Draft-Reed-Night in Chengdu

I also publish this draft in my “Medium” account, which I think looks better. Here’s the link: https://medium.com/@lrx0117/final-project-draft-reed-20bb963a8a4a

Final Project Draft -Reed

For my final project, I’m going to continue exploring the nocturnal emotions and temporality of people living in urban Chinese cities, as I did in my Week 4’s interview practice. I pick my filed site in my hometown – Chengdu, a southwest in-land city. My final project would be my pilot study for my BA thesis. Actually, I’ve been thinking for a long time(from the time I decided my BA topic) the possibility to combine sound, photos, and mind-mapping with textual social science analysis for my BA academic paper. I appreciate this class offering an experiment chance and lectures about doing ethnography in this way, which confirms my envisagement and eases a lot of my worries for it not being seen as “real” , accepted, academic ethnographic work.

Photo and Sounds: I hope to capture people’s granular and unique nocturnal emotions, of sensory and also of fears. To achieve this, I will use photos, sound recordings of streets/scenes, mind-mapping, and interviews. Since I cannot go to Chengdu physically, I will cooperate with my partner Bin (also my informant in this project) to edit photos and sound recordings, and put them together. She is the person who collects photos and sounds, and the one who expresses. She will choose the medium she likes to record what she see, hear, and feel in Chengdu’s night. Two Ways: either Bin sends photos to me afterward or we make video calls when she’s out, depending on which one suits her. Plan: Our current discussion is that during this weekend and 1–2 weekdays, she will visit places as she does every day in the night: night-markets near her home where a lot of street vendors are, very lively and crowded in the night; parks where she goes to night-running with her mum etc. She just takes photos and records sounds that touch her. Though she is a fan of photography, enjoying taking photos when sth touches her, I still remind her that taking this (participate with my project)easily and as usual to ease her nervous and being not “natural”. I also tell Bin that this might be the first project we’ve done together, which I’m excited about.

Mind-maps: I’m thinking to ask Bin to drew mind-maps that tell the routes of where she’s going, what buildings/amenities are around and point out where are the places she takes photos and mentioned in the interview etc..Or she decides what she wants to draw, just using the map to describe her night-out experiences. I want to use this method to locate my readers in the geographic settings where Bin was in, also the location and relations between places mentioned frequently (night-markest, parks etc.)

Informal and formal Interview: I’m thinking to interview/chat with Bin every day after she coming back from her out. Take interview notes and write fieldnotes(if we do video calls). In the end, I will take a longer interview with Bin to dig deeper questions. I will select topics that emerge most frequently and concerns Bin most in all of her night out experiences (temporality, safety or ?). That’s the reason I didn’t have a concrete research question beforehand, but only a direction, since I hope it emerges and become more clear in the ethnography/interview process. But a dilemma here, I encounter is, usually a research proposal or IRB will ask research questions, which I only have a very vague thought( Like : I’m just interested in people’s Nightlife and what it’s unique comparing with the daytime?)

Newspaper and some history: As Bin collecting photos/sounds, I’m going to search for history recording on Chengdu’s nightlife, and local newspaper’s report. For the newspaper, I’m using a database called “Duxiu” where digital Chinese newspapers can be found. For history recordings, I’m going to look for academic papers on Chengdu’s nightlife, or novels. I’m not going to dive deep in this part for this project though, just getting some background information. Local culture and history on nightlife is important, since as I know, each chinies city have its unique culture/vibe/ ways of having fun in the night. Chengdu, especially, is verydifferent from Beijing, shanghai and Shengzhou, those sea-shore and very globalized cities.

Combination? : I’m thinking to use the platform Medium to combine all these multi-medias. But I’m not satisfied with it , since I don’t line put things on a single page, which looks very mechanical. I prefer to put things in more interactive and multi-pages places. I will figure it out.

Here are some photos of Chengdu’s night.