ANTHMETHGRP2-2425-YIWEN-BO

[Last modified: December, 10 2024 02:40 PM]

In the case about women survivors of domestic abuse in Pakistan, I would make following suggestions for the student:

1. Get written informed consent from the participants and make sure each one of them knows exactly the content, aim of the research and how the data may be used, because sometimes there may exist misunderstanding and information mismatch between the researchers and the participants
2. Keep all the details related to the personal information of the participants confidential, since they are victims of domestic abuse, they are very likely to face retaliation by their partners if they reveal what has happened to them, also maybe they don’t want their friends or acquaintances to recognize them
3. Be very careful when extending the study to other women in the refuge, though the woman who are very familiar with the student has made herself very clear about her willingness to see the research published, it may not be the case for another survivor. While those women share the identity of domestic abuse survivors, each of them has their own different backgrounds and circumstances, maybe some of them don’t want to be interviewed, not to mention being involved in a published research article
4. Pay close attention to the participants’ physical and mental health during the whole research process, since they are very vulnerable and has just survived domestic violence, the student must bear in mind that they are injured both internally and externally, and cannot be treated like normal people. The researcher should give them extra care and consolation, as well as keeping an eye on their emotions, especially when the interview has gone into some sensitive and in-depth topics (like recalling the scene of violence)
5. Avoid and beware of the influence of religious factors, given that Pakistani people are Muslims, and Islam has many strict taboos about marital life and family issue, the researcher and the domestic violence survivors could suffer from religious pressure and even attacks by radical Muslims, so it’s essential to secure the safety of both parties and apply for extra guard from the refuge or other NGO when necessary
6. Ensure that the study is always conducted under the supervision of the Anthropology Ethics committee, and request for additional permissions when faced with uncertain or high-risk issues. Therefore the study can follow guidance from a more professional and authoritative source

[Last modified: November, 27 2024 01:11 AM]

Standing at the entrance of the building on 188 Tottenham Court Road, me and my classmate have found quite a few interesting things about this place. As mentioned in the class, everything in this space that’s supposed to function didn’t seem to work. The smoking alarm was covered, which should be forbidden, and smell of smoking still crawled through the door from time to time. At the reception desk, there was no one around. The gate had something wrong and can’t recognize one’s student ID card, and thus didn’t let her in. This whole scenario made you can’t help but think, “Are they still using this building or not?”. Based on my personal experience, I doubt that it highly reflects a distillation of quintessential London character: nothing is working well actually and you have to learn to live with the “out of service” status.

Observing the urban chaos is also much fun. I noticed how the noise of pedestrians, buses and vehicles passing by, and sirens and ambulances blend together harmoniously in an amazing way, and everyone within is so used to it that they won’t even be bothered. It’s an essential part of urban life which contains the sharp artificial noise that exists anytime, anywhere.

At the same time, my curiosity is also quite aroused by the texture of traces of artificiality in the environment, including the walls, the carpets, the desks, the chairs, the stairs and etc. Everyday you come into contact with them, but you won’t really touch them. You won’t realize they are there unless you pay extra attention, yet you’d be inconvenienced without them. As for me, I particularly love the carpet, which is very normal in Britain, even though many consider it to be messy and annoying. I have my own special reason. Watching raindrops seeping into the carpet and absorbed is healing when you walk through the doorway, coming back home from outside covered in rain on a rainy day. Modern society has constructed our living environment with a variety of complex textures, taking the way we meet our basic survival needs beyond to another level.

Last but not least, I’d like to point out one thing that keeps me thinking of. From a multimodality perspective, we will find that in fact everyday life contains far more non-textual information than we can process (if we see our brain as some kind of CPU), so usually we choose to ignore most of the sensory perception we get, which leads to a state of what I call unconscious living. I don’t mean to be accusatory by saying so, it just pops into my mind.

