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!