Research = Work?

So I was listening to Car Talk, the NPR show with the two old mechanics from the Boston area who take phone calls about car trouble.  They were talking to a woman from Palo Alto who was having problems with a noise in her tire.  Eventually, they asked her what she did for a living.  She answered, "I'm a graduate student."  Of course, they asked what she studied, and she responded, "Italian literature." They tried to make that into pleasant "small talk," and something came up about "at least you get to go to Italy."  She said, "Yes, for research," and one of the hosts said, "sounds like a lot of work."

My first thought was, "what the heck are you talking about?"

My second thought was, "you must not be someone who enjoys research."

I was putting myself in her place.  I was thinking about what it feels like, to finally dig into the topic to try to create your own original work, your own take on the issues that stir your field.  To step forward and assume the mantle of the professional scholar, diving into the topic to discover and explain something new.  An intellectual astronaut, as it were.  If you are the kind of person who is lucky enough to have found a field that you can be passionate about, this is a dream come true.  This is akin to meeting your childhood hero and getting his/her autograph and then sitting down for dinner with that person.  It's a chance to drive your dream car, go on a date with your dream girl/boy, sleep in your dream house, and so on.  It's a GOOD thing, not work.  It's a chance to play in the "big show," the audition for the lead on Broadway, and so on.  It's not a bad thing.  It's not work.

There's lots of ways to think about this.  I know that not everyone likes research, and not everyone gets a chance or a reason to conduct research on a topic that they love.  But it's the kind of skill that everyone needs and that everyone wants.  It might be work to do research for something you hate, but hopefully a graduate student is not someone who hates to do research.  Hopefully, it's the opposite.

My point is this: research doesn't have to be work.  It doesn't have to be painful and soul-crushing.

That's not to say that it isn't difficult or sometimes time-consuming or even expensive (like flying to Italy).  But my own research experience was not really work, or not always work.  True, there were a lot of difficult nights with piles of dense, seemingly irrelevant text to wade through.  But there were great moments and the pleasure of discovery.  There were times when I could make sense of things, and I could explain something new.  That's a great feeling.  I feel like I learned something and made something, and that has helped me in ways that are hard to explain sometimes.  Perhaps it's like the kid who can be successful in sports, so he/she feels more confident off the playing field because of success on it.  I don't know if that's adequate.  But research is a chance to make something new, building things from the knowledge and experience of others.  It's important now because of the vast opportunity to conduct research via the Internet and other electronic tools.

This is an ongoing concern, and I don't think I've adequately expressed it here.  I'm going to think about the research process and post again when I'm ready to try to explain it again.

OCTOBER SKY and coal

Well, I watched this movie because it came up in the library database attached to the keyword "coal."  It's not really about coal, though it's set in West Virginia in a "company town," and the main character and his father are coal miners (or, in the case of the main character, work as a coal miner for a few months).  It's about someone struggling against unlikely circumstances to be successful in a way that people don't expect or predict.  It - or the director, Joe Johnston - sets the film in West Virginia, but that's more because of the "true story" that it's based on than because of any inherent need in the film for that setting.  Homer's dad could have been a steel worker, a dock worker, a farmer, just about anything that could be dangerous or boring, and it would also work.

I think this movie is relevant to the conversation about coal, though, and sheds light on the situation of coal mining that would not otherwise be noticed.  It's a mainstream, large-scale release of a film by a major studio (Universal) with some top-name actors (Jake Gyllenhall, though he wasn't a superstar yet, Laura Dern, and Chris Cooper), and several parts of the movie take place inside a coal mine in what appears to be a realistic depiction.  It's not friendly to the coal-mining industry, but it's also not friendly to unions, either.  It's that ambiguity about the setting that really makes it an interesting study for this topic.  

Here's a link to the IMDB profile if you want to see more about the film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132477/.  

Briefly, the main character's father, John Hickam (played by Chris Cooper) is a site manager or foreman at a mine in West Virginia.  He's grumpy, favors his older, football-playing son, and distrusts his youngest son's strange habits.  Later in the movie, after struggling with his son to contain an interest in rocketry, he is injured in a mine accident and sent to the hospital.  Homer, the main character (Jake Gyllenhall) is forced to start working at the mine, dropping out of high school.  The father recuperates, and begins working at the mine alongside his son, but Homer is inspired to return to work on his rockets and leaves his father behind.  

