I want to loose the research question in the field. For us it is very-very important that you loose the research question. The research question it is your enemy. And let me explain why. Because when somebody starts to do research they have this great plan and they come to you and say: «Oh, I want write my PhD on this topic, I think that these people are very interesting». They are telling about somebody they already know, right? If they didn't know that, they couldn't make the research question. When you start your research, what happens is that you discover all sorts of things. You needn't them. You had no idea these people, that actually there was a connection between religion and family life in the way you discovered it. Now if you were writing your research question, there would be a different question, because of what you discovered. So for me a good student is one, where the end result has no relationship to what they say the going to do. If they just did what they claimed they going to do, it means to they've learned nothing. They discovered nothing. They didn't encounter anything other then that what they predicted and expected. Because they kept to their research question. And that usually is a sign they probably were not very good as researchers. For me I want my students to change their topic, I want them to be inconsistent, I want them to develop things as they learn because they were there in order to learn. The most interesting things are things you didn't ever dream you were ever going to encounter. Because that is actually what you've discovered. You didn't know that before. You know it now. In and of itself that tells you that this is a discovery. So I would always encourage you to say: Oh, I'm now finding that these people aren't what I though. They are actually more into this, or there are these other sorts of collections. And I would say: follow that. So I would say, always abandon your research question; it's your enemy, not your friend.

I would say every one of the research in our «Why we post» project. If you like abandon the research question and they all found inappropriate. So for example the person who worked in Turkey, her PhD was in political anthropology, and he went to a place on the border with Syria and Turkey. I mean obviously the research was going to be about politics. And right in the middle of this Kurdish and Arab et cetera. But it was not. Because for all sorts of reasons people actually tried not to use social media for political reasons, mainly because they saw social media as to do with their friends and their relatives, and politics is divisive. It destroys relationships. So actually they tried to keep politics away from that. Now she therefore did most of her work in the end more to do with issues of friendship and love and intimacy and gender. Not politics. Similarly we had one in a team who has actually funded to look and indigenous identity, like indigenous Indians in the borders between Chile and Bolivia et cetera. But these people never express indigeneity instead the whole point is they are trying to form the community, they [нрзб.], they know they are looked down upon. So they want to suppress those differences in order to create a community. So again the do the opposite of what you'd expect. And third example was again one of our team, he went to a place where the villages, this is in South India, little villages, very low income, and then – all this new IT work is becoming, IT professional workers, so for him obviously the important contrast is between the villagers with no income and IT professionals, who are amongst the highest income people in India. That surely is what he studied. But, what did he find? He found that for the most areas of the online life, that he was concerned with, the things that people had in common as Indians of Hindu-indians, the string family connections, relationships with kinship, relationships with religion et cetera, actually these people had more in common, and were more expressive of what in means to be south Indian, than the differences between they said it up. So the point about our work is that the one consistent thing is the all the research, it has been wrong. All the research questions were wrong, all the expectations were wrong, and for me that's why I'm proud of this work. Because it meant they didn't find the things… they didn't find the things that suited their framework, they were going for; they didn't find the thing that would have been easy and convenient and everybody wanted them to say, because they wanted them to talk about politics, and they didn't find. It meant they have that I would say integrity of research. They found what they actually found, and they spoke truth to their evidence. And if it wasn't the thing wanted to be interested in, they stayed with the findings. And for me that's proper scholarship. And the people who decide what you're studying or the people that you study [нрзб] not the big theoretical framework to the academic goose, who tell you tis is in fashion this year, this is what we should be concentrating on. Not the journalists, who say it should be politics and identity, whatever it is. Your job is to respect the evidence of the people with whom you work. They have the authority to tell you want they are. So in our team we always failed in our work, but that's precisely what may be the success. Because I could see the fact that nobody was finding the things that suited them, it meant that I really believe they had followed the evidence of their work and they were true to that. They just went where the evidence led, and that's what we ended up speaking about. To me that is proper research. But it's nothing like the way it's conceptualizing things like funding bodies and even academic institutions, who all think you can create a research strategy and them you job is to go with that. That to me is actually is against the truth of research. Research should be discovery and you should follow what you find, not what you wanted to find.