After quite a while of struggling with the abundance of theories, questions and concepts, I finally submitted my proposal to my research school. A true relief, but it also poses a brand new question: what am I going to do?
Again, as it turns out, the possibilities are abundant. After some random exploring and discussions with fellow PhD candidates I’ve now come up with the idea of using mental maps (or cognitive maps, or concept maps, or whatever you want to call them). Mental maps can be used for many different types of research, and so far I’ve come across literature varying from exercises that try to map how people (children appear to particularly interesting for this) perceive cities, or the use of mental maps to figure out the functioning of brains. This last strand of mental map use made me think of this Muse song:
I’m not quite sure what this means about the functioning of my brain though… I’m not going to use mental maps in my interviews for doing psychological studies or neuro-focussed cognitive studies. I’m going to use these maps as a tool to figure out how, to speak with Feyerabend, people make abstractions of the richness that surround them. Some call this richness complexity, or wickedness, or even super-wickedness, other argue, and I agree, we should stop using the wicked word alltogether:
“So let’s also agree to stop using the term “wicked problems”. If everything becomes “wicked” or “super-wicked”, then everyone will just give up. We need to work at our democracy, to encourage bright young people – in research and in government – to be filled with enthusiasm for spending their lives working on the big difficult problems of the time”.
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