Current Topic Explorations

This week's been quite busy with classes starting, but I've made some headway on settling in on a topic. The idea of starting with a blank canvas on which to craft a dissertation was initially daunting, but the more I thought about it, it's exciting to consider what I really want to study for the next two years. I loved the Hawaii topic, but it was much more designed around the GIS course than my actual research interests (although my interests are admittedly quite broad), and while the Lake Jackson idea was a nice extension of the Hawaii project, a key element that was missing was the comparative element. So, thinking about the basic framework of the "perfect" research project, I'd like a comparative study of a modern religious topic, preferably one that engages with issues of poetics, which has continued to be a neglected area in the geography of religion.

I've been ruminating on a number of possibilities, and I realized that while I feel confident in my knowledge of geographical theory, I have a hard time extending those theories to research ideas. As such, I'm currently reading Methods in Human Geography (edited by Flowerdew) to get an idea of how research projects are crafted and designed, and the various methodologies those projects can employ.

I'm also off to the library to pick up a few books on religion and emotion, to broaden my understanding of the poetics of religious experience.

After talking with one of my colleagues, and from my own brainstorming of what my research strengths and interests are, I've come up with a neat idea. What if I examine three different religious communities (one conservative, one moderate, and one more liberal) and explore how they use space. That is, how does the space, both inside and outside, of their house of worship reinforce religious ideas and ecourage emotional affects? How do the followers interact with and use the space? I think this has some real potential, but I certainly need to explore it further.

Last Week Before Fall Semester

I can't believe it, but the summer is almost over. In my attempt to get organized and to get started on my dissertation research, I thought I'd start a Blog to help keep track of my progress.

I'm broadly interested in the geography of religion, and while most of my previous research had focused on more modern comparative analysis, the (tentative) topic of my dissertation will be an in-depth case study of the Lake Jackson mounds. I'm excited that the site is in Tallahassee, which will allow me to do a great deal of fieldwork, but at the same time, I have a few concerns. Namely, I don't really know anything about Native American religion. Most of my undergraduate research was on more modern religious practices including Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity (with a focus on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.) So, the prospect of examining ancient Native American religious practices is a bit out of my comfort zone. Additionally, I know of at least one student who examined a similar topic, but who focused much more on issues of preservation and maintenance, so I want to avoid overlapping as much as possible.

This brings me to my next issue: what is it exactly that I want to examine? There's been a continued call for examining the politics of management and maintenance of sacred sites, but to be honest I don't find such examinations particularly interesting. Obviously, I'll have to engage this discussion to be able to paint a complete picture of the site, but I'm much more interested in the poetics of religious experience as well as the culture/landscape dialectic. Plus, I don't want to see my project get so broad that it becomes unmanageable, so I feel I really need to hone in on a few good research questions.

As far as the issue of poetics, I want to examine both the historical and modern day affective quality of the site. On the culture/landscape issue, I want to uncover how the Lake Jackson mounds reflected Native American views on landscape (both physical and cultural), how the creation of the site was influenced by the natural environment, and how it reinforced Native American geomentality.

It's daunting trying to set out on an entirely new topic, but I think that ultimately it's a do-able project, and it's something that's never been examined before from a geographic perspective. My long-term goal for the semester is to draft a dissertation proposal, and to do that, I need to create some research questions. To do that, however, I need to really understand the basic historical background of the site so I can determine what questions even need to be asked. So, I've picked up about a dozen books from the library on Native American spirituality and archaeology and I'm going to dive right in!