Bonus Blog

For this bonus blog I wanted to reflect on the reading "States" by Edward Said. Personally, I am not known as a reader as much as I am a drawer. Possibly because my attention gets lost easily among pages and pages of words. What struck out to me from his piece were his images that did not include contexts or captions. He really lets the images speak a thousand words by showing the devastation and he also does not hold anything back. The pictures do not look fake or staged with the subjects smiling or posing for a camera perhaps. What was cool was that the images drew me in and before I knew I had read through the piece without hesitation. Normally assigned readings seem to drag on for me because it might not be my first choice of literature. The way that Said uses the images to enhance his writing is incredible, it provides a startling statement to grab attention and then holds it with his captivating words. Overall it just showed how images can add to writing immensely I thought.

Course Reading

Though "Notes on a Balinese Cockfight" was one of the longer and more in depth essays that we read, I think I learned the most from it. What I learned had nothing to do with what the author was writing about but how he set up his paper. The structure of his essay was different from the other essays, but I liked it better. I learned that not all essays or papers have to be set up in the same format and that I should structure my paper to however it flows best. Sometimes I can write paragraph after paragraph and it will sound fine. Other times I may need to add pictures to illustrate what I am saying. It's even alright to have bold headings to break up the different parts of your paper.

Groups roles

I am in a group with Julie and Goran. I think that Julie is best at analyzing information and making it understandable. She is also an excellent writer. We assigned her the task of reviewing our annotated bibliography and writing about the information we found. Goran is very creative and is always exploding with ideas. Thats why he is in charge of the digital presentation part of our assignment. I am organized and can get things done so I am in charge of putting our paper together and editing it. I am also collecting information for Goran to put in our video.

My role in my group

I think that my role is the organizational person. I'm not necessarily the best at writing and piecing together an essay or document. A lot of the time I will ramble off onto another topic and and lose sight of the overall piece. I prefer to manage people and send out texts or make calls to make sure things get done and divvy out responsibilities. More so a project manager fits my role the best. I like to decide on the topic and sort of point the group in the direction that it needs to go.

reading classmate's ethnographies

I really enjoyed reading my classmate's ethnographies. Not only did I learn a lot about two subcultures that I didn't know about before, but I also got to see ways that I can improve my paper. Both of the papers I read helped me see ways that I can strengthen my paper and make it better.

Some things that were interesting to me were facts about the subcultures. For example, I didn't think that the basketball team was such a tight-knit group off the court. They have weekly team dinners, and that was really fascinating to me. Another thing I learned is that Russian refugees eat pig fat. To me, that sounds pretty disgusting, but it made me realize how different we all are as people and that we need to accept each other no matter what.

Reading about other cultures

I found it very helpful to read other people's papers, especially looking at how they organized their research and field work. I found that I had huge amounts of information and no idea where to start. Reading two different papers gave me some ideas on how to structure my paper. Besides that, I really loved reading about the cultures. The presentations that we did in class were enough to spark an interest and I enjoyed really learning more about them. Both of the papers went beyond the surface information about the cultures. We have all heard little bits of information about groups of people. With the research and field work, I found the papers credible and they gave great in-depth information.