I met with my mentor on February 1, 2018 for thirty minutes to discuss the feedback I received during a collective advising session in class. A panel of professors from the School of International Service heard me present my research and gave me recommendations for my project. For example, one professor suggested I do a comparative study between countries in Africa and Europe such as Germany and Ethiopia and how they receive refugees, so I plan on researching comparative studies literature in the databases. My mentor recommended I see the International Studies research librarian to understand how to achieve full exposure to this discourse.

I asked Dr. Shinko if I could use a burden-sharing statistic as the concrete start for my discourse analysis, and she warned me that I would have to prove that the statistic is accepted as contextual backdrop. I would also have to consider how aware countries are of the burden-sharing statistic. To analyze the discourse of countries where I don’t speak the language, Dr. Shinko reminded me that I will have to acknowledge an immediate limitation of my project which is that I will be relying on translations. However, enough exposure should ensure accuracy.

Ultimately, I have two potential pathways with my burden-sharing analysis. I could do a normative analysis by defining what burden-sharing of Syrian refugees is and what proper burden-sharing looks like in order to analyze which countries are doing it. On the other hand, I could research how countries are using or abusing burden-sharing discourse. However, before I make this decision, I need to continue my exposure to literature and discourse to discover who’s mostly using this discourse and how they are saying it? Are elites using burden-sharing discourse? If so, which ones?