Homer doesn't seem to mind the job so much, though it is clearly not a good fit for him.  There's an aura of sadness (slow music, a shot of Homer staring up into the night sky watching a satellite as he descends into the coal mine), but it's not clear if we should be sad because he doesn't belong there, or because no one does.  When the mine workers are on strike, the abusive father of one of Homer's friends takes a shot at John and misses - he seems to be aligned with the union, and the union doesn't look too good when men like that are mixed with it.  There are good friends and honest workers among the miners, but none seem to favor Homer until he enters the science fair and becomes a town favorite.  

At the end of the movie, we discover that John died of black lung disease about fifteen years after the events of the movie took place.  All of Homer's friends - and Homer - escaped coal mining, and that appears to be a good thing.  Clearly, people aren't supposed to want to be coal miners.  But Homer lionizes his father, in the end, and the movie seems to make his father into a kind of blue-collar hero.  Even though the father died of a work-related illness, he was well-suited to his position and became a hero through his work.  He was fulfilled in that job, and - we seem encouraged to think - many people can be happy as coal miners.  Even though not everyone wants to be a coal miner.  

So, to summarize this into a pithy little statement: people ought to be allowed to choose what they do with their lives.  There is honor in everything, from rocketry to coal mining.  Honor comes from finding where you belong, and sticking to it.  Something like that.  

Coal mining is just another job, and some people choose to do it, and do it well.  Unions are not part of this equation.  Neither, it seems, are corporations, really.  It's all about individual choice.  

TRAPPED by Marc Aronson

So, I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

One of the reasons that I pursued COAL as a topic is a book called Trapped by Marc Aronson.  I heard him speak at the NCTE conference, and I had already encountered his great book, Sugar Changed the World.  He spoke for a few minutes about the book, and mentioned some of the things the trapped miners said and did.  (I remember him talking about the one word that made the difference for the miners - the thing that saved all of their lives and kept them all from dying.  "Democracy."  They voted on everything.)

Of course, the funny part is this: the book is NOT about coal mining.  The people who were trapped in the San Jose Mine in northern Chile were mining COPPER, not COAL.

Oops.

Does this mean I need to change the topic?  I don't think so.  I think that the book and its ideas are still relevant, though perhaps less directly.  I think that the concepts of mining that I can take from this book, as well as comparisons to other mining disasters, are useful.  But it's funny, now, how this mistake in understanding (did he say that they were copper miners at the presentation?  If he had, or if I heard and remembered it, I might have chosen some other topic.)  helped me choose this topic.  I hope that the decision turns out to be lucky.

I suppose we'll find out soon.

Filmic Thinking? - Key Points of Film as Research

Coal Company thugs bullying a union family in Matewan

I think it's important to notice that video (especially long, narrative films like these, and most especially fictional representations of actual events, like Matewan) can seriously manipulate - even mislead - our thinking about an issue or an event.  There are a lot of ways to construe this story, and a lot of things that you can say about coal mining and its checkered history.  Fictional films always present events from a specific perspective (a particular camera angle), and that choice always affects the representation of events.  Who is in the center, for example, in the above image from the film Matewan?  The sheriff (the guy with the cigarette and the gun on his belt, played by David Straithairn) is in the center of the frame, alongside the slightly-off-center Coal Company bully, who is speaking and directing the removal of these people's belongings from a Coal Company house.  This frame puts these two men at the center of the action, which will turn out to help with the next step, which is when the sheriff stops this forced eviction.

But if you move the frame a little to the left, you shift the focus to the young man with the suspenders and blond hair.  He becomes an important character because of the way the coal company men mock him.  (What a great depiction of bullying in this movie - the scene where the two coal men are sitting at the dinner table with the kid, his mom, and his grandma, and making fun of his preaching, even pulling a gun on him.)  If you do that, the whole scene shifts to the effects it has on the townspeople.  Shift to the right, and focus on the stocky guy with the suit - who is the other Coal Company thug in the town at the moment - and you make this "sidekick" character suddenly important.  Is he conflicted about their tactics?  Is he seething with hatred and prejudice against "hillbillies"?

The most important question, really, is this: who's standing next to that guy?  Who is outside the frame?  Who is left out of the picture?  And, why does the director - or whoever is deciding what goes into the frame - choose to leave these people out?

