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I was all set to react to the second Butler lecture given on 11/14, but somehow her talk became entangled with ideas we’ve been playing around with in class and these two thoughts are the result of that entanglement...

One thing I have noticed about my writing overall is that it does get easier each week. While I still struggle to produce paper's I feel comfortable turning in, the process has become increasingly easier, and I find that our weekly papers have given me a great sense of growth. However, this paper was extremely challenging for me to write, and I am still unsure as to if I completed the task in the way I should have. I felt unprepared, and I wished that I could have gotten just a few more voices to place into the paper. Overall, I felt as though my paper was too representative of my own thoughts and voice, and I struggled to find a thesis out of the information I had. I also felt uncomfortable with quoting my interviewees because without "real" quotations, I was nervous about overstating things they had said. 

My writing process gave me a lot of ideas as far as how to address issues of class on campus, but again, these were personal thoughts. While they were influenced by my interviewees, I wish I had put more voice of others into the paper. I definitely think that this week's writing has a lot of room for revision. 

Many of you, who wrote in your last set of web events about biological and sexual education, might be interested in this 11/16/11 NYTimes piece about teaching good sex @ a local Quaker high school.

From Secret Dread @ Penn State (NYTimes, 11/19/11):
"In a culture that increasingly accepts gay life, organized athletics, from middle school to the professional leagues, is the last redoubt of unapologetic anti-gay sentiment .... What lurks behind so many male athletes’ vociferous antipathy to homosexuality seems to be deep anxiety about masculinity, the very quality that aggressive team sports showcase .... Maybe it’s time for a new kind of sports hero....?"

As I was thinking about activism in the context of some of the readings from last class, I thought about this idea of constantly bring "awareness" to an issue. If we look at our social landscape, we notice that there are so many issues that are being brought up and the sheer amount of them makes it difficult to fully engage with any because there is just so much information. Given that we are all entangled, shouldn't we be able to unify and thus, make what we are campaigning for a little bit more integrated?

A lot of the time, many campaigns and movements, in my own personal experience, have fallen on deaf ears because there are just so many issues. This is frustrating from the viewpoint of both the people attempting to spread the word as well the audience. Where do we focus? Who do we listen to?

Also, in terms of a global movement towards social justice, I would like to see something that really integrates both the sender of information regarding a more specific cause with the 'listener'. I personally feel that there is a hierarchy within social justice movements between these two categories. Given our entanglements with each other, I think that this would be better if equalised and thus, be more integrated.

At first I hated the idea of this paper. I did not give much thought to the process we were going to go through. I just judged my feelings from the initial idea, which is not always the best way to go about things. I felt like my interviews were successful and I gathered some important information, but I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with that information. Initially my focus area was based on class and money. I did not have a research question to base anything off of, so I decided a focus area would lead me to my research question. Initially I thought that my research question would relate to class and money, but my interviews led me to a new question that I did not think would come up based on the questions I asked. My research question was based on the correlation of class position and how comfortable we are talking about class. Once I found the path I was going to take with this paper, I realized hate was a pretty strong word.

In the end, I actually enjoyed writing this paper because of the fact that it was so different form ones we have written before. Our sources were not what we read from scholars, but rather our own questions we made for our interviews. I also liked that we created our own question to analyze and make a claim towards. We were not given a specific question that we had to make something out of, but rather we created a question based off of what was collected. So, I guess this paper was not as bad as I made it out to be.

This kind of writing is totally new to me. Writing a paper based on your interviews and real life workshop is a very hard job, but I did learn a lot from that. I recognize the importance of making questions for an interview. It's obvious that we need to make open-ended questions, but to what extent? At first, I tried to make my questions very general. I thought by doing that, my interviewees wouldn't be limited by the narrow topics. They could have more space to express themselves. However, what happened was contradictory to what I expected. Because they are general questions, people just give me general answers. These answers are not deep enough to write a paper. I had to add so many small questions to get the information I want. Even though I tried my best, the information I got from all sources were not deep enough for me to write a good paper. To me, it's easier to write an essay based on complicated ideas from the texts rather than little stories I heard from the interviews. I just have 3 interviewees and all of my interviews just last for about half an hour, it's hard to step away from the simple ideas and acquire indepth information. However, it's nice to go beyond classroom and experience what happen in real life. It's a wonderful exercise that make students become more familiar with social research. I think all of us may have many difficulties and make mistakes for the first time, but we do learn a lot from this experience.

Usually, after reviewing class readings, I start an essay with the expectation of knowing (at least the guidelines of) what to write about. With readings, the argument is logically outlined and easy to follow. However, due to the open structure of my interview questions, I had to entrust my subjects, the international students, to guide me through their story, convoluted stories that involved different contradictory factors which made it harder to follow and produce a thesis.  Furthermore, never having been an international student, I didn’t know what to aspect from them - what they want me to take away from their experiences, their needs and their story. I took this as a blessing because, having read Tuck, I did not want to taint my data with my assumptions and bias. I wanted my data to be raw and genuine.

In any case, working with the international students for this paper reminded me of our reading of Tuck in which I was researching not only to build a greater understanding but utilize it towards change. The paper wasn’t just about collecting what they were saying but trying to piece together what to do with this understanding, to create a message that would give these encounters meaning. Sometimes, I take for granted conversations and encounters with different people but having to develop a deeper meaning for this encounter helped me to remember the potential in interaction and in turn, active learning beyond the self.

Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street

* gender politics in alliance w/ that of other precarious peoples
* expand the "we"