Today I used JSTOR to search for some articles about my topic, which is healthcare for Uyghur women. While the sources I was able to find are a good start, I’m still hoping for more information. I also used a regular google search for some less scholarly articles. One continuity I noticed was the tension and differences in lifestyle between the Han and the Uyghur community, and I wonder if this is a continuity for the rest of my group members’ topics.
JSTOR was overall easy to use and understand, but I kept running into the problem of my topics only corresponding to one of the keywords. It felt like there were a lot of articles about the Uyghur people and a lot of articles about women’s healthcare, but not as much overlap. More information may be found on another search engine, so I may try that to find more information. Another problem I faced was that many of the articles didn’t focus on healthcare for women; they instead covered general issues facing all genders. They were informative, but just felt like good entry-level articles about the topic: hopefully there will be more direct information about women’s health later on.
One other difficulty I had was finding historical information about women’s healthcare. I could find a lot of articles about issues from current years in the community, dealing with topics such as the discrimination the Uyghur people face due to their ethnicity, a lack of knowledge about illnesses like cervical cancer, and how Uyghur women were affected by China’s one-child policy. But I haven’t been able to find any information about women’s health in earlier times, which is a bit confusing to me. I would assume that health has always been an issue to be dealt with, and women have always needed unique care when it comes to issues such as childbirth. I’m hoping that not finding a lot of information about this topic is due more to not using the right keywords when searching or some other technical issue, rather than an actual lack of sources. However, if I am able to find out more about historical issues of women’s health, I think I could pull together an interesting narrative of historical versus current events, analyzing what has changed and what has stayed the same over the years. However, this narrative also depends on what my teammates find: if no one else is able to find a cohesive narrative between past and present, than I am open and flexible to different ways to develop my topic. Despite a lack of information about women’s health specifically, I was able to find a little bit of general information about the role and perception of women in the Uyghur culture, so I have shared these sources with my group members in the hopes that it may help them with their topics.
While I was a little disappointed with the information I have found so far, I’m hoping I will be able to find more sources by digging a little deeper. I probably have to stop relying on the Internet so much for information and check out some books from the library or something like that.
Monthly Archives: September 2016
Sky's the Limit
Lets discuss methodology. We all have a certain way of doing things. As for me, when it comes to doing research projects and presentations, I tend to work backwards. By that I mean, typically I visualize the final result of the project first, then build on the ideas in my head. With the digital silk road project, I’ve already completed the project in my head, but the fundamentals are not coming together. For my group, pinpointing a location to research is much harder than we expected. Determining which era to closely examine is even harder. I did not foresee these challenges. Our group has considered researching groups of people near the Arabian Sea. Presently this land is designated to Iran, Saudi Arabia and parts of Afghanistan . The scope of the Silk Road is so broad that one can find his or herself overwhelmed by the various societies, cultures, religions and so forth. Gathering information is vital for Team Sky at this point. My method for gathering information consists of scouring through academic sources (print books, eBooks, journal articles etc.) related to beauty and body images for Muslim women. I started with Guilford’s library database. I searched for topics related to beauty and body images for Muslim women in addition to the perception of beauty in Islam. I searched for a variety subjects like: “Islamic feminism”, ” beauty in Arabia”, and the “history of women’s bodies” just to get a feel for what kind of information was out there. Now, even though there were plenty of sources for my topic, again I found the task I narrowing the subject down to a specific group of Muslim women very challenging. I read a few summaries that were interesting and I kept record of the ones relevant to my topic. Right now, I am in the beginning stages of exploring Persian art and literature. My intention is to make connections between the idea of beauty in Islam, specifically in locations near the Arabian Sea, and the influence the Silk Road had on those perceptions of beauty. The articles I have read are very engaging. In addition to the books and articles, art that is associated with the women and Islam is very interesting. Now, the task will be tying all these wonderful things together with the Silk Road.