As soon as you ask that question, you start to realize that the whole film is deliberately and carefully constructed from a huge assortment of film, and that every scene - every image - every moment reflects a conscious, purposeful decision.  Someone has a message to convey, and the images - their order, their content - even the sounds that go with them - represent an attempt to convey it.  Film is no accident.

Roll that up with an understanding of bias and perspective, and you start to think about how important a director (and whoever is helping the director edit the film) really is.

Watching a movie like Matewan as a kind of research is a lot like reading a novel about coal.  It's a made-up story from someone's point of view, really just meant to entertain.  Watching a documentary about the coal industry is different, but it still represents a carefully crafted message, delivered with a purpose.  It's easier to forget that manipulation with film.  It's easy to forget that someone is holding the camera, and that someone else is cutting and putting scenes together for the final product.  Someone is controlling what you see, and we must be careful that we don't forget that when we watch a movie.

Watching Documentaries = Research?

I think so.  I think that watching a nonfiction film - especially a credible one that uses the same (or similar) methodology as a reasonably good historian (although with a slightly political slant - which everyone has these days) - is a kind of research.  I'm not sure that I could publish this in Critical Inquiry with only film sources, but it's helping me understand the topic.  There was a nice use of music in this one, too, including a short interview at the beginning (and a clip at the end) of Kathy Mattea talking about her album, Coal.

Last night, I watched an older movie about unions in coal country (Matewan) and a documentary that was mostly about "mountaintop removal" or "mountaintop extraction."  (Even the term is contested.)  It was trying to be incendiary.  There was a lot of tension in the beginning and the end, but the middle kind of lost traction.

Here's a trailer for the movie Coal Country:

There's a site for the movie (careful, there's music that kicks in when you go there) - Coal Country Site.

I think one of the more interesting parts was the treatment of anti-coal activists.  People who are trying to fight the coal mining companies are getting threats, mistreatment, and the kind of thing that happened to Civil Rights activists in the South in the 60's (like, for example, standing in the woods next to a person's house, in the dark, at night, and yelling evil names at them - my favorite was "tree hugger" - as if trees don't deserve a good hug now and then).

The most significant problems with mountaintop mining, according to my "reading" of the film, are air and water pollution.  These huge explosions spread coal dust for miles, and it is affecting people's breathing and overall health.  Worse, perhaps, is the runoff from rain on exposed coal seams.  Toxic chemicals are entering the water supply through this process.  Other, perhaps less serious consequences of this process are the long-term change to the landscape (fewer mountains and valleys, a flattened landscape where companies try to re-grow the "overburden") and the subsequent carbon emissions from all of this coal being burned and used to make electricity.  Landscaping is a significant concern, but it doesn't have the same "bite" as people being poisoned.  Carbon emissions are also significant, but that's a much larger and more complex problem.

The other concern is the fact that mountaintop mining is a response to the dangerous conditions involved in older mining operations that involved underground mining.  Mountaintop mining is much safer for the workers (assuming they know how to handle the explosives).

Matewan

Watching this movie right now - starring a young Chris Cooper and a younger James Earl Jones.  About the coal industry in West Virginia in the 1920's.  Very violent stuff, very scary.  

Here's the IMDB profile on the film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093509/.

  

Here's a clip from youTube.  

It's surprisingly pro-union.  It makes me wonder: would a movie like this be made today?  Would John Sayles be able to get a big corporate movie studio to put this out?  

Pre-Writing - Thinking about Coal

So, I chose this topic for a couple of reasons:

1. It's a key energy source in an uncertain energy future.  
2. It's a hot-button political issue, exploited by both Democrats and Republicans because of its strong links to the "rust-belt" swing states, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
3. It is plentiful in the United States.
4. It has played an important part in American history.
5. It is local - I'm from Ohio, a reasonably big coal state, or close to one (West Virginia).  I'm currently living in Illinois, which is a big coal state.
6. It has a complex and interesting scientific history, as a "fossil fuel."  It relates to geology and paleontology.
7. It has complex ties to unions and worker rights, because of the abuse of coal miners.  
8. It causes Black Lung disease, an interesting workplace disability.
9. It is a significant cause of air pollution, and a major cause of the Clean Air Act.
10. It is big business, with several huge corporations exploiting it for large profits.  
11. It helped cause and fuel the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and around the world.
12. Barack Obama called the United States the "Saudi Arabia of Coal."
13. Several mine disasters have happened recently, and they never fail to get covered, even though the coverage doesn't seem to lead to any serious changes.  These accidents keep happening.  

