Supervising Experiences of Difference –
How carefully working on the research question might help to reveal cultural-bound perspectives

 

Getting stuck in our own perspective is a risk for all who travel. For many years, our students at HyperWerk have been travelling and ever since then we were also challenged to supervise them while they were doing their research or project work abroad. Supervision in that sense provides some specialities which are taken up in several articles on this blog, all marked by the keyword supervision.

 

 

One important element is the preparation of the time abroad. Different dimension of preparation are described here. Crucial for the preparation is to identify the central research question the student wants to work on. Only if this question is clearly described, changes can become visible and can be discussed later on.

 

One of our former students, Manuel Wüst, went on a field research trip to visit scavengers (wastepickers) in the Philippines in his second year. At that time, he was fascinated by manual printing techniques. When planning his travel, he came up with the idea to organize silk screen printing workshops with the scavenger’s children. After discussing this with him, he realized that this might not be appropriate considering the daily struggle to survive that these people are facing. He reworked on his research question and finally left with a much more open-minded focus: What is the genuine creativity I can find in the life world of the scavengers? Out of this question emerged a wonderful project, based on observation rather than action.

 

That research questions change over the duration of a project is a common phenomenon. But the change might be linked to a cultural space visited or explored. It might reveal the student’s cultural perspective. This is an interesting opportunity to learn and lay open what we are not aware of.

 

In this post you find Manuel Wüst’s process and project described more in detail.