Our MA dissertation

During one class, we didn’t talk about any particular issue related to PR, but about our dissertation topics, as the 3rd semester of our MA will be dedicated to carry out researches and write a dissertation, to hand in by the end of August. The dissertation aims to be an academic piece of research, which findings come from secondary sources (books, articles etc about the topic) and primary sources (our own surveys, interviews etc). In order to help us define our topic, we had to write a 2000 words essay about it.

You may think that this class was a bit more relaxed than the others, open to various discussions about all the different topics we can decide on… Well that was the most stressful class of this module: the teacher made us try to explain our topic to the rest of the class, and this was a 1st step towards some confusion, and I think most of us were thinking “erm, is it really clear what I want to talk about?”… But then it got worse, after the dreadful question: “so what do you expect to find out?” If not confused, the answers were just blank. And if ever we managed to formulate some hypothesis about our findings, well then came: “but how are you gonna be able to prove this?”… And we were struggling again.

Then the teachers left the class for a while, just after having said:”by the way, there is something hidden in the class”. Instantly, as it was the Wednesday before Easter, I thought about Easter eggs, and most of the class started to look for them… We looked everywhere, but found nothing. When the teacher came back she said: “have you found it? And did you have any idea about what it might be?” She looked a bit confounded when we told her about the Easter eggs… Then she took the white board’s sponge and said: “what if I tell you that it was this thing that was hidden?” What a disappointment!! Personally I really thought we would get chocolate eggs… Haha, but anyway this little game had of course a purpose: make us realise that if we don’t know what we are looking for, we can’t find it! This was of course related to our dissertations…

So in the end, most of students were quite panicky about their dissertation topics, as the difficulties seemed to suddenly pop up in front of our faces… However I was among the lucky ones, as my essay had been really appreciated, so it encouraged me to keep the same thinking for my dissertation and gave me some self confidence. But I also realised that I really needed to define better my key question about my topic, as it is a very broad one in which I could easily get lost if I don’t find an angle to approach it: the communication and manipulation about climate change… Huge.
Today luckily I’ve finally found a clear angle, from which I can build a structure and a hypothesis: I'll write about communicating on science: how science can be objective given the needs of the media (good stories and a language accessible to the public so simplifying) and given the scientists' needs of funding, and how scientists can be used as third part endorsements, so as PR tools, to serve some organizations' motivations. And I'll try to illustrate this through examples of the communication made on climate change. Well, that still may not appear very clear, but work is in progress!