Week 9

Personal identification documents are intriguing to me and I think they would provide a great deal of insight as to how we classify ourselves.  The complexities and variances of the human experience are endlessly interesting to me, and the evolution of personal identification, within Canada and abroad, tells both individual stories as well as a big picture of our societies.  

I would focus on the drivers license, even though the historical scope of study is more narrow than it would be with a birth certificate, it contains a goldmine of information that is irresistible!   
Thinking about when the car was invented (1886- according to wiki) the regulations about who could drive have changed dramatically over time.  The number of people with drivers licenses would show us things like affordability and prevalence of vehicles at any given moment in history.  The evolution of the ID would show us changes in what information was included, when photographs were first used and what types of cameras were used, where they were issued and so on.  How many licenses belonged to women and how does this data change among different countries?  

In addition to containing data that reflects the composition of our society and social issues over time, drivers licenses tells a part of the story of government policy, surveillance and technology. How has the way government classifies their citizens changed and why?  What were the first restrictions on driving and how have these policies evolved?  What materials have been used to make drivers licenses and what can these tell us about the economy, trade and environment?

I'm sure these questions could be answered in other ways, but using drivers licenses to answer them adds another dimension to our understanding of the world.  Plus, think about how many hilariously bad photos would be enjoyed in the process!

Week 9

I would be interested in looking at magazines for women as my artefact. Last summer I stayed at a cottage with my family, and I ran out of reading material. My cousin had brought a magazine (Cosmopolitan) and gave it to me to read. I was surprised by how much of the magazine was dedicated to explaining to women all the things that were wrong with them (in their appearance, their personality, their work, their sex lives, and their relationships) and how they could fix these things (by purchasing certain things such as cosmetics, or by taking the advice of the columnists in the magazine). I’m honestly not certain what I would hope to learn from it, but I would like to look at the methods that they use to persuade women that they are not good enough. Even if my research was only to help people to think critically about these magazines I would consider it to be worth the work.  

Week 9: Stories Told By Artifacts (Althea)

If I had the choice and resources to based my research on an artifact or text, I would like to do it on a cultural text - a movie called Salmer fra Kjøkkenet, or Kitchen Stories. I was introduced to this movie by a professor teaching research methods during my undergraduate studies, and it left a strong impression. I wished we had the time to analyze this movie closely.

It is a 2003 Norwegian film, in which it depicts Swedish efficiency researchers studying how Norwegian bachelors utilize their kitchen (by sitting on an umpire's chair and observing from above). *SPOILER ALERT* One of the protagonists, the researcher, eventually gets off the chair and forms a human connection with his subject.

There are four points of interests that I have identified.

1. During the movie, the viewer will notice that the Swedes and the Norwegians seem to have an antagonistic relationship throughout the movie from the way interactions between Swedes and Norwegians are portrayed. It could give an insight towards how a Norwegian (the director) understood the post-war relations between the two countries.
2. The viewer may also gain interest in the idea of efficiency research, which was an actual area of interest during the post-war period, and further research the topic and compare it to what they have seen in the movie.
3. A researcher may choose to think about whether observation as a data collection method is impossible or undesirable particularly when the subject is a human. If not, what other kinds of methods would be more ethical or effective? 
4. The viewer may also question the validity of the research results that the efficiency researchers obtain when all they do is map out and record what they can see from one room in the entire house. I mean, is the kitchen necessarily the only place in the house where food preparation or consumption take place?

Week 9

Given the past two blogs and a few recent assignments, I've come to realize how bad I am at choosing a topic when given free reign and no parameters. I suppose I'm so used to thinking of ideas that fit within strict criteria that I've loosened my grip on what actually captures my interest. Isn't that worrisome? Here's hoping our interests continue to be developed within, and outside of, academia.

With that being said, I think the text(s) that I'd like to study would be a religious text, of any religion really. The reason this interests me is because I was raised without the presence of religion - very few members of my family practice Buddhism, and those that do experience it subjectively. Give this fact, I think it would be interesting to study the origin and prevalence of different texts, without any personal investment in the writings and teachings of the text. Particularly, an objective view would lend itself to research into any chances that have occurred to the texts over time. I'd like to look at how these texts came to be, how they were duplicated, how they were distributed, and what their migration patterns look like. I think this research would have to cover a very long span of time. More interesting is the range of technological advances that would need to be taken into consideration. Presumably, the duplication and distribution of various religious texts would have been done through methods such as transcription by hand, to printing presses, to current day digital platforms.

