After filling out everything and completing the application (on my end) for the study abroad programs (both Silk road and Japan), I felt at ease. This thought was last week. Allowing me to take a breath and get on with my other work, such as working on these blogs and pre-flight quizzes. However, I missed one crucial part of it. There were more than just applications for the Guilford College. I was assigned to complete one for the ISA study abroad website.
My chill went inside out into a concentrated adrenaline rush, as the deadline was October one. Not to mention, they were all required to be mailed. If you read any further into this blog, it is mere fumes of myself and my problems that is in no way scapegoating.
So forth, on my list was this page and a half essay for my scholarship, and documents that need to be mailed to an office in Texas. My mind drifted away from anything considered class work and more into what will happen next year.
Still dealing with this problem, I sent 6 emails out to different departments in search for documents, and one came out to be a huge relief, which was the ISA study abroad office mentioning that they were going to extend the deadline to October 10. Such a time crunch, and this came to save my life. A relief that must go on this post as it was nearly the death of me, mentally speaking. And so, I will be able to catch up on all these posts, hopefully do this pre-flight quiz with ease tonight, fingers crossed.
And also, talking about study abroad. During my scholarship essay, my mention of cultural and modern bridges that Japan is so uniquely molded into, Daniel Diaz told me to add the current event of Emperor Akihito’s abdication. Yes, he will be abdicating, but is trying to find a method in doing so, as he does not think his mentality will hold much longer (which means he’s at the age of retirement). More so, he made an appearance on national TV, one of the rarest things in history, mentioning his abdication. Check it out!
Monthly Archives: September 2016
Onward and Upward!
Great news for the Sky Team! We discussed our ideas for the project with our professors and finally settled into a topic that is very interesting! I got the feeling after the meeting that the team seemed more invigorated now that we had a more solid direction, or at least I felt a new wave of interest for the topic! Our new direction is looking at contemporary women and queer identities through beauty standards, aesthetics and fashion, and the performative nature of gender, including drag, in the Uyghur peoples of the Xinjiang Province in China. I am actually very excited for this topic, and I hope that the rest of my team is as excited about it as I am! I feel like there is a great avenue for research and learning and analyzing that can be done with the topic that could be really fascinating! The Sky Team will meet again this week to discuss more about research, ideas, and the Story Maps.
The only thing I worry about now is making sure our team gets things done in a timely manner. Half of the semester is almost over and we essentially have a month to finish the research, make the Story Maps, gather all of the pictures and documents that we need, and put them on the class website. After that, the TAs have to take the finished Story Maps from all the teams and compile them into a huge map for the front page of the website! But we will see how this week goes, and on into October. I have no doubt my team will get things done, though. We’ve got this!
Getting off the ground~
It became rather painfully obvious midway through last week that our topic was still in a very preliminary phase. We had a decent idea of where we wanted to go – the focus still centered largely on women and associated minorities along the silk roads, and we knew we wanted to tie their experiences together under Islam. It was the location that was proving to be a bit of a challenge. We initially settled for the area around the Arabian Sea, but we quickly learned that the Arabian Sea is circled by a wide range of peoples and it would be difficult to make a cohesive project out of that.
After Eric recommended looking into the Uighur people of western China, things cleared up a bit. We’re all on board (as far as we’ve voiced) with making them our primary focus – I’m particularly down with the idea because they’re outside of the Han and Persian empires, which feel as if they’ve been researched quite a bit already. It’s weird, considering how difficult it’s been (and will likely continue to be) to find sources for my individual focus, that I’m so willing to dive into this. I don’t feel like I’m going to find many sources, and certainly not many academic ones. So far, I’ve only found two particularly useful websites.
Despite only finding those two sources, I’m really interested in the thread that seems to be falling out of them. Both pieces (a blog post and a personal essay) reference a gay bar in the city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province, and from what I’ve been able to find it appears to be the only one in the area. What’s particularly interesting, however, is both pieces reference an ethnic divide between Uighur and Han men in the bar, the essay describing how Uighur men apparently sit on one side and Han men on the other. The most fascinating bit about all of this, though, is that the bar hosts drag shows – and the drag queens are all Uighur. The blog post that I found mentions this in reference to the apparent Han notion that the Uighurs are “exotic,” but only in entertainment – in the real world, so to speak, they’re just lesser.
The gay community has always been rather problematic in matters of race and discrimination – in the west, there’s a running joke about guys who list “no fats, femmes, or asians” on their Grindr profiles, alongside other phrases such as “rice queen” – but it’s fascinating to see that manifest in a society where queer individuals can’t really afford to be so picky (for lack of a better word).
Fall Break: So Close Yet So Far
I am definitely feeling the stress this week. The 3-hour time expectation for the Map Test was a very conservative estimate. I’m struggling to keep up with three very reading intensive classes this semester (two Religious Studies and one Philosophy) at the same time and am finding it near impossible to keep up. I’ve been sick on and off for the past couple weeks, which has put a significant strain on my work time, and am facing a very big week in my internship with the Bryan Series, along with a visit from my mother for family weekend and homecoming this weekend. I normally feel that I hit a rut at some point in the semester, but am feeling like it should be much later than this point.