[Last modified: November, 13 2024 01:33 AM]

Studying toilet signs design, as I may say, strongly indicates the political assumption that our society is filled with gender bias and need to be focused and corrected, especially from the view of a female who considers herself to be a feminist, which is me. You either are aware of the stereotypes, bias, discrimination and inequalities in the domain of gender topics, or not, there’s no such thing as “neutral” or “hold reserved opinions”. As for my pilot research project, it is based on the assumption that the majority of toilet signs are not properly designed and are prejudiced more or less, creating even more misconception about gender. Moreover, for the LGBTQ people, or we can say the minority ones, toilet signs ignore them simply and brutally, which is also against the core idea of fighting for LGBTQ rights during parades and pride months. To recap, in most cases, the design of toilet signs is quite unfriendly to the minorities in our society, even squeezing out their space for basic living. This assumption is the foundation of the whole thing.

Meanwhile, my own positionality as a feminist draw me to link this phenomena to broader societal issues, view it as an embedded political agenda and feel angry towards the current situation personally. Thinking of the toilet signs and their deeper meaning or hints make me feel deprived of part of my rights, which is not fatal but still important, and once again make me realize I’m at the lower end in this society. Being a researcher representing disenfranchised groups, I naturally reckon myself obliged to stand out, speak up as loudly as I can and call for change. It would inevitably has political overtones rather than just plain and restrained narratives.

Overall, I speculate that my possible outcome would point out what kind of prejudice the toilet signs contains, how they are presented and integrated into the visual elements, and how can we improve them. It seems very likely that it will indicate that toilet signs are deeply related to the collective consciousness of the society and are products of the prevailing view. Besides, I guess my project will include some practical advice on what to do, which can be seen as some kind of political appeal or campaign to some extent. I don’t know exactly how my method are going to adapt to these political elements but I’ll try and figure it out.

[Last modified: October, 30 2024 10:27 AM]

This week I spent some time at Byng Pi which is close to Birkbeck. Watching people passing by, I suddenly realize how distant and isolated we are to each other in modern society. There’s a famous saying in China: The sorrows and joys of mankind are not connected, I only find them noisy, which I think is an accurate description of this feeling. The scene is, students and pedestrians rush about towards different direction, while other people rally in solidarity with Palestine just a few steps away with banners and posters, and there are two street food stalls at the corner, with lots of customers queuing. The owner of the stall, who seems is Middle-easterner, is yelling “ rice, beef, chicken” in Chinese to everyone passing by who looks like Chinese, and there’s also eye-catching Chinese slogans that says “ very popular cuisine on Chinese social media”. It’s easy to speculate that Chinese UCL students are the main customers of this stall, so the owner learned a bit Chinese.

So in this scene I saw 3 groups of people and each have their own thing to do, and when they come together in the same place it seems very conflicted and divided. Most people, with a cold look of indifference, don’t seem to care what others are doing.

General psychological alienation in modern society. That’s the theme I would set for this scene. Nowadays you can feel even more lonely when you’re in the crowd. Atomized individuals become the norm, and thus emotions and agendas are totally private and ripped too. People can no longer connect with others as much as we used to. Everybody tend to focus on their own stuff. I’m not quite sure what it would be 10 or 20 years ago, but I guess people would be more engaged in collective sentiment when a political assembly takes place to call for a ceasefire and protection of civilians far away.

Field notes, in the process, helped a lot in terms of memory and capture of details, especially in such a bustling street scene. People pass by in front of me before I can even notice. Dialogues in various languages happen at the same time, making it hard to identify or analyze, not to mention the extraction of core information. Living and researching in a society overloaded with information can be quite challenging, but thankfully we can take notes, make sketches, shoot videos to leave some records.

[Last modified: October, 23 2024 10:48 AM]

Studying a topic that’s deeply relevant to gender issue is never easy as a woman when it comes to staying objective and neutral in the progress. As my aim is to figure out how people view the sex stereotypes contained in the icons that refer to different gender, I’m concerned that my own dissatisfaction with the current social gender order may affect the response from my participants through subconscious verbal guidance during conversations. It seems impossible to completely get rid of the mindset as one indivual of the disadvantaged group.

