First couple weeks reflection

Hello everyone,

I have begun my preliminary research though I will admit it has not been super in-depth yet. I have begun to narrow down my search by finding a few articles and learning the language of what I am looking to research. There are a few broad topics that seem interesting and will more directly relate to my research topic. 

Some of the general topics that I would like to look at and some questions I would like to answer include:

How do we preserve tradition and memory of a diasporic community that has little possibility of returning to their place of origin?

How do we tell the story and history of a community like the Moroccan Jewish community that is both a religion and an ethnicity? 

How important is it to integrate softer information such as experiences, emotions and memories into a museum exhibit about Moroccan Jews?

In designing musuems, how do we integrate these experiences along with the hard historical and social information?

These are a few of the questions I have come up with so far and I am looking forward to delving deeper into the topics in the coming couple of weeks. I would definitely like to take the advice of the readings from this week and speak with a librarian who could help narrow my searches and point me toward a few rabbit holes (Luker). 

Aden

Comments

  1. ErinaSeptember 26, 2020 at 6:33 PM

    All of the questions you mention here look interesting. I think your insights from your research will prove useful for other groups living in diaspora around the world as well. I am particularly interested to see how you tackle the challenge of telling the story of a community where religion plays a large role in identity formation. Do you think you will be looking at different types of primary sources for your research in addition to secondary sources?

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  2. KaitlinSeptember 30, 2020 at 2:38 PM

    Hi Aden,

    It looks like you have a wide variety of fascinating research topics to focus on. Specifically, the topic of storytelling of the Moroccan Jewish community may be well suited to more qualitative research methods using a purposive non probability sampling strategy. One thing I am wondering is, have you considered narrowing the scope of your research? At the moment, the topics appear quite broad (which is a great place to choose topics), is there an area you are thinking of focusing in on?

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  3. AdenNovember 5, 2020 at 1:06 PM

    Hi Erina,

    I definitely hope to do a historical analysis as well. This would include some form of source comparison. I actually really enjoy examining primary sources, it is one of the things I enjoy most about studying history. I want to both contribute to the database on primary sources that already exists and to study analyze and compare the sources to sources that already exists documenting the Moroccan Jewish experience. This is one of the parts of my research project that is really exciting. I hope that it also acts as a hook for the research. The comparisons between existing sources and the sources I gather will be interesting.

    Aden

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