Inés Robledo, marketing coordinator, November 2024

Daniel Knoth is a recent PPE graduate student from the University of Warwick. He has published not one, but two papers in our freshly published issue, Volume 17 Issue 1. To acknowledge this great achievement, we asked him a few questions about his research:

Tell me a bit about how your research came about, how did it start and what made you write a paper(s) about this topic(s)?

I became interested in the topic of political discourse when I began attending various political party meetings during my term breaks. I observed how entangled the way people think and speak about political issues was with their personal and political identities and how these varied across political parties and social groups. After studying an ethics module covering a linguistic speech theory, this gave me an idea that these concepts can also be used to distinguish between different forms of political discourse. I then contacted my ethics professor and asked her if she would be willing to supervise this research project of mine in which I wanted to use the linguistic speech theory framework by Austin and apply it onto the political context of political disagreements.

 

What challenges did you face?

As I was only in my second year of my undergraduate at the time, I didn’t have that much experience in approaching an issue like this completely independently, without any set research question or suggested readings. However, the more time I spent reading through the relevant (and not so relevant) literature and after some discussions with supervisor, the process of narrowing down on an area and identifying relevant texts became increasingly easier.

 

Do you see value in publishing undergraduate research?

Yes, I think being able to go through this whole process is really valuable. Beyond the researching and the writing, the publishing process teaches you many things, from receiving feedback on your work from the peer reviewers to having to pay very detailed attention to referencing and formatting at the later stages.

 

How did you find the process to publication? Any advice for future researchers that are thinking of publishing their undergraduate research?

The publication process requires a lot of patience. Compared to submitting something for university, where the time between your submission of work feedback is quite short, I believe it took about half a year for me to receive feedback and the peer review on my first paper. So, when you need to revise some specific aspects in response to peer review comments, I think especially as an undergraduate where your writing tends to improve quite rapidly it is sometimes difficult to not go back and think of all the other things you would have written and argued differently now.

 

Read Daniel’s papers here:

The Dimensions of Political Speech – Conceptualising the Origins of Political Hostility

Conceptions of Freedom in the Regulation of Junk Food and Tobacco

Interested in publishing your research with Reinvention? Find out more atReinvention: an International Journal of Undergraduate Research (reinventionjournal.org)or get in touch via reinventionjournal@warwick.ac.uk