What do academics, entrepreneurs, and artists have in common? To me the answer is that they can choose what to do rather than being told what to do. Certainly their choices must be 'sellable' to someone else, but they have much more freedom than almost any other profession to follow their own instincts and their own interests. Entrepreneurs and artists have to sell a product, an idea or an experience. Academics need to sell their ideas for research to funding bodies or organisations, and their written outputs to publishers and journals. But the freedom to choose what to work on, within those constraints, is very considerable, and a real privilege: we are in my view one of the luckiest of professions, to have that choice. And the choice is sometimes driven by serendipity rather than strategy.
Exactly a week ago I visited a village in Normandy where, many years ago, my own research career took a new turn. How did this happen?
On the day I arrived to take up my lectureship in Sheffield a senior colleague gave me the news that I would be accompanying him to Normandy on a field class the following Easter. He had been there over the summer and identified the ideal area, and a hotel that could put up a student group. (I discovered later that one of the prime factors in the choice had been the presence in a nearby village of an outstanding restaurant.) I knew that taking a group of students to do field work in rural France was going to be a challenge for me. For a start, my doctoral research had been carried out in Switzerland and Italy, on the impacts of tourism on rural communities, and I knew little about conditions in rural France - or about the data sets that might enable students to create projects there. Secondly, with the exception of one spa town, there was no tourism in the area of Normandy we were going to, so it would not be possible to use the field class to test any of the ideas I had generated in my doctorate. Thirdly, my French was much rustier than either my German or my Italian - both of which languages I had been using much more recently.
However, another doctoral student who inhabited the same workroom as me in Oxford had been writing his thesis on population change in the Massif Central of France, and I had picked up ideas on possible lines of enquiry for other areas of rural France. The field class was a tolerable success, and over the next couple of years (and without the senior colleague accompanying me) I developed it into quite an intense investigation of rural depopulation in an impoverished agricultural region.
And at the same time my own research appetites were whetted. I got into the literature on rural France; I explored rural depopulation more generally; I learned about French data sources; I worked on my French. And my first post-doctoral research theme emerged - rural population change.
Could I 'sell' that interest? Well, it proved very sellable indeed at a period before second home developments, rural commuting to cities, or rural holidays had transformed the fortunes of poorer rural regions. I secured funding from the forerunner of today's Economic and Social Research Council, and from the British Academy; a research team at the University of Caen learned what I was doing and invited me to join them, with their funding coming from French state research sources; local radio in the UK was interested in whether my findings in rural France would also hold true in areas such as the Peak District. And I got those all-important publications - at least three book chapters (one in French), and (more importantly) three articles in good journals.
I later moved on to other research interests - migration, the geography of languages, minority groups in cities - but in each case there has been an event or happening of some kind that has set off a change of direction in my enthusiasms. I owe a great deal to that colleague who had organised for me to lead a field class in Normandy with him. But returning there last week, I recognised that my interest in the area had not dissipated. There are new issues there, new patterns of change. Apart from going back to a beautiful area (and yes, the restaurants are still excellent - as is the cider, the calvados, the cream and so on), perhaps I will look up some of my old materials and data sets, and take up research to bring them up to date to analyse what has changed over the last 40 years or so, and take up visiting there again.
No comments:
Post a Comment