January 21st 2025,

So today was my research class and before it started I went to office hours. Why? Because this first part of the research proposal is confusing as fuck and I was in a lot of distress (still am). I wanted to ask my professor for some help with it. Of course, he doesn’t want to give us all the answers so I had to tailor my questions in a specific way. When I sat down I told him that I was there because he told me to not start freaking out until this week, so now I am officially doing that. My main issue is coming up with a research question for this part of the project.

He then asked me what I was interested in, I said a lot of things, so he told me to be more specific and I told him “rainbow imperialism.” A subject he vaguely knew about, which makes sense because it does not seem to be a term that is widely used yet. So i explained it as LGBT people and rights being used for imperialist purposes, it is somewhat related to pink washing and Homonationalism. He got the point and typed onto google scholar for a bit pointing out different scholars and key terms I could search up instead to help: Beate Jahn, Emma Paszat, rainbow colonialism, gay imperialism, and looking into queer, gender and politics journals.

I thanked him for the help with that and left to get ready for our class together. My main issue is still finding my direct research question and case studies. I am still unsure as to how that works. Anyway, class was about research design. There isn’t too much to say here of course, but while he was explaining certain concepts he would use examples that I found interesting. While he was teaching us how to come up with questions he brought up the example of the question “should the US have invaded after the attacks of 9/11?” Most professors would have given vague answers but he just straight up said “no.” Which I found interesting.

I agree with him, it’s just that I am not used to professors being so matter of fact with certain issues. When going over how research questions affect the method used he talked about his process when he was doing his PhD. At the time he was very interested in the EU due to the fact that Europe went from being one of the most conflictual continents to the most peaceful. This led to many questions about organizations, their relationships towards each other, how they act in warfare, and why organizations do not work together anymore.