Week 4? (Aden)

 Hello everyone, 

I think that I have decided on a research question. Please let me know if you have any recommendations. My research question will be:

How do museums incorporate diasporic memory into Museum exhibits? I will approach this question from the Moroccan Jewish perspective. My hypothesis is that the Moroccan diasporic memory will be have many similarities to the realities of Jewish life in Morocco. However, there will also be significant differences, namely that Moroccans who emigrated from Morocco will remember life in Morocco through rose coloured glasses, especially with regard to anti-semitism. 

I would like to incorporate a study through either a formal or informal interview process that will track the things that Moroccan Jews living in Toronto believe are the most important part of history and culture to preserve. I think that an informal interview would be an easier way to do this as I have experience conducting interviews with clients. I am a little worried that this process will not provide rigorous enough results that can be properly analyzed (Knight). It is comforting, however, that Knight states that qualitative data analysis will not be strictly objective. I think it is fun and interesting that I will be able to analyze the data and come to my own conclusions. It is also interesting that the interviews can be used for other studies because there are many possible interpretations of an interview process (Knight). 

Please let me know if you guys have any recommendations for my research question, type of study and direction I should take in the next week before the next assignment is due. 

Best,

Aden

Comments

  1. ErinaOctober 14, 2020 at 4:43 PM

    I think you have a great research question. Have you thought about how you will decide on who to interview? I can see the younger generation having different ideas and views regarding what history/culture is important compared to their older counterparts. I am not sure if gender will be an important factor here as well.

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  2. AdenNovember 4, 2020 at 9:35 AM

    Hi Erina,

    Thank you so much for this insight. I think it is a really interesting question. Different generations of immigrants have different perspectives on these issues. One of the issues I have encountered in crafting my research project is that it is difficult to narrow the research down to one project that is suitable for the scope and time limits of a Master's thesis. This seems specifically to be an issue in qualitative research where the data can lead to lengthy inquiries with many possible interpretations (Knight, 2002). I also think that Knight offers a useful tip in how to make sure qualitative research does not get too unwieldy. Knight says that the research should be focused and specifically tailored to answer one question. Without doing specific tailoring, I think that my research could quickly get out of hand because there are so many questions about Moroccan Jewish life I would like to answer.

    To answer your question, I think that gender and age would both play a role in memory. Gender specifically I will need to account for in my study because I suspect there will be differences between genders. I think that age is a really interesting topic that I would love to do more research on in the future but is probably outside the scope of this research project.

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