Methodology is super important with this project. The organization of this entire process will either make us or break us. Managing our time, compiling our evidence, presenting our findings and arranging our story map must be on our top priority list. Even though deciding on a location and time period supersedes all these things, Team Sky needs to come to solid consensus on these issues very soon. Am I worried? Not at all. We each have our own way of doing things. I am confident that my team members are busy digging for sources and information. I’m quite sure they find the task of focusing on a particular society on or near the Silk Road just a difficult as I do, but as a team we will prevail. So far, the information that Ive encounter is relevant but solidifying one particular society is hard.
While finding a particular society to focus on is a task, on the other hand our class readings have been very helpful. The readings are long, but at the same time they contain vital names and dates of societies that thrived on the Silk Road. The reading, Periplus of the Erythraean Sea revealed the names of some historical Persian societies that thrived on maritime Silk Road. It described the flourishing trade of frankincense through the Arabian peninsula and further into India. Even though the article did not talk about beauty and body images directly, I was able to get a sense of the culture on the Arabian peninsula and the maritime routes impact on the culture.
So, as I close, I look forward to putting more pieces of together and making more connections between beauty and body images as it pertains to the Silk Road. In the near future I anticipate more correspondence with my Team about their methods and their individual findings. I embrace my Teams unique ability to get things done so, I hope the task of choosing a society and a time period is not to overwhelming. If we find that it is too overwhelming, I hope that we can discuss our issues and try to resolve them together. I have a great feeling about our process and an even more better feeling about the outcome of our Silk Road project.
The Process: 2
Marco Polo was an intrepid fellow.
I’ve been reading many of his accounts that follow his journey along the silk road to get a better understanding of what the terrain, people and other features were prominent during the time. Polo, who traveled with his father (and initially some priests which were sent along to convert pagans), speaks about the land and the people of places he visits. He seems to have an incredible talent for linguistics and grasps many of the languages of the people whom he interacts with.
He is also more curious than afraid. The priests who I mentioned above, took off when they heard that the next city had been invaded by a ferocious army. Honestly, from the accounts, Polo doesn’t really seem to care. He and his father (Nicolo) are hoping to arrive at the Great Khan’s court before he dies, so they keep trudging along from Baghdad to Hormuz.
Along the way down the Tigris river, Polo talks of a new “breed” of people who are inhuman in nature and acted like wolves. The Kurds were of course just normal people, who happened to be attacking Marco and his party. The fact that he describes them as “the savage and vindictive race who dwelt in those fastnesses, and whose occupation it was to rob and murder,” doesn’t really give them a great rap. Unfortunately, we don’t know what the Kurds thought of Polo and his party of flashy armor, strange amulets and terrifying weapons…
This just reminds us of the fact that having a written language and keeping records, skews the perspective of history toward the victor (and often the European). The Han Chinese wrote about the Xiongnu pastoralists in an uncannily similar manner, calling them “Barbarians and animals from the North.” Quite interesting how the “opposition” is related to animals, both from the Han China and Italian point of view.
After a few paragraphs dedicated to insulting the Kurds, Polo finds himself in the port-town of Hormuz. He then proceeds to insult the Persian ships docked at harbor. I judgmental character to say the least… However, not all is bad. Setting out from Hormuz, Polo remarks on the beauty of the natural landscape with in all its flowering magnificence. In fact, he spends the same amount of time discussing the nature around him as he spends describing an attack in which he and his father had to kill 3 bandits before barely escaping with their lives!
The trails of the silk road are already proving treacherous for our venetian explorer. Will he make it to the hall of the great Kublai Khan, or will he succumb to the dangers of the barren deserts? All will be revealed next week. Until then, a great quote from our drama king:
“(Polo and his squad) leading their horses and camels, sometimes on a path so narrow and so high above the gorge by whose side it ran, that it seemed inevitable that the travellers would fall and break their necks.”
Charming.
