I met with Dr. Field on February 2, 2018, from 2:30 to about 3:05, so approximately 35 minutes. Our conversation was mainly about my interpretation of comments I received from the collective advising workshop that day. The problems that I am particularly focused on are the researchability of my current project and the broader methodological decisions I have made. Both of those go hand-in-hand, of course, and I feel like either my methodological choices need of change to accommodate my research question or my research question to accommodate my methodology. Perhaps I could get some insight into Chinese government decision-making for protests that took place at least a decade ago (such as those of 2005 and 1999) from retrospective leaks and memoirs, but getting insight to the black box of decision-making for a protest that took place less than a year ago is challenging, if not impossible.
This was probably the main reason for the skepticism my project received at the workshop, and the solutions with which I approached Dr. Field were that I first banish the term “decision-making” from my vocabulary because even Jessica Chen Weiss, a scholar with much more experience and resources than are available to me, acknowledges the difficulty of illumination decision-making is a regime as opaque as that of China.(1) Also, I am considering completely changing my research question so that instead of inquiring about decision-making, I am asking about why China obtained diplomatic concessions in some cases, but not in others. This would completely change my research question and make two-thirds of my literature review superfluous. Dr. Field suggested that I not become too methodologically attached so early in the process of actual research and that I talk to my mentor about my dilemma. She also suggested that I look at cases where protests got suppressed. This very problematic, though, as it makes the dependent variable very difficult to detect (how does one find protests that never happened). Overall, though, I think that my methodological dilemma (of using protest as either a dependent or independent variable) is my largest problem and one that I will be considering moving forward.
(1) Jessica Chen Weiss. Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014: 31.