Patrick Interview Questions  Um I think one of the big misconceptions is that it is all earthy hippies that want to do drugs and have sex when in reality it’s a lot of normal people that work normal jobs and also people think it’s a music festival but it’san art festival people go out there to go see cool art, it’s a lot of fun.  I think welnness and party scene two of the most prevelant things out there, there’s so much of the culture out there is “harm reduction” and making sure everyone is healthy as in wearing sunscreen and staying hydrated and that’s something people will talk about and there are jobs dedicated to that. There are resources for people who have a hard…

The Venezuelan factory documentary was so interesting to me, there is something so striking about watching workers make choices collectively over production decisions, wages, and workplace conditions. The United States considers Venezuela as a third world country, while that ethical model of labor is largely absent from the country that most loudly claims freedom and individual rights for all. It’s ironic because the United States maintains a labor structure where wage theft is normal, workers have little meaningful say in the conditions of their own labor, and the gap between what a worker produces and what they take home continues to widen. The exploitation is normalized and sugar-coated in the…

Reading about the femenist ethnography article reminded me of Margaret Sanger. Although Sanger was a woman, she still held racist views and bigoted ideologies when it came to her research. During her research in Puerto Rico, Sanger was responsible for many unconsented experiments and sterilization in regards to low-income women on the island. She believed in selective breeding and revealed how feminist identity offers no automatic protection against racist and colonial ideology. She was a woman advocating for reproductive autonomy while simultaneously denying it to women she deemed less worthy of reproduction. What makes this relevant to feminist ethnography specifically is the question of positionality and power. Sanger approached Puerto…

Maria Machado’s story unsettled me in a way that felt deliberate and earned. At first you focus on the relentless haunting aspects but underneath all the odd incidents is something subtle about a marriage coming apart. The supernatural elements don’t cause the distance between the two women so much as reveal it and amplify it. The house becomes an externalization of what they can’t say to each other. What struck me most was the ending. After everything they argued about and all the people they brought in to “resolve” the haunting, the narrator opens a door and sees two women from another century, easy and intimate, laughing in bed together.…

When watching People’s Park in Angela’s class, I felt uncomfortable in a sense. The video was very violating of the local people doing normal human things and being treated as a spectacle– it almost made it feel like they were animals in an exhibit at the zoo to marvel at. Knowing that the people who made that documentary were two white individuals made it more questionable, it’s not being done by someone from the culture from their perspective but rather an invasive, biased view on these peoples lives. It’s also so interesting to me that these people received awards for their work, when it was just an outside gaze imposing…

The state park I chose for my park project from forever ago.

Growing up overseas and coming to the United States later, I had to completely switch over to a different culture and assimilate into it. The shift was sudden, a genuine culture shock. It showed up in my daily interactions with classmates, in the news media, and even in the grocery store. I learned quickly that the easiest version of myself was the one that asked fewer questions and made fewer corrections. My name was simplified so my fellow Americans could pronounce it, and the food I brought to school was adjusted to match what everyone else was eating. The American identity didn’t so much replace the other one as wear…

In our EMW class this previous week, we discussed the concept of grading and the consequences that follow it. At Guttman College, we use the standard letter grading system as most schools usually do. We’re ultimately defined with whatever letter is assigned to us by our professors, grouping and labeling individuals without regard for the actual person. Grading is a system designed to keep us compliant to the “man”.Angela addressed that we (CUNY) still rely on using the outdated system yet wealthy, “elite” instituions–such as Harvard, Brown, or MIT– have abolished or have lessened the significance of the traditional grading system. Their students are allowed to explore and have the…