Reflection-Sky
Over this week, we’ve had a lot of changes and compromises with our topic. But now I think we have narrowed it down to a particular city: Urumqi, which is in the Xinjiang area. Since this city has a mixture of the Uyghur people and the Han, it seems to serve as a meeting place for different cultures and ideas and provide a lot of information about the effects of that. Both Nathan and Tiejii seem to have found information about their subtopics from within these regions, and I’ve found a little information as well. However, since my topic of healthcare is more universal, I don’t think I will have too much difficulty with finding good sources. One thing we still need to do is find a time period or figure out what type of narrative we want to pursue, such as a comparison between historical and contemporary ideas. I think as more research is done a decision about this can be reached. I also hope that the meeting with Eric and Zhihong next week will help to clarify things. Like others have been saying, I think one of the reasons it has been so difficult to find a topic and stick to it is due to the broadness and possibility of the Silk Road. Hopefully, we will be able to find lots of information about the topic we are currently exploring, and also have some fun with researching and learning new information!
All of the digital meetings have been incredibly helpful and have made me feel a lot less anxious about the project. I have never used search engines like JSTOR before to find academic papers, so it was nice learning how to use that and other databases, in order to find journals that may not show up with just a google search. Also, learning about metadata and the site to use made me feel a lot more confident about sourcing images. I have always been kind of paranoid about plagiarism and accidentally not sourcing something correctly, but after seeing how easy to use this site is I’m not as worried.
The digital aspect I’m most worried about is the story map. I’m looking forward to receiving instruction on how to make the map, because I feel it may relieve some of my fears over the technicalities. But on the narrative side of things, my group is still struggling a little on how to arrange the map. Hopefully as we do more research and narrow down a time period, a cohesive narrative will begin to emerge.
Initial Post
Team Earth off to a Rocky Start
Our initial research plan didn’t pan out, so we had to keep panning for research topic gold. There just wasn’t enough information on agriculture and plants in oasis cities. We’ve spent the last week discussing ideas and scratching our heads a bit, anxious to begin researching.
This morning I wasn’t able to attend my group’s meeting with Zhihong and Eric because I was at the protests in Charlotte until late last night. We had all been leaning towards this idea, but Jake and Austin finalized the topic of travelers- particularly their interactions with the Mongols- at the meeting. I’m quite interested in nomadic culture and also the remarkable exploration of brave travelers along the Silk Road, what their observations and interpretations looked like, etc. I’ve been told that we have some awesome primary sources to look into, and some of the readings for class so far have been very helpful. I’m excited to get started with this research.
Digital class
Currently in class, Tierney is giving us a broad range of tools to use for our digital project. One of which includes Metadata. Basically this is whatever defines a piece of information such as author’s name, copyrights, and other varieties of cites that provides useful data about that particular material. It was something that we see in our daily lives; only until today did I realize how to describe this common sight.
Further into this class, the teachers have introduced to us an account on Shared Shelf that enables a community media archive as another resource for our silk road. To clarify, students and professors alike have the ability to upload media relevant to the silk road class into the Shared Shelf account and, with proper citations, share it with the class. All media will have specific bibliographies to be certain of avoiding any copyright issues; as we’ve learned in class, (with both teacher and professor repetitively emphasizing on citing every uploaded image).
This is a great way for students as a whole to share the media that have been seen through their daily internet usages. With the whole classroom given this ability, the SharedShelf account will, without a doubt, be filled with very useful information relevant to our Silk Road project.
Resource Draught
One thing I have learned so far in working on this project, is that a lack of resources is a sure fire way to loose hope and motivation. My groups initial project idea which we were all very excited about had very few resources on the topics we were researching and so after running into the roadblock of no information over and over again wore us out and made me personally have less motivation in working on the project. I’m writing about this issue despite the fact that we have a new direction in our work full of resources that i’m excited about, mostly because it’s a good reminder to myself.
I think that I need to be aware that despite the fact that I have a lot of resources in front of me now, somewhere down the line I may run dry and this issue could start again. I need to remember to not give up hope and simply stop working on my project and to actually dig deeper and really try to work with both the physical resources I have in terms of text as well as the people in my life who are here to help guide me on this project. Both professors have been a huge help for me so far even early in the projects beginning and so I need to remember that they’re here for me if I need them later on as well. I think I also just need to remember that running out of resources on a certain topic isn’t the end of the world and I can’t simply give up when I have a group relying on my input and participation as well as the fact that the final work we produce is graded.