This is before I've done any serious research.  I'm not sure exactly what I want to say about coal, or what "angle" I want to pursue.  Let's call this need for an angle a sense of "tension."  I'm looking for the conflict buried in this story - the thing that makes it a story, that makes it interesting to readers.  Conflict - or tension, since that makes it clear that we're dealing with a topic here - is the "stickiness" (from Murray?  I forget), the oomph, the guts, the gumption, the money, the gold, the payoff, the rub (Shakespeare) in the topic - is what makes the product worth reading/viewing/seeing/clicking through. I want people to enjoy and appreciate the final product, so I need this overarching sense of TENSION.

So, what questions do I need to ask?

Based on what I've written above, and what I'm thinking right now, here are some things that I want to pursue, at least for the moment (these questions help me begin and shape the research, but they do not confine or restrict me if something interesting pops up - it's a good thing if I change direction in the research because the thinking that I do in the midst of the research is often the most specific and text-based I can possibly produced - it often represents my best thinking about the topic, and needs to be respected as a voice that is more informed than the voice that speaks right now - why would I let the me of today, who knows very little about coal, give orders to the me of tomorrow or next week, who is in the middle of doing research about coal and knows a lot more?):

• Why do we keep using coal to generate electricity when it is so dirty, dangerous to mine, and expensive to transport?
• Why do people keep talking about "clean coal," when no one has been able to come up with a way to burn (what amounts to) compressed, hardened dirt?
• Why is coal so common in the midwest?
• Where are the largest coal mines, and who are the largest coal-mining companies?  
• What is the extent of coal-burning electrical power plants in the United States?
• Are there alternative technologies out there that might provide adequate energy if coal were abandoned?
• How did coal mines and coal miners contribute to the formation of the large labor unions in the United States, such as the AFL-CIO?  What influence did they have on other unions and on the gains made in worker rights in the Progressive era and New Deal?
• What role did coal play in the settlement of the Appalachians and the midwest?
• What events - especially related to coal and coal burning - contributed to the passage of the Clean Air Act?

I already know a bit about American history, and I've read a little and watched a few movies about these periods and these issues, such as Harlan County.  I'm not a total newbie about this, so in some sense this is false.  But knowing more about American history helps me learn more, and I chose a topic that I already know about so that the research will make more sense to me.  It's easier to do more research about something that I know a little about - that helps me know where to begin and where to dig deeper.  

I think there are a few key questions that I need to keep in mind for developing the product:

• What might make coal interesting to people who don't necessarily know a lot about American history, and don't care about the coal mines of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio?
• What is important about coal today?
• What biases do I have about coal, and how can I try to remain balanced and open about these biases?
• How can I limit the scope of my research?  What kinds of materials can I ignore or exclude?  What kinds of materials should I focus on?

While I am looking for the "tension" of the subject, it might help to open my research as wide as possible.  With a broad topic like this, that could be daunting.  The final product that I envision for this is some kind of YA narrative nonfiction book.  (Ouch - an audacious goal, but darnit, it's reachable.)  So, it's not unreasonable to include music, video, movies, google images, TV commercials, poetry, and any other sources that might offer some kind of insight or interest.  While I might not be able to use an old movie about coal as a source, it might help me understand things about the coal industry that might otherwise be difficult or take more work to understand.  

I'm going to think about this some more, and begin the initial research soon.  I think I'm going to start with some images.  I already have a few music CD's from the library that I'm going to listen to in more depth today.  

Coal

I checked out a bunch of stuff on the coal industry yesterday.  I've been messing around with the idea of a book about coal and labor unions.  It's a topic that kids don't know a lot about, and I would be pitching the book for a YA/middle-level audience, a la Albert Marrin or Marc Aronson.

Aronson was at the NCTE conference in Chicago, and he is both an excellent presenter and an engaging, incisive author.  I really liked Sugar Changed the World, and his book about the coal mine rescue in Chile (Trapped) got me thinking about the coal industry again.

My thinking here is some kind of modeling or write-alongside my students.  I'm interested in digging deeper into this topic, and I'm thinking about ways to do that in front of my students so that they can see and learn from that example.  Perhaps it would help, too, to have some of them along on this trip.