My first research journal. Not sure this will last, but I’m going to give it a go.

I hope that journaling will help me in a few ways:

• By keeping me engaged in my research practice from week to week, so I don’t have to do the cognitive work of picking things up after a long break if there are any gaps in my time spent researching.
• By helping me think through and clarify my thoughts by having to write them down. “You don’t know something until you can teach it.” (Einstein, allegedly — though probably not.)
• By allowing me to go back over my notes and “re-trace the steps” of my thinking, if I ever want to understand how I came to a particular understanding or want to go back and change my process.

As it’s only Week 1 I haven’t got much to report, though I have found one interesting idea. In Utopia for Realists (Rutger Bregman), in the chapter about Universal Basic Income, Bregman quotes Bertrand Russell about utopia:

“Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change,” the British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote. Elsewhere he continued, “It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.”

Could ideas of utopian society be a framework in which to analyse the family unit in Australian cinema?