The Epic of narrowing the topic | Nadin Helmi

During my first meeting with Joska to discuss my thesis topic, he told me to “Narrow the Topic” and since then I am thinking how can I do that?? Should I take a different approach?? Should I exclude some aspects ?? I have no idea.

I started by reviewing what we have learned in presenting cultural heritage class and academic writing, also I googled the issue online and I came up with an answer that the question lays with my research question. In order to be able to narrow my topic, I need to generate the proper research question. I will try to go through the process and introduce my topic within.

-              A general idea of the topic

To be able to initiate my research question, I have to start looking at it from a general perspective. My topic is related to “the preservation of urban heritage in Egypt”.

-              Preliminary research

Through my preliminary research, I detected some issues related to conserving heritage buildings in Alexandria related to three points. 1- confusion concerning the legal cover of those buildings. 2-  urban planning of the city. 3- the state vision on managing urban heritage.

Then I start on reading researches related to the topic by other scholars to see what have they not cover on the topic. Which approaches did they avoid or missed? how can my skills and previous experience support me to make research or o help me to take a certain approach?  And then the answer was very clear to me after that.

” I will definitely focus on the legal protection aspect”

-              Why and how

after I figured which angle I will focus on, I am asking myself these questions to be able to identify certain issues surrounding this topic. And to be honest, my questions in the beginning maybe wasn’t that smart or in order, to give example I used to propose “yes” and “no” questions which did not lead to anything really. 

So I had to change my method and ask open-ended questions such as; why the current law did not protect registered heritage buildings from being demolished in Alexandria? And to answer this question I had to read, understand and analyze the law text really carefully and try to detect what wordings were foggy and unclear to me then I read some of the court rulings to understand the judges perspective and interpretation of the law. From that source, I could detect a number of issues related to the interpretation of the law and followed regulations.

To give an example the Arabic wording concerning the type of the building “heritage buildings”  were really confusing as a result the regulation came uncompilable to the original text and that confused the judges while review a case related heritage building as in some cases owners *of a heritage building ) requesting a judge ruling to remove their building from the national list because it does not comply with the listed categories.

Also, I need to figure out the answer to a million question popped suddenly in my head “who is responsible for what?? Who is supervising and maintaining those buildings? What is the process of registering a building at the national list?? Is there is a collective heritage list??

Question example:

How did the current policy concerning the preservation of urban heritage fail to protect the heritage buildings in Alexandria?

-              My audience

Who will be my audience? Who I am talking to when I am writing my topic. At this point I decided to write a policy study and for that my audience will be policymakers and stakeholders among others yet I think that I will need to write a policy brief as a short, direct and clear version of my findings and recommendation to consider present it to some of the politician or parliament members if I can reach and have a contact with them.

I am still in the process of generating my research question, but I am relying on my primary sources and coffee to help me through this.