Your topic should facilitate a critical approach that integrates some of the theories covered in your course.
Your research topic may be born through different channels:
Your research question will be related to your topic. This question usually answers a matter that has not been covered by previous scholarship.
Developing Research Questions: Your Purpose
Consider where your questions will lead you. Will your questions:
Background sources are beneficial at the beginning stages of your research process. Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and even Wikipedia are traditional background sources that we usually do not cite in our final project. These sources will give us ideas for research topics, keywords and even provide further information that may be useful.
My sample topic: Poor communities activism against the slow violence to the environment
Question: How does the resistance of poor communities propel change against slow-moving environmental damage?
Keywords and related terms are those words and phrases that are related to the topic of your research. These terms may be synonymous with a word or a related term. We use keywords to enhance our searches and gather as much scholarship as we can in relation to a topic.
Look at the example below and see how these words are related to my topic:
My topic: Poor communities activism against slow violence to the environment
Keywords: | Related terms |
activism | advocacy, involvement, boycotting, championing; environmental justice; ecocriticism; environmentalism; environmental change |
activists | Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wangari Maathai, Njabulo Ndebele, Arundhati Roy, Indra Sinha, Abdelrahman Munif, Rob Nixon |
Location | global south; transnational perspective |
Environment | habitat, territory, environs, wildlife, nature, Mother Nature, climate, ecosystems, environmentalism of the poor; |
Issues | unsustainable consumer appetites; slow-moving environmental damage, climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, environmental aftermath of war, environmental crises, the vulnerability of ecosystems; the poor, disempowered; involuntarily displaced, social conflicts due to life-sustaining conditions; international oil and chemical companies, the dam industry, wildlife tourism, agri-business, American military cause long-term environmental damage that undermines the health and livelihoods of peoples deemed disposable. |
Who does drive the problem? | military, civilian, and corporate elites |
Boolean operators help you connect, expand or exclude your searches.
Ken Saro-Wiwa AND environmental exploitation OR dissent OR modern African struggle
environment* AND global south AND activism
ecosystems AND global south AND poor
"environmentalism of the poor" AND "environmental justice" AND Indigenous"
"environmentalism of the poor" AND environmental economics NOT India
"slow violence" AND environment AND activi*
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