The way one asks a question affects the way one is able to respond. This seems to be a truism. It also means that the way one shapes a question to turn it into the magical scholarly formula – a research question – is something that both enables and constrains scholarly work.

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Let’s backtrack a little. In order to have a research question, one needs to have a topic. And, moving ahead a little, one also needs to have begun to make a case, have an inkling of an argument. Reading Lauren Berlant’s approach to the case, one learns that ‘the case reveals itself not fundamentally as a form but as an event that takes shape.’ Perhaps this is what putting together a research question also turns out to be: a way of pinning down a topic in motion, a way of making a topic, like an event, ‘take shape’. Read this way, having a research question means we now have something definite, something formed – a topic now turns into a formulation – but also that it now takes on a shape, it is ‘shaped’, it has an enclosure where ideas are now able to roam.

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The topic of my recent doctoral research was restitution in Germany after the Holocaust and WWII. The case I make concerns the genres of law and aesthetics and their practices of restitution. And, in a meta-move, my underlying research question became how one asks the question of restitution.

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Recently, I read Menachem Kaiser’s memoir Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Stolen Nazi Treasure (Scribe, 2021). Kaiser is at pains to avoid sentimentality. His tone is questioning; the mood of the book is, at turns, confiding, humorous, reflective, unsure; the epilogue is astonishing. I read his book as a mediation on the way we shape our questions in the aftermath. Not to necessarily find the answers or have a resolution – case in point, his property restitution claim is still ongoing within the Polish legal system – but as literal method of reflective circling around, of noticing and crafting, of enacting the impossibility of an end. Kaiser uses questions and reflection as a method to craft a story that places a person (his own writerly persona) in a place within a time. It is a way to open himself up to resonances from the past, whilst always writing from a position in the present, caught on the threshold.

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Kaiser’s method could also be named jurisprudence. By this I mean the way we write about law is always a crafted relation between a persona with a place within a time. At least this is how I approached it in my doctorate. I was also at pains to avoid the sense of an ending or a sense of equilibrium, any hint of justice. I wanted the work to remain fragmentary, shapeless. My reluctance came from a deep unease about my persona and my relation to the topic; my determination to place my scholarly self within the frame meant I was trying to take responsibility for the way I wrote my questions – and therefore knowingly had shaped the way my work had framed the response. 

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To be ‘out of the question’ is to fall outside the scope, go beyond the frame. It is also to be beyond possibility – it is inconceivable – and means something is beyond consideration. This is not my aim. I don’t want to be without questions – I am a writer and researcher, after all – and generally I have too many questions that jostle for prominence and emphasis. But I am apprehensive about presupposing I am able to ask; I am aware of the arrogance and the power wielded by those who feel they have a right to examine or to interrogate.  

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What are we doing when we shape our research questions? Obviously they are a direction, rather than a destination; obviously they are a starting point that is meant to be trampled over in the heady run of researching and writing. But even so, I struggle with the forced designation of forward articulation when my thinking and writing process is so iterative and circular and laboured. I am wary of the way the questions I ask myself necessarily create the paths that mark out the ground and field where my ‘work’ then takes place. And so, even though it may be a truism, I worry that the way I ask a question shapes how I can respond. How can I be a responsible scholar – not only towards others, now, but to those in other places and in other times? 

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This piece has to be short, the brief was to stay limited. This suits my purpose. I deliberately cut it short. Again, I want my work to remain fragmentary, shapeless – I want to make a statement through absence as well as presence. And so, please mind the gaps. Notice the way I am implying – through the shape of my piece – that going down a particular research path may mean you leave (literal and metaphorical) holes in your work. Notice how I conflate justice with resolution, even in a formal sense of writing without an end, and how I try not to end nicely, all wrapped up. Notice my tone, notice my play, notice my resistance.

-Laura Petersen is a postdoctoral research fellow on the new research project “Imagining Justice: Law, Politics and Popular Visual Culture in Weimar Germany” at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland