How do you connect your interests to a research project?

Once upon a time I had to write a paper. It was for a rhetoric class. I didn't know what it was going to be about. A few months before the paper was due, I was reading one of my rhetoric text books--it was one of those most fascinating textbooks, the kind without pictures--and came across a statement about how a Cezanne landscape communicates a different message than a forestry bulletin. The book's point was basically that the Cezanne landscape communicates a more poetic, emotional meaning that connects with an audience in a way that the forestry bulletin's logical, fact-based meaning does not.

I love Cezanne's paintings. He's one of the artists that formed the bridge between the impressionists and the cubists. One of his most famous paintings, always in art history anthologies, popped into mind when I read about Cezanne in my rhetoric textbook: 

I remember why I started searching for Cezanne stories in Google news, but that's where I went next. The question that formed in my mind was, "What have Cezanne's paintings inspired people to accomplish?" and "In what ways did Cezanne's paintings communicate messages that made people connect with each other?"

A quick google search resulted in several news controversies about the landscapes Cezanne painted. The one above, a rendition of Mount Sainte Victoire, which he glimpsed from his window, he painted over 300 times (one of my sources says). He made the land quite famous, and when French citizens look at his paintings, they're reminded of their national identities, their home, etc.

So the controversy was that President Sarkozy recently announced a plan to cut a high speed bullet train through the landscapes that Cezanne painted. The construction project was meant to jumpstart the economy. His arguments in favor of the project were strictly logical--all fact-based, all including numbers on how much money the project would cost, how much money it would save, etc.

What did Sarkozy's opposition have to say about it? Their arguments were purely emotional--about how their farms and means of livelihood would be destroyed by the train. One of Cezanne's descendants was pretty vocal about it too. There were several protests and discussions about how Cezanne himself, in the late 1800s-early 1900s painted a picture called "The Railway Cutting," which depicted a train cutting through the Sainte Victoire landscape. All this art history in connection with the current proposal to build the train incited lots of emotion.

So my research question then became: "What would it take for Cezanne's descendants and current French citizens who oppose the project to win this environmental argument?"

With this question in mind, I did my research and found sources to help me answer this question. I discovered that often, environmental debates like this are approached from one of two perspectives: the logical and the emotional. It's hard for the emotional side to win if they're only making pathetic appeals, and those who only make logical appeals often fail to take into account the emotional appeals, which are valid, but have a hard time standing against cold, hard facts. My paper was much more complicated than this, but I'll spare you. The point is, this was one of my favorite papers because it was connected to a personal interest.