Session 02: Sketching Ideas

Welcome back!

Welcome! Today we’re going to get into groups to talk about our ideas and questions. It’s going to be an open ended session where we can take time to think freely about the capstone — without any pressure — and to start coming up with ideas.

I’ll put you into small groups first of all, and give you ½ hour to talk about:

1. Your ideas — both the ones that seem quite wild, and the ones that seem safer
2. The problems that you anticipate in following up on these ideas
3. Any challenges that you anticipate in carrying out this project
4. Any questions you have about the capstone course as a whole.

Please make notes as you talk, and we can come back to discuss in the main group. In each group, please appoint one spokesperson to feed back to the main group.

In the second half, I may set some writing tasks, or some thinking tasks, to get us started. But the main aim of today’s session is to hear from you.

Some ideas from the group (anonymised)

01

• Civic engagement → informal special needs / PWID education / special needs. 4 states Bago, Shan State, Yangon, Mandalay
• Creative project → existentialism / reflective journalling.
• Creative project in video?

02

• Questions of Sino-Burmese identity
• Maybe a documentary? But how to get the skills?
• Research/creative project
• Private higher education in Myanmar

03

• Hledan/Yangon, sex education for street children / homeless children through creative arts education
• Civic engagement / creative project (or both? Can it be both?)
• Questions about curriculum design

04

• Academic paper (strategic decision → wanting to go on to continue in academia)
• Feminist philosophy / personal perspectives
• Questions about ways of writing (autoethnography? )

05

• Creative / civic engagement project
• Economy of elephant foot yam cultivation (good connections with people working on farming this crop)
• Risk of diarrhoea / public health, and small businesses
• Chin state

06

• Young people who have grown up in refugee camps
• Education
• Scholarships / transnational movement

Some feedback

• Think about the scope of your project — don’t make it too big and ambitious. You only have 5000–7000 words (if it is a fully written project)
• What are the projects that you admire, that you see as exemplary, or that you would like to emulate?
• What different kinds of outcome could this project have?
• Where does it sit in terms of the rubric?

What’s Next

It may take time to formulate your ideas, and that’s okay. We don’t expect you to have a fully-formed project in the first weeks of the course. Remember to fill in your research diary by the end of the week, and I’ll respond early next week. Then we’re going to look at thinking through research questions, shaping projects, and the mechanics of actually doing research.

For next week, bring the following:

1. A possible title for your project
2. A two or three sentence summary of what the project involves
3. One or two examples of projects that you admire, or that you think are worth emulating! (They may not be directly related to your own capstone).