Research Trip¶
Transfrontier - Angoustrine, Cerdagne, France
Mercè Rua & Johnatan Minchin
17-24th March 2024
Reflection¶
I started the trip with the idea of clarifying my doubts about my master’s research. I had been tackling the urban-rural theme for a whole trimester and this opportunity, for me, was the ideal opportunity to set myself a goal: to decide whether to pursue the topic and, if so, to investigate it from a non-urban point of view.
With hindsight, I failed to set such a firm and inflexible goal. I quickly saw how the Research Trip was designed for exploration, and not clear objectives from the start. The first two days, when we met the tree nursery, Maria Claire and did the excursion, were very enjoyable days but I lived with some concern that I was not “taking advantage academically”.
It was on the third day that I sat down with myself and started to think about the environment I was being given. At that moment it became very easy for me to let go of the firm objective I had set at the beginning and I started to think about the context in which I found myself. It was very useful to take a walk with Marius, to put myself in the physical and temporal situation of the context and to talk with my partner. It is always better to think out loud and accompanied in these cases. It also helped me to realize that I could not go out to the village to do “interviews”, because there were no people in the streets and I had limited time.
Finally, thanks to the invaluable help of Mercé, I managed to make a small step, something that the previous Sunday would have seemed small to me, at that moment it made sense. The visit and the conversation with Susanne was exciting for me, even a bit paralyzing. Thanks to her way of speaking, slow for me to understand, and her stories, I was able to analyze 33 minutes of audio over and over again.
I set out to select, from those 33 minutes, at least 2 moments that I thought were relevant to talk about the topic “borders”. So far I hadn’t thought about that topic but, once I had the content I was looking for, it was great to have some restraint from Mercé and the teachers. That helped me to treat Susanne’s stories with care and purpose.
My final presentation was very different from what I would have imagined at the beginning of the week, and now looking back, it could have taken many different forms. We had 5 days of freedom that I was able to use to transform into a small investigation of something very small but very real.