research as leisure activity

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:

I truly think that autodidacts are responsible for all that is good and great about alternative culture.

Research as leisure activity involves as much rigor as necessary .

As a result, research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined or antidisciplinary .

• Research as leisure activity is directed by passions and instincts . It’s fundamentally very personal: What are you interested in now ? It’s fine, and maybe even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. And if one topic leads you to another topic that seems totally unrelated, that’s something to get excited about—n

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Research is strengthened by a social and intellectual community .

Research ideally has contemporary relevance, but should not exclusively devoted to contemporary concerns .

Research culminates in some output .

Research requires understanding the history, theory, and practices of the discipline(s) you work within . Each discipline has its own particular history, and contemporary researchers are often elaborating upon, responding to, and reacting against that history.