Week 1: Ethnographic project proposal!

[Last modified: October, 5 2024 04:28 PM]

For my project, I’d like to look at themes of creativity, art, community, sociality, and storytelling by attending free and low-cost craft workshops around London. There is a large variety of accessible workshops in the city including more guided “how to” workshops such as learning to embroider, as well as more open workshops that provide the materials, space, and freedom to openly create. I am most interested in attending workshops that are focused on unique crafting media that are typically less accessible because of cost or “know how.” I’d like to focus especially with young adults in their twenties and amateur creatives, or those who enjoy the creative process and art but are not professionals by any means.

I hope to center my main questions around community building and how young adults find community in large cities. I want to look at why participants choose to attend these workshops and the effects the very social nature of the experience has on their sense of community, both with new acquaintances and those they came with, if applicable. I would also like to talk with participants about their projects and what they chose to create at the workshop and why. I would like to see if the social setting influences their creative expression.

I think I will find that these workshops are a very social, community building space. In such a big city as London, I suspect people are always looking to meet new people with similar interests, or even deepen bonds with existing friends through a shared activity or love of creativity. I am less sure about what I will find in terms of the influence of the social setting on artists’ expression. In some ways, I think that it could make some participants nervous to fully express themselves or feel pressure to make something perfect and “correct.” On the other hand, I think the group setting could be a great place for people to bounce ideas off of each other and consider the meaning of their work on a deeper level.

To achieve this, I will participate in various workshops myself and observe, and I also hope to talk with other attendees informally throughout the workshops and formally through interview questions. It would be great to include a multimodal aspect to my ethnography, such as pictures of artists and their work or some sort of creative rendering of my findings and the art I’ve created along the way. I believe my own reflexivity may be interesting in this exercise as well. I love to craft, but it is something I typically do alone. This will be a new experience for me, and I am excited to see how it influences my own expression and sense of community, especially having just moved to London.