Santosh Khadka: Research Profile

I do not have a long research history or experience. My schooling until undergraduate degree being from state funded institutions of a developing country with education system heavily influenced by traditional British lecture method, the pedagogy until then did not include much of research components and therefore did not provide me with the opportunity for research of virtually no kind. Almost all the courses were content-based and the kind/s of writing I produced were the responses to quizzes and sit-in exams which is to say that those writing products were not original ones but the regurgitation of what was read or recited as part of preparation for the periodical or annual exams. Couple of courses however were on research methods, taxonomy and techniques which acquainted me with some quantitative and qualitative research samples and also prepared me to go for my own research projects. As part of requirements for those courses, I conducted a couple of mini research projects too though those projects can not be called professional. Though not research-based my education until undergraduate had strong content focus and provided me, I should say, with preliminary research insights, as well as equipped me with necessary know-how of research processes and nuances to go forward for my own research projects.
Thus, my research practices began with masters degree for which I went to a US-model private university. Though degree was labeled as Masters in English, the courses offered were mostly interdisciplinary. I confronted the courses like Issues of globalization, Disability Studies, Spiritual Quest, Communicating Across Cultures, Discourses in Disciplines, Human Rights and Law together with score of others on literary genres. And important feature of these courses in the program from research point of view was that each course required the weekly production of term papers on various disciplinary and other related topics/issues culminating into seminar papers as well as final university sit-in exams. Here begins my research practices. Even for producing the term papers of moderate length, depending on the nature and emphasis of courses, I had to either conduct library research, scanning, skimming and exploring databases or indexes for articles or library stacks for pertinent textbooks or had to make field visit with set of questionnaires for interview or survey forms for data collection or making observations or doing scores of other things depending on what kind of information was required to make the research worthwhile or complete. These are, I know now are just prewriting steps. Drafting and editing would again take time and labor and often the stages overlapped. For instance, sometimes I had to go for field visit or locate new relevant sources in the midst of revision process. In short, even a short paper demanded a lot of research works on my part.
This is the story behind short research papers. The seminars papers and culminating Independent Study and Thesis are the places where I got involved into serious research works bringing to them the resources, skills, techniques and knowledge I had previously garnered from undergraduate research courses as well as other reference (research) guides. Again depending on the emphasis of the course, I had to resort to different research methods and methodologies to produce the seminar papers. Not all courses required seminar papers though. I now recall writing a research proposal for grant collaboratively (with a classmate) and conducting an empirical research for a collaborative seminar paper for a course in linguistics. It was a study into the language of an endangered tribe in eastern Nepal. We struggled a lot to prepare the proposal. There was no published literature on the topic of our selection. What we located in the libraries in Nepal and online are few passing references to that language and that too wrongly grouped, assigned or misrepresented. We could however track an unpublished dissertation on the socio-historical aspects of the tribe. That source served as the starting point for our research proposal. We began with the fact that there was not much literature and that ours was going to be the first study of its kind in the country. We won the grant from University grant commission. But the research part of it proved a real ordeal. We had to go to the community, interview people, record their responses to our set questionnaires though conversation was not predictable while also taking visuals. Data/information somehow ready, the hardest part of the project was to develop theoretical framework to analyze and interpret the data/information and thus develop a cohernet theory. We had visit the site number of times, had some educated members of the tribe come to the city and work with us. We treated those members respectfully in fact as co-authors of our research project as they were the major sources of information/data we used to make the research a success. Of even more importance were their stories and experiences and since there was no preceding study in that sense any data available on the topic of our inquiry, we had no choice but to rely fully on them for the raw materials. Since the project was titled as “Socio-linguistic” study of the tribe, we had later to go to disciplinary literature published in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, demography, geography, music and culture for theoretical insights to back up and validate our research findings. Here at this point for the first time I realized that research today is totally interdisciplinary no matter what the topic is. I also understood that empirical data-driven research has more stakes and pitfalls than a library research.
