What better icebreaker for a research logbook than a meta explanation on the logbook itself! We think of this journal as a space where we’ll try to keep record of the journey of the LGBT+ Equality Politics project and its team so that if you pick it up some months from now, you’ll be able to see what practical and academic routes we went down.
Our project abides as much as possible by an open science principle. Open science can mean many things, but the simplest most essential definition that we give ourselves is ‘making as much of the research process and results as public and easily accessible as possible, as soon as possible’. Few weeks after the project kick-off meeting, Massimo and Francesco met several times throughout the month of March to flesh out what “open science” would mean to us, in other words how to make it work practically and make it compatible with the way we are going to function as a team, with our time and energy, and within the limits that academia sometimes dictates. This research logbook is one of the tools we found that we think can make ‘open science’ resonate with our aspirations for this project. Academic work can often seem like a black box: we only see the result in the form of papers, seminars, books, but we rarely know what the process to get there looks like. And this is so rooted that we might even actively avoid disclosing parts of that process either because we consider that we have something to gain from keeping information and pieces of analysis from others or because we feel that it is inappropriate to talk about the sometimes bumpy and exhausting sometimes joyful and rewarding process of doing academic research.
While you’ll get to see the theoretical results of our research in both academic formats (e.g. papers and conferences) and in more accessible formats (our podcast Pride & Politics), we see the research logbook as an occasion to be open on our work process, to share the doubts we have, the difficulties we go through both academically and practically… basically how the sausage gets made!
The project has just started, much is getting done already… come follow our journey in our next logbook entries!
