My name is Aminah. As a second-year history student I was interested in how professional research for serious projects is conducted and working as a Collaborative Research Intern on the Movements and Mobility: an online forum project has proven that yes, even serious research starts with just googling random words.
My supervisors on the project Dr John Munro and Dr Nathan Cardon were interested in compiling a database or list of different local and national groups that tackled mobility issues such as dependence on the car, bettering public transport, lack of public space, city planning and road safety. My fellow intern and I created a shared database and were given complete independence by our supervisors with fortnightly checkup meetings.
To find these groups, my generation Z mind went straight to social media. Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook were instrumental for my research; I scoured the ‘following’ pages of well-known activist groups such as the Campaign for Better Transport and even Extinction Rebellion to find smaller, more localised activist groups like Better Streets for Birmingham and Epping Forest Transport Action Group.
The next step was to widen the geographical boundaries of our research. My fellow intern and I split our workload by continent to try and document as many groups from around the world as possible. The language and culture barriers were difficult to manage but luckily Instagram has a translation option on captions and comments and google translate works well enough for tweets and Facebook conversations. I was especially interested in the Arab countries and their shared obsession with the auto, to the detriment of public transport, pedestrians, and cyclists.
The final stage of my internship meant writing up a blog post about mobility issues in a certain area and here too, we were given full independence to write about what interested us about these issues. My own interest lay with the idea of public space in authoritarian led countries and its link to the increasing auto dependency in these countries. These issues were widely discussed online, often in the form of memes and jokes, like these Instagram posts concerning Alexandria, Egypt’s new 10-lane highway next to the beach front.
This type of research has surprised me in being so easy to conduct from home and with limited language skills. However, not all activist groups have an internet presence, write in English, or even subscribe to the same ideas about mobility issues. For example, it was far easier to find activist groups in the ‘West’ dealing with issues like auto dependency, cycling and 15-minute city planning than in Asia or Africa, firstly because of language barriers and the fact that not every country has the same level of online activity but also because these countries are preoccupied with larger issues of climate change and poverty and do not have the resources to be focusing on carbon neutral transport, promoting cycling etc.
Overall, the research I have conducted has been eye-opening and extremely beneficial for my studies next year. It has shown me that social media can be a great tool for finding primary sources and a great way of discerning the different debates around topics.
Aminah Elahi, BA History