budding scholar

A blistering afternoon, where a wall of heat hit me as I walked out of the parking garage toward the library. Vast blue skies. Sticky behind my knees and down my back. Luckily it’s Friday, so I found a spot to work in the crowded Alcazar study room. A far cry from Grad Services at Berkeley, with it’s open tables, easy plugs for the computer, and my study buddies. But there’s some charm to being here too, surrounded by Spanish young people preparing for September exams, and it’s quiet, and away from the distractions of my in-laws, so it works.

Am working on editing a book that was a colleague’s dissertation, and it has me thinking a lot about how difficult it is to do good research. My adviser often talks about how challenging it is to connect theory with data, but until I started to try and do it myself, and critique how well others did it, I didn’t see the full picture of what she was saying. Because while any piece of research broadly relates to and touches on a lot of different areas, the possibilities of one study to really show evidence for something are actually quite narrow. So oftentimes books in particular claim to be addressing a broad swath of issues, many of which are unmeasurable by the methods in the study.

The challenge is to balance the philosophical and theoretical questions the study’s topic broadly raises with the conclusions drawn based upon the research itself. Complicated to do well. Even writing this here, I’m thinking to myself–How will I do this?

This is just one challenge of my dissertation, as I work to revise my proposal and begin my study. Critiquing how this professor has done it is relatively easy. Doing it well myself is much more difficult.

What’s your experience balancing these things?

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And as an aside, if you need a moment to be filled with love for your country (as in the Estados Unidos de America), look through this art project. Or if you’re interested in immigration. Or if you just want to be inspired to make creative and beautiful things.

For my Language and Immigration Reading Group today we talked about the book “Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration” by Richard Alba and Victor Nee. The scholarship in the book inspires us toward being better scholars ourselves, and our conversation pushes my intellectual borders more than many other experiences at Berkeley so far.

What would it look like to apply the ideas about assimilation and social integration to education? How might the (sociological) theory in the book be a tool for studying what happens to immigrants in schools? How can studying schools relate to the broader ideas Alba and Nee present? In the real world, people still expect immigrants to assimilate in the old way, adjusting to the dominant culture. In Spain, right now, people don’t want or expect their own culture to change as a result of immigration. In fact, they are resentful of immigrants’ efforts to change schools to incorporate their own cultures. But change of the receiving culture is a fact of migration.

How can these broad theoretical interests and basic questions about the problem of integration in societies with large numbers of immigrants be fashioned into a set of research questions based in education?

Just read an article from the Berkeley NewsCenter covering the immigration one-day conference I attended a couple of weeks ago. Irene Bloemraad, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, was interviewed for the article. Several other professors are mentioned who might be worth me meeting and learning more about, including Sarah Song and Taeku Lee from political science, Cybelle Fox from sociology, and Leti Volpp from the law school.

No one mentioned from education, unfortunately. Is no one at the GSE doing work on immigration and connected with the rest of campus?