Dissertation – broad outline plan

I have never been someone who produces written work based on a firm blow by blow plan. My preference is to highlight broad areas of interest and to develop these as I write. This document is a starting point for my dissertation alongside my literature review and acts as an extension to my proposal.

1. Question

It would seem a natural human reaction to death or impending loss and to grief caused to seek to capture that moment in time often through visual means. Is this an attempt to find an image that conveys a sense of what has been lost, or is it perhaps related to the pain of grief and the discomfort of being in the death space and is it an attempt to bring a sense of normalcy to this period and to put the sense of loss away so as to allow a sense of closure to the grief event? Is photography, rather than a tool being used to aid memory, a way to forget?

2. Method of providing an answerMy dissertation will attempt to answer this question through research using written works and ideas outlined in my literature review. These include Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, On Photography by Susan Sontag, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory by Marianne Hirsch and Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance by Geoffrey Batchen. I will also explore creative works of practitioners who have recorded life at or near to the point of death to understand their motives. Such practitioners include Annie Leibovitz, Jo Spence and from a slightly different perspective, Francesca Woodman. My own creative works will aid my research and explore a visual representation of the dead and of how we remember our dead. I have been working on three strands of research over past few months; first, an exploration of an idea on attitudes towards death based on work of French historian, Philippe Ariès; secondly, as an extension to my work on attitudes towards death, an initial look at the specifics of death and memorial in Scotland; thirdly, I started to look into the idea of the liminal space related to death. The liminality of death is a recent discovery for me and is an interesting way to describe what I previously called the ‘death space’. I can see elements in these pieces of research which interest me and would fit into my dissertation but my challenge is to try and limit the breadth of my work.
3. Mind map
4. Why is this work important?My work is important to me to help me better understand personal loss of my mother and daughter within three days of one another. I suspect my research might not come to easy conclusions and might even provide no clear answers at all but I still feel it is important to me and so is worth the attempt.  It almost feels to me that the task of my research allied to creative works and this essay are an end in itself even if my work might not come to a neat ending and might open up an array of new questions. Is this acceptable? How do I judge if my work has value in wider world? Does any of that matter?