I am also interested in boundary crossing and gender studies, in particular, feminist theory and identities that test the boundaries of the gender binary. I like to read novels in my free time, especially young adult fiction, so I was considering doing research on a book. Some books that I thought could fit with theme of Animals, People, and Power were Iron Widow, The Knife of Never Letting Go, and The House in the Cerulean Sea.

After further consideration, I decided to look deeper into Club Penguin and The Knife of Never Letting Go/The Chaos Walking book series. I searched for secondary source resources for each of them and was able to find a good amount of scholarly work on them. There were a few keywords, concepts, and topics I was interested in for each primary source:

Winner : Chaos Walking

Unfiltered Consciousness in The Knife of Never Letting Go

Since the role of Noise and unfiltered/tangible consciousness is one of the most unique aspects of the book, I formulated some research questions that I would be interested in pursuing. They focus on different aspects of the Animals, People, and Power theme, with some pertaining to animals (the relationship between Todd and his dog, speaking animals/nature) and some pertaining to power relationships (toxic masculinity, colonization).

Research Questions:

• How does the role of unfiltered consciousness both animalize humans and set them them from animals? 

• Why does Todd's relationship with his dog Manchee transform from one of annoyance/tolerance to attachment/dependence?

• How does the portrayal of animal consciousness through Noise reveal different aspects of human perceptions of animals?

• How does the use of Noise perpetuate toxic masculinity?

• How does Noise accentuate the othering of Spackle and women by the men of Prentisstown?

Next Steps

I plan to look more in depth into secondary sources that have to do with consciousness, talking animals, human-animal relationships, and power-relationships. During my preliminary exploration of the scholarly landscape, I found a good amount of scholarly works on Chaos Walking that explored topics like settler colonialism, power and resistance, masculinity, gender, consciousness, and loss of privacy. I also plan to look more into the concepts and historical contexts of colonization, othering, and toxic masculinity, and I want to learn more about methods that I can use to analyze YA books, such as narrative or qualitative methods of analysis. 

My Final Paper

When I first started the quarter, the thought of writing a research paper was overwhelming to me. Looking through the research process timeline and seeing that by end of 10 weeks, I would have a 10-12 page research paper was daunting. I had never written a paper that long before and I had no idea what topic I would would write about. When choosing a topic, I thought I needed to have a primary source that I was really passionate about and that I would have something meaningful in mind that I wanted to say about it before analyzing it, so when I had multiple sources in mind that could work, but didn't have a strong preference for either, I was a little worried. However, even though I wasn't extremely passionate about my topic, I chose something that I enjoyed, and through the process of research and formulating ideas, I felt more prepared to write my paper.

For future students, if the thought of writing a research paper seems very overwhelming at first, I would encourage you to focus on one step at a time and to trust the process. When looking ahead at what I would have to do in the research process timeline, I often felt unprepared, but by the time I actually got to it, it wasn't as bad as I thought. The hardest part for me was writing my first draft, but I found that looking back at my primary and secondary sources and pulling out quotes and then making an outline really helped me start writing. The most rewarding part was looking back after writing out my initial draft and creating my research presentation, seeing the payoff and tangible products of my work over this quarter and year in HumCore.