as well as dominant theories are considered. The second is to work on processes to expose oneself to theories outside of the research area (and my expertise). And finally, they suggest that a supervisory committee should be made up of people from different disciplines.
I had tried doing some knowledge mapping during the application but had not managed to create a map which helped me take any action nor see the relationships between theory and practice.
I started to build on this map after my first meeting with my supervisors. This is where I got to—there is a lot missing:
This map was based on the categories I had used in referencing software for my application. Those categories are:
Having read the Gaziulusoy and Boyle paper I am reviewing this mapping, starting with a version based on their case study. I will keep reviewing this and reading some papers to help me understand how the levels relate to my area of research.
It is still early days, but I am happy to have a framework (or is it a model) on which to base my literature review. Even happier that it involves İdil Gaziulusoy and Manfred Max-Neef.
REFERENCES
Gaziulusoy, I & Boyle, C. 2013, ‘Proposing a heuristic reflective tool for reviewing literature in transdisciplinary research for sustainability’, Journal of cleaner production, vol. 48, pp. 139–47.
Max-Neef, M.A., 2005, ‘Foundations of transdisciplinarity’,
Ecological Economics, 53 (1) (2005), pp. 5–16.
