I’m going to spend this weekend doing some research on my resources. What books, papers, articles, anything related to what I want to write my paper on. Since I don’t have a super concise idea of what I want my paper to be about, I’m going to use this research to 1) find resources, and 2) clarify my topic. I basically want to get more into the details of, I suppose “real history”. Not to say the history I’ve learned wasn’t real, but I want to get different perspective, memoirs, biographies, etc. We’ve been reading some historical fictions and it’s interesting since I get to hear about history from a perspective I’ve never seen, or things I never really thought about, ways people experience their heritage and how much different it is from the way I experience mine. Maybe it’s because I’m so much more disconnected from my heritage, I mean I’m not even really sure what I am. I get told I’m Irish, Canadian, German, Native American, a long list of things. I’ve never really felt any connection to any of those and no one in my family has ever tried to give me a sense of what it means to be whatever it is I am.
Update on project
I’m still not completely sure what I want to write my final paper on. I don’t have a concrete idea, all I know is I’m interested in getting a better idea of the real history. I suppose in this context I want the real history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islander Americans, in general I’m just more intrigued with history. In high school, history was never an interest of mine, but honestly, I wasn’t interested in any academics.
Most of the research I’ve done is trying to find good resources for this project. I’ve done a few Individual Learning Contracts (ILC) and internships here at TESC and one of the most important tasks when planning these contracts is finding good resources. Finding a good text book for a thread takes a lot of research, researching the author/s, the content of the book, just because it’s a book about networking doesn’t mean it’s in the context I want. There are quite a few good memoirs I’m going to check out since that’s kind of the angle I want to get, I want to get the perspective of people who experienced whatever I’m reading about, first hand.
Thoughts this week
Reading When the Emperor was Divine was pretty fun. It was a short read and gave me a new perspective on interment camps in the US. I remember learning about these when I was in middle school and high school but it was from our US history text books perspective. Even though it was fictional it was still very thought provoking.
I also read the optional paper about pop culture and it was pretty interesting, I enjoyed it because I’ve always had a hard time describing to myself what pop culture means. The conversation, at least in my social groups, have never really veered into that direction, never asked the question about what pop culture means, but it’s something I’ve questioned many times.
What is Popular Culture
I decided to read the optional paper What is Popular Culture because I always had a hard time describing or defining the term. I always kind of understood what it meant, and how to use it, but I could never give it a definition. After reading this, I have a better idea of how it became, and maybe some ways to formally describe it, but mostly what I got is that there are a lot of ways to define it. They even attempted to give it a scientific approach which was appealing to me, but there were flaws with the approach. At the end of the paper they concluded that between all the many ways pop culture can be defined, they all have one thing in common, culture only emerged after industrialization and urbanization. I guess according to their definitions this might be true, but I can’t help but feel like there has always been culture, maybe that’s the distinction, pop culture vs culture. One definition stuck out to me as the way I’ve always imagined it, folk culture, of the people for the people. Not to be imposed on people as other definitions describe it but almost derived by the people. Mass culture, an imposed and impoverished culture, described as an imported American culture.
Example Rock Post
A research log for a major writing assignment — posts in this category will trace the evolving relationship between your “home” and Asian American/Pacific Islander American popular culture.
Example Paper Post
Includes: class notes as well as observations on program readings and a synthesis of ideas across program texts
Example Scissors Post
A personal journal – these posts will include any snippets (pun intended), fragments, partially formed thoughts, personal observations, etc., related to our program and which you may or may not reassemble into logical/linear fashion form by quarter’s end.