We did a ten-minute meditation in class today to a recording of poem performances, which was very appreciated. I was enrolled in Eric’s class on Buddhist Emptiness last semester, which had a weekly (if not more frequently) meditation component that I am not sure I realized how much I enjoyed until the class ended, the summer passed, and this new semester has started. I would like to get back into the habit of going to the Buddhist Meditation Fellowship meetings to get that meditation in, which I hope will aid in relieving some stress. I would also like to go chat with both Eric and Jill (my other Religious Studies professor) sometime within the next week to work out some strategies for coping with the high level of reading that is currently on my plate.
My experience in Guilford’s Religious Studies department has been very different than my experience in the Business department. In the Business department, if I did not excel at assignments, it was often because I found the assignments to be mostly busywork and had difficulty motivating myself to complete them to the best of my ability. In the Religious Studies department, I feel a lot of pressure to perform well in my classes because not just because the material is interesting and in depth, but also because I truly look up to and respect these professors and consider them good friends. I feel like I’m not only letting myself down, but them down as well when I don’t complete work to the best of my ability. I’m finding myself spread so thin that I’m not satisfied with my work in any class and then I just end up spiraling into a zone of stress where I can’t finish all of the work and I’m not happy with the quality of the work I am doing so then I end up more stressed and left unable to complete a bigger chunk of what is assigned.
This semester, I am a TA for two different classes, following my summer position as an Orientation Team Leader and my simultaneous work as an intern and student representative for the Guilford Bryan Series. I feel that all of these roles have left me in a place where I feel like I need to be someone that others can look up to and count on and when I start to fall behind, I feel that I am no longer doing that duty. I start to feel like a phony being the TA of a class that I am not thoroughly completing every reading for because I am supposed to be setting an example.
Although this was more personal than I initially intended this blog post to be, I am feeling better just having had the opportunity to talk about it, so I suppose I owe you a “thank you,” kind Internet reader. I hope that your week is a little more positive than mine and I look forward to bringing you a more positive outlook soon.
Where It Is ~ What It Is
Duhduhduduhn! I just completed the first map test! And it took me way too long. The test was (although very long) pretty cool. I must say, I learned a lot. For the first time all semester, I finally have some clue as to where all that we have been learning is–and let me tell you, by knowing where it is, I feel like I have a better grasp on what it is, too.
The test covered a large range of topics from routes explored, to current events, to geographic terrain and borderlines. It required a lot of looking at the map and not just memorizing where each place is, but understanding the geographic pattern of terrain. That said, I had to look at the map a lot just to be sure. I found interactive websites the most helpful–there was one that took us through Marco Polo’s route and one site that had a map that showed not only the routes of explorers, but also the religious belief of each region, the language primarily used, etc. I also did many extensive google searches. Wikipedia and Google Maps became my best friend.
It was really cool to see what’s already out there (mapping wise). There are some neat maps I found on China made with Google Maps and Timemaps. The Timemap I found seemed a little clunky. There were many dates, but the organization of them all was not quite clear. I think that when my team builds our Storymap, we should be weary about how many slides we include. Also, it kind of makes me want to set a window of time that our project is focused on (maybe over a 200 year span?).
I also wanted there to be more pictures. On Friday, we had another tech lab with Tierney about Shared Shelf. Of course I had heard of Shared Shelf, but I had never used it before. It seems pretty straightforward and simple. The only thing that bums me out is that I now have to take an extra step to put any picture in my blog–which makes me not want to put any pictures in my blog. See, I’m already doing it. I’ll get over it at some point, I’m sure.
My team hasn’t met for a few days now. We’ve all been overwhelmed with work and the current events going on in Charlotte. So long as we get back on the horse this coming week, I think we will be just fine.
Till then…
(Kashi)-ing Up to Kashgar: Recipe for Success
Gute Nacht,
Mind-blowing fact: the correct spelling for a clay oven in the Kashgar region is tandyr, not tandoor. (Many thanks to Zach our research will be much more successful now!!)
The latter portion of this week I spent my time poring over “Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey” by Najmieh Batmangli, which is on loan from Jilly of Team Heart. It’s been valuable for my role of discovering the cultural mores and histories surrounding a meal in Kashgar. I’ve learned about casual cafes known as lokantas, the encyclopedia of plants the Chinese once kept for medicinal purposes, the expectation of citizens to be discerning of cuisine and wine, the two constituents of a balanced meal (fan/grain and ts’ai/vegetables or meat), the importance of the least refinement of ingredients possible, and the link between joy and consumption. To a lesser degree of importance, it provided me with many delicious recipes the Tongue Team could use in our final presentation. I probably spent an hour just flipping through and bookmarking dishes I wanted to try, from salads to candies, but the probability of any of them coming to fruition depends on our supplies and cooking skill.
