[Last modified: October, 18 2024 03:17 PM]
My research question pertains to competing ideas of community and sociality vs. individuality and mindfulness in crafting and art spaces. For this project, I think it would be most important to critically examine what kinds of people and spaces I subconsciously want to interact with. As a young queer woman, I definitely think that I would naturally gravitate toward people with a similar or shared identity and be most comfortable interviewing them. Even if these identities aren’t inherently relevant to the topics or questions at hand, I think that my more introverted personality means I would be boldest with those who I can find this connection with and most likely to introduce myself to them. So in doing interviews and in entering a variety of crafting and art spaces, I think it would be important for me to critically examine the demographic of the environment around me and make an active effort to enter spaces that I might not normally enter.
The other option would also be to tighten the project to focus on queer or women and nonbinary dominated communities specifically. I do think there could be a really interesting study on queer crafting spaces specifically and how art spaces can be safe, open, and creative spaces for the queer community. I also suspect that there are a lot of young queer artists and creatives in these spaces and workshops even if they are not advertised as such. So I think if I were to complete this project and realized that a lot of my interlocutors were queer, women or nonbinary, it would still be a really fruitful project and may even speak to a deeper sense of community. I would just need to be mindful of this switch in focus based on my own positionality.