That being said however, I have very few worries about running into a lack of resources in the future, and although it is definitely a possibility and something I am feeling a little bit anxious about, I need to remember that it is an obstacle I can overcome. This all being said I am really excited about the new direction this project is taking and one of the best things I have learned from this experience of shifting focus is that a shift in a new direction when confronted with an obstacle can sometimes lead to something more exciting. The projects direction now has me even more engaged and happy then before and It wouldn’t have been possible without a shift in focus. I can’t wait to get started on the new research!
Moving in a New Direction
This morning the earth group had their long awaited meeting with Eric and Zhihong and it went amazingly. We have left behind our original plan of focusing mainly on agriculture and medicine and have moved in a new and wonderful direction. As of right now our plan involves taking a detailed look at the many travelers who along the silk road visited the Mongol court. We will be cross examining and comparing the multiple accounts and primary documents we have from the travelers, as well as looking at how the Mongols presented themselves in their own records.
I feel much more confident about our groups plan right now and am feeling much more involved and excited about working on the project instead of fearful and anxious. I’m personally very excited to get to work on any aspect of this project because the topic as a whole interests me and the primary resources are especially exciting to read. I think this new start is really what our group needed to get going on the project and really start to delve in on our research and get involved in our project in a more intentional and driven way.
The stories of travelers is a topic that has always been interesting me, and as a child I was fascinated by historical journeys across the world and the way the travelers would describe the new world that they were seeing. Our new project topic allows us to look at these kinds of documents and do the important work of dissecting who’s writing them, what kind of lens they’re viewing the world through and comparing them to one another to try to paint the most accurate and telling image of the time. I’m especially interested in getting to see how Marco Polo’s travels compare to some of those for whom the travel was a political mission or driven by religion.
Another big step that I am excited to take is to make sure we look at the travelers visiting the mongol court who not only came from white European nations but also those who came from Persia, Arabia, Russia and hopefully even smaller civilizations so that we can get the full view that were looking for in this project. I am incredibly grateful for our team being so flexible about this topic and for our wonderful professors for helping guide is in our decision making process and supporting us sin finding a topic we were excited about.
Starting Routines and Moving Forward
So I guess this is like my first ~official~ blog post. Well, as a TA for the Silk Road course, I do not have a bunch to say about the Silk Road project itself, for my part in the greater project is not until later in the semester. However, there has been a lot going on in regards to other work for the course as well as the Sky Team dynamics, and surprise, surprise, I’m stressing.
The Sky Team 9/22/16
The Sky Team is still working on narrowing down on a topic that will 1) have enough research to sustain the scope of the project, 2) be interesting and compelling for everyone in the group, and 3) work within the narrative format that is required for the Story Maps. And it is both frustrating and amazing how difficult it is to come up with a research topic within a group dynamic! I have done several research projects in school, mostly by myself, but I did do some in groups. However, the groups were smaller and we had, what felt like, more structure in terms of prompt and expectation. This Silk Road research project feels gigantic because there is SO MUCH that can be researched. How on Earth do we figure out a specific and narrow topic- a single drop- out of the entire ocean of information?? Hopefully meeting with the professors within the next week will help the team decide on a topic.
Also, our team lost a member this week. We are sad to see them go, but I do not think that it will be a huge deal for the project itself because we have not solidified a topic yet. It might make it easier to decide meetings and such as well. Speaking of, it has also been difficult trying to get everyone on the team together and to communicate with each other about the project. Since I am a TA and play more of a mentoring and advisory role, there is only so much that I can do about my team not communicating or talking outside of class and meetings with me. We have started doing weekly meetings all together, so hopefully that will help a little.
I think that I am also feeling overwhelmed because I am not actually a part of the research, so it feels out of my hands. But at the same time, I feel a responsibility for my team. Being a TA is like I am sitting outside of my team, in a weird limbo between student and teacher. Needless to say, navigating the role as a TA has been a very challenging part of the course so far! But I’ll get it!