I had similar experience conducting a research on the literacy of visually challenged women. These doubly marginalized section of the society had many interesting and revealing stories to tell me and later the class and professor . But research did not end there. The blind by birth, blinded accidentally and partially blind had different stories of literacy to tell which complicated the research topic and made the easy conclusion really difficult. The collection of case studies was the easiest part in this research too. What was frustrating was again the theorizing part: making sense of and drawing generalized inferences from them. The risk involved is the fear of unsubstantiated findings or drawing forced conclusion. That is the reason I began and ended the research writing with limitation and the scope of the research at hand where I openly stated what the research covers and what it does not.
These are just some snapshots of my struggle with this enigmatic process called research. To be honest, I never know in advance my research methods and methodologies which is why I never write the methodology section in advance though research proposal requires of us to tentatively state the methods and methodologies even before the project starts.
My major research works (if they can be called) in Masters were in addition to ones discussed above the Independent Study and culminating thesis. But these both projects were not empirical or data-driven. Since I come from English background, the disciplinary fashion in Nepal was to blend the theory and textual/discourse analysis in such projects. English studies in Nepal being heavily informed and influenced by literary, linguistic and cultural theories, my works were also not exceptions. I had to dig the theoretical stuffs of postcolonial, postmodern, and cultural theories even before I was allowed to write the proposal. Only after my theoretical plane was all set did I write the proposal and conducted the research. I didn’t find that approach very rewarding though. What I did was to discuss and explore the major relevant theoretical insights from some pertinent theoretical schools and reflected, analysed and proved how those insights/concepts/trends operated in the text of my choice which is to say that my projects were thoroughly descriptive and analytical.
I should say it frankly that I learned very little from research practices in the school. My four years of professional life after graduation in Nepal and coming to US remained productive from research point of view. I got involved into an NGO, Human Rights protection/promotion and a dictionary project as well as part-time teaching job immediately after my graduation. Each of them provided me opportunity to research distinctly different field and areas. Given the length of the paper, what I can put here is that researching academically in the school and outside in the real life situations are two very different phenomena. Real life researches are more challenging, adventurous and rewarding too in the sense that we get the result or return of our work immediately. I have bitter experience of not being able to write a grant proposal with a university degree at my hand while working in the NGO. I have similar experience of government official being indifferent, cold and rather hostile to release information about human rights violations and impunity at the time of civil war in Nepal. Better not go to this part of the painful story.
Let me end with a positive note here. I had a very exciting and rewarding research and writing experience with a dictionary project funded by a publication in Nepal. I was appointed as an assistant editor among many others who worked collaboratively with senior professors and lexicographers of Nepal to prepare bilingual dictionaries. I worked in Nepali-English dictionary for two years with the duties of collecting and compiling Nepali / English words from various sources including the authentic Nepali/English dictionaries published thus far, research, field visit, newspapers, journals and other media publications and transmissions. Then translating those Nepali/ English words, phrases, idioms, proverbs and sayings into equivalent English/ Nepali words, phrases, idioms and proverbs. The translation could be literal, literary or figurative depending on the situation and sense. The effort however was to translate the Nepali /English into English/Nepali without the loss of the Nepali /English flavor. Then followed editing of the written content giving the translation precision and exactness and finally publishing the bilingual dictionaries. The productive and fun part of the project was that we had to go to the field: market places, schools, meeting points like restaurants, café or parks and records covertly whatever people spoke. This was all for the collection of new words coming into circulation. We similarly scanned daily newspapers, TV broadcasts and recently published books and articles in order to see the frequency of new words if any. We even visited some remote parts of the country where different variants/dialects of Nepali were spoken and collected hundreds of words. The experience was very enriching and enlightening. Fun part used to be over however when making those words dictionary entries with all the features and right translation. Fun part at the end is that the project is still in progress and first edition of text is being released next month.