In todays post, I want to go back to my literature review and talk about something I realized and learned. We had 3 articles as a group for our presentations and all of them were concerned with the idea of strategic forgetting in a micro level. The 4th article we found took the same issue about strategic forgetting to the macro level and it’s arguments were a game changer, contradicting with all three articles and how they approached strategic forgetting. It did not necessarily prove the other three wrong, we still thought strategic forgetting could be beneficial in micro level, however, it just brought another dimension to the issue and showed us how strategic forgetting could lead to terrifying causes in a macro level.
When I went home thinking about and questioning my methods of thinking, I realized that I never actually thought of how the issue I was thinking about affected people in a micro way and how it was different than the macro dimension. Soon after that I started thinking about some issues I analyzed recently and figured out my opinions actually change or at least became more understanding as I could now see how other people/societies were affected, that I just never saw before.
Since then I started re-evaluating my opinions, especially about recent political events that occurred in my hometown, Istanbul. After seeing the changes in my opinions just by a single method of thinking, I understood the importance of critical approaches and began researching more deeply.
Thinking how a single article we found by chance (if one of us found another article before Maria did, this wouldn’t have happened) shaped the way I thought, I was very impressed by coincidence but more importantly I realized the significance of research and research assignments.
Barış Uzel