Rants…

I recorded rants during research. Those are basically my insights of myself when I’m researching the project.

Text: I mean this is crazy…I’ve never ever thought that I…would do a research project on fan-fiction of all things. I mean…I mean I’m a constant reader of fanfiction, I hesitated to be a writer of fan-fiction because it’s “unoriginal” but that’s…basically BS…and now I’m a researcher on a project of fan-fiction(against fanfiction stigma), and that’s crazy…

And…I’m guessing the change I want to make is that…it…well…autoethnographically to change myself, initially, to kinda break the hierarchy, and…to reduce the voices that starts the social stigma, and…there must be people like me…I mean…there must be people like me…

Text: I think the reason that it took me such a long time to find the topic that I like was because I was used to doing the 2nd fave thing on the list, I was used to letting the world push me to not do sth that I was passionate about. and…

Text: And…honest to God…this course had pushed me to a point that…I had to take a leap of faith, to actually do the thing that I wanted to do, to not…I mean…to not basically “play safe” by choosing a topic that I thought suited the needs of the power dynamic or sth like that.

Text: I’ll be completely completely honest…I only started reading secondary research for the sake of digging deeper, for the sake of being actually curious NOW. And what I had done before was basically doing research for (the sake of) doing research and doing research for school. I didn’t really know why I was doing it. I did it as an assignment. And I think I can honestly say that I’m quite hooked…which in itself is quite weird…

Reflection: I now know that I came to the UK to untie some deep psychological knots. I would never be able to untie those knots, not even be able to communicate them in a clear and succinct way, if it wasn’t for this course. During independent study I felt those knots slowly loosen. To be quite frank, it was a painful process. I constantly felt like I was wasting time. But I managed to push and expand my project during the limited time in August, contacted 2 experts, attempted to contact multiple stakeholders, tripped, failed, and formed a plan for the project to continue to carry out in September.

I was very frustrated because the project was pushing quite slowly, much slower than I had anticipated, and the interventions I designed and carried out did not provide strong evidence to my research question. But I had learned to accept that I had a much slower thinking process than I would have liked, and my adaptability was slow as well. I conducted interventions not just for the project alone, but also to practice my courage. I could feel the plan for the project getting more and more solid as I progressed through the unit nevertheless.

I could make great visuals but I constantly trip over the logic. Like why I am conducting this intervention, simply for homework? How can I fine-tune it so that it pushes the project? It is supposed to be an experiment but I don’t seem to have the braincells to design an adaquate enough experiment to form evidence of the change…

It’s very, very hard for me to apply academic methodologies to action research…but without it I’m as good as shooting in the dark, and I did spend several weeks of independent study shooting int the dark until I found adequate means of absorbing research in my own way…not just in text, but in different media. Video essays on YouTube, Instagram shorts, listening to fans rant on Reddit and Instagram and other places…Slowly making links and using methodology(mostly on Saunders Research Onion) as a guide for my action research.