Tonight Judy Olsen presented in my research methods on what she calls “the ten questions.” Apparently originally deployed on PhD students at the School of Information and the University of Michigan, these ten questions are designed to structure your research and (apparently) make graduation day arrive sooner. While they do structure research into a certain type of academic work, I do like the narrative they create. Without delay, here they are:

1. What is the problem?
2. Who cares?
3. What have people done about it? Why is this not solved?
4. What am I going to do about it?
5. What am I REALLY going to do? (A.K.A., how are you operationalizing this?)
6. What will/did you find?
7. What does this mean?
8. Who cares?
9. Where are you going to publish this?
10. What are you going to do next?

I am not exactly how this might map on to my attempts to problematize identity (ahem), but I am curious to try. Hold on, this might be a bumpy ride…