Blogs

First, concerning the interviewing, I was really nervous and actually waited until the last minute to do all of my interviews because I kept mulling over how to approach people to ask them to help me out. Ultimately I asked two out of three via email. I found that once I actually got it going, I enjoyed it, mostly because I got to know some intimate things about people who I had been spending time around and interacting with for the past couple of months. In one particular instance, I would have never guessed the information that I would get.

As to writing the paper, I actually had a good amount of difficulty. I had all my information and knew what I wanted to say with it, but it was very hard for me to turn that into a three-page paper and ultimately my paper actually turned out being just a little over two pages, which I'm not proud of. I would really like to expand on the paper sometime, but I just really don't know how I would do that now. Maybe after speaking further with my writing buddies and Anne, I'll figure out what to do with it!

As I read Humbach’s piece on the difference between the justice of rights and the justice of right relationships, I kept thinking about how the author would react to Haverford’s Honor Code. According to Humbach, the justice of rights prioritizes the abstract and cannot truly inform the “intricacy of interactions among persons.” On the other hand, the justice of right relationships comprises a worldview more than anything, a means by which an individual, without compromising her individuality, seeks to “be attentive and responsive to the needs and emotions of one another” in a way that supersedes any written rules. 

I do think that Haverford’s Honor Code actually works more toward the justice of right relationships than the justice of rights. The Code is, according to its website, “not a set of rules, but rather an articulation of ideals and expectations emphasizing genuine connection and engagement with one another, and the creation of an atmosphere of trust, concern, and respect.” These attributes are, then, all more reflective of the justice of right relationships than the justice of rights. Trust, concern, and respect are not rules so much as ethical guidelines, upon which any relationship is necessarily grounded; they are also guidelines loose enough so as not to be particular to only certain situations.

            I found this essay particularly challenging to write simply because I have no experience with writing a research essay based on personal interviews. Doing the interviews, for example, was completely new to me, but I found it to be a very rewarding experience because it gave me a chance to understand another person’s perspective on a subject that I felt I was struggling to comprehend fully. Interviewing three people provided me with three fresh perspectives about socioeconomic class perceptions based on working/not working on campus, and better enabled me to form my own informed opinion on the subject. Though my first interview was a bit awkward, I felt that I gained confidence as the interviews continued and the experience has taught me a lot about how to conduct interviews in the future.

I had my Barad "Aha!" moment in the beginning of class last week. It happened during our first Judith Butler litany and it took me by surprise. I have to admit, I was skeptical of Barad - I couldn't fathom what it might mean to experience the world like electrons do, and perhaps I don't understand the concept in the way Barad means it, but I've been feeling more electron-like by the minute...

Judith Butler's piece, "Violence, Mourning, and Politics" made me consider the ways in which each of us is both a particle and a wave (and that we are both at once, but the questions we ask - the way we look/measure - can change which "form" we focus on). Butler writes that, “one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed” (21). This definition of mourning struck me as very “wave-like.” We bounce off each other, diffract through one another, imprint ourselves on each other in such a way that when we lose someone, the patterns will change. We are wave-like in that there is something of our presence that is not necessarily visible or finite - we change the world we live in and the people we live with. But there is also a way in which we are discrete – we have a physical presence, we are in a certain way tangible, borders can be drawn around us. I think most of the time, though, when we think about each other or ourselves we consider the wave and particle together – like electrons we are both at once.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about Tuesday's class, and I spent a couple hours last night discussing various issues around rape and sexual assault with a friend (not in the class).  Some of the questions we talked about (along with some of the questions I was left with) are listed below:

How can we talk about rape theory in class when, statistically, rape is so much more than a theory for 25% of college women?

Is the "theorization" of rape okay?  Or does it do violence to rape and sexual assault survivors?

When even GenSex professors and students (myself included) make elementary mistakes when introducing and discussing rape and sexual assault ideas, where is the hope?

Is it fair for Haverford to ask rape and sexual assault survivors to out themselves to their deans in order to receive adequate support in classes (i.e. extensions and/or exemptions from certain assignments)?

Should I have to change who I am to avoid rape and sexual assault?

How can I tell Haverford or my dean that they are NOT doing a good job at helping students who are dealing with rape and sexual assault?

I really liked interviewing for research purposes because I love working with people more than working with readings. But I feel like it's hard to combine all three interviews into one thesis. For me there were a lot of conflicts between each of the interviews. I think it's easier though to shape your paper by interviewing people on what you want to know instead of pulling and stretching the ideas found between the lines of our weekly readings.

I had a much harder time with this paper than I expected.  I believe it was mainly because I went into my interviews with an idea of a research question but discovered that my interviewees didn't answer my questions the way I expected them to.  Developing a research question afterwords was a little more difficult, and I'm not quite sure if I wrote the paper the way I was supposed to.  I also may have read into my interviewee's statments a little differently than they expected.  I basically didn't take them at face value.  Did anyone run into this problem too?

First I really want to say something about my on-campus interview. This is the first time I communicate with people as an interviewer. At first I thought it would be easy, cauz it’s all about ask questions, answer questions and record people’s words. But it turned out that being a great interviewer is really hard. I have to admit that when I designed my questions for my interviewees, I was making assumptions about how they will answer them. Or, in other words, I know what I HOPE them to say in order to gain some useful information to prove my thesis of my essay. But actually when I finished conducting my entire interview, I found that actually almost all my interviewees answered those questions in a way that I didn’t expected them to answer, which means that I had to try change my claim. When I went over my notes trying to come up with a new topic for my essay, I really rethought many questions. I used to believe that I knew answer to these questions, which turned out only my own assumption. For example, one of my questions that I designed for my professor of English workshop is do students from different socioeconomic backgrounds perform differently? I thought her answer would be like “students from higher class families are more confident, whereas students from lower class families are more quiet.” But actually her answer was “there is no distinct difference.” I realized that actually I regarded my own assumptions for many problems as the truth.

The most important task with this paper for me was staying within the confines of my data. Three interviews with BMC student does not offer a broad range of information to make larger claims very strong. Academic writing must be able to be suported by more than conviction, fact, statement, interview, quote, calculation, etc. While you may "know" that there is a larger truth to what you are saying, you must not state something bigger than your concrete data shows.  Additionally resourcing interviews for an essay was a first for me, and it was great to explore research options other than the internet and books.

Despite my initial apprehension and borderline anxiety about the depth of this paper in combination with the new element of interviewing, I really enjoyed this project. I was incredibly surprised by the openness of my interviewees in the subject and was really excited to start working on my paper after I had completed them all. Especially because I had really gotten involved in each of my interviews and the stories they represented, I was positive that this had to be the best paper I've written thus far; however, I feel like because of this attachment to the topic and pressure of very high expectations, I was not very happy with the outcome of the paper. I really wanted to capture the essence of each of the interviews, so that I could strongly prove my point, and when I was talking about that point and about how I planned to prove it, I felt that it was clear. When I got to the writing aspect, however, I feel as though my argument was lost in including too much interview content and not enough explanation. I am definitely going to continue revising this paper because I really want to use the interviews as much as I can, while getting my claim across clearly. I think it's something I'd like to work on because I feel so invested in the topic and in conveying the students' stories as they pertain to my topic.