Project Change
This is the proposal that I sent to the Watson Foundation on September 3, asking for permission to alter my project proposal. It’s not particularly exciting, but I thought you all would like to know what’s going on.
Project Alteration
After two of our conversations, one of the women who I’m interviewing said, “Don’t tell anyone I told you that. But my soul is a little lighter. Thank you.” I’ve thought a lot about her words and I realized how skewed my intentions have been. It was foolish of me to think that, after developing a personal relationship with someone, that I should share her thoughts and stories with total strangers. In my original project proposal, I wrote that I planned to conduct formal interviews and publish the transcripts. After a month of work, I’m not sure that I should publish them, ethically speaking.
I still want to collect stories from older Russian women but am more interested in what their stories teach me about faith, not what they can teach a group of academics about history. At the end of my Watson year, I will be able to speak to the effect their stories have had on me, personally. This makes my project more of a Watson and less of an academic study.
This proposed change has no financial impact.
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