Week 9: Stories Told By Artifacts

I, like some other cool people here in our group, was also part of Matt Price and Matt Ratto’s Culture and Technology class last semester. Our semester-long project involved analyzing multiple dimensions of almost any artifact we wanted to tackle.

I chose the contact lens.

This artifact interested me because the contact lens, in my mind, had only recently come into being. I mean, how could it not be recent? Just the technology to create it must be sophisticated (a soft, miniature lens that fits snugly onto your eye?!), and the idea itself must have been thought up long after the invention of glasses due to that limitation.

What’s interesting is that the contact lens actually has a long line of history dating back to 1508 when Leonardo da Vinci first came up with the concept (for reference: my guess was 500 years off). I also learned other things I would not have otherwise: how a contact lens is made, what type of professionals are involved in its creation, as well as distribution and patterns of use around the world. For myself, there weren’t many complications, and finding the answers usually just involved scouring the Internet for the facts and data I needed. Occasionally, the answers would be hidden within videos (i.e. the specifics of the manufacturing process and the tools required to make a contact lens).

Bigger questions started coming up when I looked into the political and economic dimensions of the contact lens. Questions like how they can be used as a determinant for social standing, and the multiple reasons to wear (or not wear) contact lenses beyond just eyesight.

Week 9: Stories Told By Artifacts

Last semester when I took Culture & Technology I we had to develop a research project based on an artifact (object). I chose to do my project on my Mizuno Frenzy fastpitch bat. This project was by far the most interesting research I have done. Looking up information about the Mizuno fastpitch bat was intriguing because there were so many different factors that went into the bat that I had never realized. For example the material make up (carbon fibre and where specifically it comes from), the invention/maker of the Japanese company, the socio-cultural aspects of the bat, the physics/science behind the bat, and I just never realized how one artifact could tell such a big story.

Some of the complications I had while doing research was that there wasn't a lot of information about composite fastpitch bats, in fact a lot of papers were either written on baseball bats or aluminum bats. Also, the history of a fastpitch bat was extremely hard to come by. However, this made my research all the more interesting because I realized that it wasn't just the information you found, but the information you didn't find that said a lot about an object. 

The big story that I found about my object was about the gender narrative. For me it was about showing how the fastpitch bat was made to represent women, and the baseball bat men. I took a socio-cultural (and symbolic) approach showing how the Fastpitch bat was seen as lesser object than the baseball bat through the history (or narratives of the bats), through the material and make up of the bat and through the advertising of the bat. I showed that the fastpitch bat was unnatural/untraditional/and all together a crutch that women relied on to get power. Meanwhile the baseball bat is seen as natural, traditional, and a tool used by men to exert their power.

This research project proved to be so interesting to me because it made me think of the object I have been using all my life in so many different ways and had I not researched this artifact it would have just remained an object I use. Now I see my bat as a controversial object, however after my "big story" I will not let my bat define me and my strength and I would advocate for a change in the way the fastpitch bat is advertised to women/men. Researching an artifact is worth the time, because although you are not focusing on a group of people, in the end you kind of are (along with so many other things) which makes the object all the more exciting.

Week 8 - Open Topic (Althea)

For this week's open topic blog post, I've decided that I'm going to post this (maybe philosophical) question that I've had since doing my first research project as an undergraduate student:

Why do research?

At least, research in social sciences. This is not to say I don't think research in social sciences is useful at all. There exist research projects that have drawn attention to problematic statements and shed light on problematic issues that exist in society e.g. Philippe Bourgois' Righteous Dopefiend. Those are research that exists to problem solve.

The kind of research that I question are those which pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake and do not necessarily forward any kind of intellectual conversation. I come across such research all the time while doing projects and assignments, and it is frustrating. It's like the researcher never cared to think "So what?" when they were planning their research. This is part of the reason why I don't ever consider pursuing a doctorate, because I don't feel confident about being able to contribute anything useful to the field that I choose to be in. 

However, at the same time, I wonder if my strong feelings about this issue come from having a different opinion from the researcher about what "useful research" means. Should we practice reflexivity and try to understand what the researcher thinks is "good research" from his or her point of view?