ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the researcher's unfinished business in the work claims a researcher through his or her complexes. Research as a vocation puts one in service to those unfinished stories that weigh down upon us individually and collectively as the wait and weight of history. It is what the word itself indicates. It is re-search, a searching again for what has already made its claim upon us and is making its claim upon the future. The topics that we think we choose in fact choose us as much as, and probably more than, we chose them, and the intentions that the researcher has for the work are ensorcelled by the dreams of the soul in the work. Research as vocation places the researcher within context that is larger than his or her intentions for work. The vocational aspect of the process attends to these subtle complex interweavings between a researcher and the work, and it acknowledges that the work is indeed made between the two.
