In the second section, please sketch some answers to the following seven sets of questions. Note that you do not have to answer each part of every question. Instead, it is important to sketch an answer that makes sense to you for each of the seven issues below. 1) Purpose: What is the purpose or objective of your proposed research? Is your purpose one of exploration, description, explanation, prediction, understanding, or social justice? Why? 2) Objects: How do you understand the (ontological) nature of the objects or events that you wish to analyze? What would you consider the relevant ‘environment'? Who or what do you consider the significant 'agents' (human or otherwise) who set matters in motion in your research setting? 3) Domain: What is the domain of operation (spatial, temporal, and/or relational) for your objects of research, specifically in the context of your proposed project? In other words, what boundaries (scalar and temporal) are you setting up for yourself so to keep your project from encompassing the whole world? Are there any categorical exclusions? (For instance, you might choose to include certain local aspects of the social world as the focus of your research, but then you might still choose to exclude most elements of the natural environment such as birds at a window). 4) Relation: What do you believe is the best way to understand and engage the relationship between yourself (as the proposed researcher) and the objects, subjects, or people that you will be studying or collaborating with? In other words, will you take an 'objective' position, or a 'subjective' approach, or something else besides? 5) 6) 7) Audience: Who is your intended audience or knowledge-community? In what context, and for whom, are you developing research questions? Who are the people you would deem best positioned to evaluate and critique the results of your proposed research? Procedure: How will you operationalize the research process? Do you plan to follow what are thought to be the typical steps of a 'scientific' procedure, or do you plan to follow some of the more interpretive procedures outlined in environmental studies, in one of the post-positivist approaches in human geography, or in one of the post-reductionist approaches in physical geography? What is the overall architecture of your research and/or its general protocols? Evidence: What counts (epistemologically) as the most decisive evidence? Why is that kind of data considered more persuasive than other forms of evidence? Please keep your audience in mind (see #5 above). Note that you do not need to take an approach that is congruent with any of the major approaches in human geography. This is because the theoretical traditions in physical geography, environmental studies, and GIS look rather different, and because many students in this course likely identify with one of those fields. Note too that we will have only briefly touched on some hybrid human-nonhuman approaches, and that we will not have discussed other traditions (including, importantly, a pragmatist tradition that often draws on mixed-methods - both quantitative and qualitative - in ways that are appear to be useful to support a given objective, yet may seem less than theoretically consistent; the pragmatist approach has become increasingly popular over the last decade or two). The bottom line is that, for this exercise and for your proposal, you do not need to identify with any of the named 'approaches' that have been covered in the readings and lectures in ENV/GEG4104 over the last four weeks. Once you have addressed the six questions above, please draft a budget. This should take the form of a table, followed by a brief (75-100 word) explanatory paragraph. Again, the research-related costs of your project cannot total more than $8,000. This sets a hard limit on the sorts of research projects that you can propose (e.g. any year-long studies in Antarctica are out of the question). Research costs can include the cost of travel, equipment, hired interpreters, honorarium and/or food for participants in the study, and the like. Your own salary is not included: for the purposes of this (imaginary) funding competition, it is presumed that your time will be voluntary and your costs of living (lodging, meals, utilities) will be self-financed (possibly with full- or part-time work). Please keep the conditions of the imagined grant possibility in mind. Yours is to be a grant proposal to fund some original research, even though there is no actual grant to be allotted at the end of the term. Imagine that the competition is tough: there are a lot of other researchers who are looking for funds, and there's not much money to go around. That means your polished research proposal will need to meet two parameters. Both of them limit what you can actually do. First, first, you will need to design and propose a research project that generates original results within 12 months based on work that you, and you alone, can do on a volunteer basis. Second, you will need to design and propose a research project where all research-related costs do not exceed $8,000. That will be the upper limit, but of course proposals with even smaller budgets are more than welcome. All this means that you will need to be thinking about how to answer your specific research question(s) with some methods and forms of analysis that are persuasive, practical, and cost-effective - which are standards that often take you in opposite and conflicting directions (for instance, surveys that are conducted online are usually cheap, but not terribly persuasive due to their sampling problems). That is the sum of it. The bottom line is that, for Part D, you will need to write up: • The current title of your proposed research project • The latest revision of your specific research questions • Your thoughts about the nature of the six methodological components of your proposed project: its purpose, the objects of analysis, relations, audience, procedure, and evidence Your budget, in the form of a table • A brief explanatory paragraph that justifies the research-related expenses