research as leisure activity - by Celine Nguyen

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Who is doing this kind of research as leisure activity? Artists, often. To return to the site that originally inspired this post—I’d say that the artist/designer/educator Laurel Schwulst uses Are.na to develop and refine particular themes, directions, topics of inquiry...some of which become artworks or essays or classes that she teaches.

People wh... See more

Celine Nguyen • research as leisure activity

Cultivate Curiosity

Having the library of Alexandria in our pockets has dulled, rather than heightened, our senses. Despite unprecedented access to information, there is a sluggish incuriosity, a giving of the self to the algorithm that feeds us information, rather than allows us to search for it.

Yet curiosity, at its core, is simple: it is observat... See more

Mariam Mahmoud • The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

When research is your leisure activity, you’ll end up making connections between your existing interests and new ideas or topics. Everything gets pulled into the orbit of your intellectual curiosity. You can go deeper and deeper into a narrow topic, one that seems fascinatingly trivial and end up learning about the big topics: gender, culture, econ... See more

Celine Nguyen • research as leisure activity

There’s something deeply compelling to me about the idea that research—in some form—can be done by anyone with a serious commitment to intellectual inquiry.

Celine Nguyen • research as leisure activity

But this isn’t really about the software. It’s about what software promises us—that it will help us become who we want to be, living the lives we find most meaningful and fulfilling. The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and inter