No, I don't mean searching for a new girlfriend or anything personal like that. Sorry to burst your bubble! I'm just so happy because I think I found the elusive research topic I've searching for all this time.
Thanks to Tamir, my former professor whose research in Malaysia I'm currently helping, I now have a concrete idea for my doctoral research. The idea came about when we were eating a late lunch at the nasi daun pisang place in Bangsar after doing a public survey around the area. We were bouncing ideas off each other until he came up with a great topic for me to study. Without going into much detail the topic is, in a nutshell, about political socialization of youths by various political parties and organizations and to track the maturation of the youths' political ideology during their formative years.
I don't know why this angle of research eluded me before since I've always been interested in youth politics. But now I've captured it there will be nothing but exciting times ahead. I had originally thought about doing a comparative study between Malaysia and Indonesia but after further talk with Tamir it seems better and more worthwhile to just focus on Indonesia. So the plan now is to study various political and social groups in Indonesia - Muslim, Christian, secular - and track the connection between their efforts at socializing the youths and the development of the youths' own political ideology.
Now I can't wait to write up my research proposal and to hopefully do an extensive fieldwork in Indonesia later. It's been a while since I was this excited about something!
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