I loved having Andrea Seabrook in class last week. I felt like we needed her to come in and inspire us with her words, but also make us really think about the project and where we were going with it. Above all, I think she asked the questions we were all thinking, whether we realized it or not: Why does Bromo matter? And even more than that, does it matter that it is an art district? The decision to not necessarily focus on how and why the space is an arts district suddenly opens up so many more questions and opportunities for us to explore the area without this label that seems as though many don't know or really care about. It's not that figuring out why residents and those that invest in the area don't have a lot of ties to the arts district designation, but our other questions seem to offer more towards the project. Andrea's lecture (although I'm sure she wouldn't call it that) about figuring out the focus of our project was really useful and narrowing our project down and figuring out what we want to do moving forward with the semester.
Another major question I wrote down during class with Andrea was:
Why did this happen this way?
I think it will be important for us to keep this question in mind while finalizing the format and outline of our project.
The working outline of exploring different aspects of the space leading up to the uprisings and culminating with a final piece on the uprisings themselves is really powerful and exciting. I think especially coming up on the one year of the events, we are in a really unique place in time to be exploring this. I think our timing in it being one year is a huge strength. However, timing on the other hand, deciding on this right before spring break, will be a weakness because we are in such a time crunch already. I also think it could be difficult to really put themes such as theater and entertainment into this timeline leading up to the uprisings, but I'll be excited to see how we are able to do this through questioning and further brainstorming and focusing in on the project.
Having experienced a version of this project in the Station North class, I laughed when Andrea said we shouldn't first transcribe and see how the pieces fit together because that's exactly what we did. And in the lab I work, that's still what we do. It is a very academic approach, but I think we can find ways to still do it and appease Andrea's anti-academia attitude. In my anthropology capstone class we recently talked about interviewing and how to utilize the information we collect during such interviews. Semi-structured interviews with a broad question that will kind of open the gates for us seems like a great way to hear peoples stories...I haven't figured out what that question is but I'm working on it. And for us to still transcribe at first since that is how we get oral histories, the method of select transcription during initial listenings to interviews might be beneficial for us.
I would like to help pick out those themes and transcribe, because that's what I'm used to and pretty good at. But I would be interested in maybe helping at least structure and plan questions for interviews.
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