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.