On Friday Tierney lead us on a tutorial of Shared Shelf, a place to share metadata for all artifacts/data/articles/photographs we use in our project. I knew what metadata was before (data that describes other data, like the publishing information on a book) but didn’t have a term for it until then. This resource will be incredibly helpful when trying to collect citations later on. Eric suggested that one person in the group volunteer to enter all the data into Shared Shelf so all four of us don’t have to fool with it, and as Recorder I believe it should be my place, but the Tongue Team seems content to enter data individually for now.
With my insights from the cookbook, Billie’s progress through Youtube videos, Zach’s revelation in terminology, and Chris’s continued research, we seem to be progressing well!
Off to continue working on my first Map Test…………………………….
Thanks for reading!
Regards,
-Delaney
Thoughts
Finding a Rhythm
This week, the Sky Team was able to meet and discuss the research project, which was very much needed! It turns out that others in the team were feeling the same way I was in regards to communication- or lack thereof. To make amends and move forward, we had a talk as a team about increasing communication within the group so that we can make greater strides for the project. So far, I have noticed a little more communication, so our discussion was successful in that aspect. Besides fixing the communication breakdown, I think at this point, our team is a little overwhelmed with how to best narrow down the research topic. Although everyone is heroically moving forward and doing the best they can with research this weekend, I do notice that there is still a nebulous feeling about our topic. I think that is because our topic is very much centered on ideas and concepts that were created in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as gender identity. I fear that it will be much more difficult to find the historical research that we need.
Thankfully, we will be meeting this week with the professors of the course to get help finding a specific area of interest that will be conducive to the scope of the project. Furthermore, to ease stress and make sure we stick to deadlines, we have agreed as a team to have the bulk of the research done by the end of next week so we can begin the story mapping process and collecting “artifacts” (pictures, documents, videos, etc.) that will supplement the overall narrative and research of our topic.
Besides working with our teams, everyone in the class has been busy completing the first map test, along with other readings and quizzes. I am very grateful that we were given an extension on the map test (which was supposed to have been due this past week). I would not have been able to finish all of the other work for the course on top of the map test and my work outside of Guilford! I think that this course got off on a little bit of a rocky start because the class was not ready to go from zero to seventy-five on the first day, but I do feel that the class is starting to find a rhythm.
New Research Topic
As of yesterday, Team Earth has decided to change the topic due to limited resources of the initial one. During our meeting with the professors, we’ve decided to focus on silk road travelers.
More specifically, we will be doing a cross reference comparison with eastern and western travelers. Perhaps Marco Polo comparing Rabban Bar Sauma & Markos. Using the story map as our medium, we will collect data on their travels through primary and secondary sources. And another thing to add on to this research, specifying it ever more, would be to concentrate on Mongol interaction. Because of Marco Polo’s work with Qubilai Khan, there’s bound to be other travelers who also either advised or experienced interactions with this leader or any other during the mongol rule. Also to note, this then dedicates our research during the 13-14th century, (Around 1206 to 1368 when the last emperor of the Yuan Dynasty passed away).
Thus being said, we’ve found a lot more sources to do the project, and the members have shown much interest with travelers and mongols.
YouTube videos & bread
This week I watched a bunch YouTube videos. The first one I found was about the different kinds of traditional breads that get baked in this really incredible earthen oven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39bRJSUewNE. While the actual baking of the bread by the professionals and watching how everything gets done was fun and illuminating, the three men leading this video expedition were very annoying and would have ruined the video for me if not for the delicious bread I got to watch. This initial video led me to others, all in Mandarin. My favorite so far is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJM38DtTCkk. What I hadn’t realized before this, is that so much information about cooking, cuisine, and traditions surrounding food in Kashgar would not always be documented in the usual ways we expect: scholarly journals or even official/trustworthy websites. Instead, much of the details that I, as well as my group, am so interested in learning about can be found in more creative and personal ways of documentation. Watching three YouTube videos gave me more information than all of the other research I had done through databases and google searches thus far.
Being somewhat familiar with Mandarin, I was able to pair the visuals with the spoken content to an extent. However, the truly enlightening part of watching videos as a source of research is actually seeing everything get prepared and cooked, such as the ways in which they rolled the dough or pierced it with these decorated tools that create beautiful designs in the bread. I now know how the bread gets slapped into the sides of the earthen ovens with pillow-like tools and how the naan sticks to the sides to bake. I now know that the bagels in Kashgar don’t have a hollow middle (like the hole in bagels we have here), but just a dip in the middle. I now know that in tea houses, 茶馆, they dip the naan in their tea and drink out of beautiful white porcelain. In Kashgar they also spread chili sauce onto the naan or tear the naan into pieces and put them into soup/broth.
I have so many new avenues of research to explore that I might never have known existed or were important before now. My next main foci for research will be the clays and earthen ovens/pottery, porcelain, the pillow-like oven tools, and the decorative piercing tools for naan. Additionally, I hope to find more YouTube videos to explore.
~ Side note: these videos, similar to 舌尖上的中国, give me such immense joy. They are so beautiful and fun to watch. Watching these videos held two educational components for me: research and the practice of my Chinese listening and reading (subtitles). I forgot so much Mandarin, but I also gave myself too little credit for how much I do remember; I was able to recognize significantly more characters than expected. ~