Most people, especially those who are familiar with me(and value our friendship), tend to slightly polish their wording and maintain a vague position instead of speaking frankly to avoid irritating others when they talk about their opinions on politically sensitive issues such as race and gender. It’s simply for sake of maintaining social bonds.

Besides, based on my personal experiences, I often go to the wrong toilet due to the misleading of toilet signs, so the presumption about the inaccuracy of toilet signs has existed for a while, which may also influence my final conclusion. I feel like I must forget all this and embrace any kind of investigation results with an open mind.

I also worry whether I should share some theory I learned regarding gender temperament and feminism with my participants if we exchange ideas in related fields, because I’m not sure whether it will set a brand new context for them and thus can interfere with the outcome. When I browse the transcript of interviews, I doubt I can’t help myself to extract and highlight the parts that are mostly consistent with my views. These are several main questions popping up in my brain when I reflect my positionality in this research.

Therefore, I guess I should talk less, listen more during the interview. I need to wait for them to end their speech before I try to make comments or critique. Also, I should pursue a more balanced gender proportion of the participants for more diversed voice. Meanwhile, I shouldn’t categorize the outcome by gender or other label, instead I should see the participants as a whole, a so-called ‘mass’.

[Last modified: October, 14 2024 10:00 PM]

This week I visit many places in our campus to observe the real scenery in which people use toilets on a preliminary basis. My findings are not quite adequate due to the time limit, but still contain some interesting thoughts.

First I noted that the facility/toilets is different from building to building, for example, in the student center, toilets do not have gender signals, instead the sign reads ‘WC’ on the door, indicating it’s for all gender, and each toilet cubicle looks exactly the same. I guess that’s meant to promote the concept of equality and de-sexualization, and most importantly, to eliminate the hassle of misreading toilet signs or climbing a few more floors to find the corresponding toilet. Deep in heart I favour this idea very much, after all, toilets are just place to address normal physiological needs, it’s human society that complicates this simple thing, making it overly gendered. In other places, such as the Taviton Building where I attend my classes, toilets for different genders are scattered on different floors, causing some inconvenience to students.

When it comes to the toilet signs, most sex-segregated toilets in the campus uniformly adopt the standard design to represent male and female: ‘man’ is a normal standing human figure, ‘woman’ is the same human figure, with arms spread as if it is lifting the hem of a skirt. In other words, the male image is closer to what we call ‘the first sex’, which is purely ‘human’ with no emphasis on gender, in contrast to female image which emphasize the sexual characteristics to be distinguished from males. This subtle distinction is a implicit reflection of women’s status as a ‘subordinate gender’ on a subconscious level.

Moreover, usually the word ‘men/women’ is way smaller than the 2 humanoid icons. Maybe it’s actually easier for most people to recognize graphics than text, but I still keep wondering if we can remove the sexist implications of toilet signs by using larger font size and abandoning the use of graphics, or at least we should try to design a set of more neutral humanoid icons. Also, most toilets overlooks the need of LGBTQ people while the society has admitted their existence and rights for a long time.

Nearly everyone would look up and check before they go into the toilet, and I hardly saw anybody who went into the wrong toilet. Based on my personal experience and speculation, I guess that’s because social and cultural psychology tells us it would be extremely shameful if you accidentally go into other gender’s toilet, therefore no matter how desperate people are to excrete, they would always make sure it’s the right toilet.

[Last modified: October, 14 2024 09:26 PM]

A draft research proposal: Public perception of gender signage of toilets

Topic:

What’s people’s opinion towards the common signs of gender in public toilets?

Research question:

• How much attention do people pay to toilet signs?
• Do people really think this existing symbol system can accurately represent gender characteristics?
• Do people believe that toilet signs should be strongly related to gender characteristics?
• Do someone consider these signs associated with gender bias and stereotypes? And why?
• To what extent are people confused and sometimes misled by these signs and went into the wrong toilet?
• If people do not quite endorse the current signs, what kind of design or alteration would they suggest?
• (optional) What about LGBTQ people? Do they want a new symbol system that includes non-binary gender as well, or they are perfectly good with the existing ones?

Methods:

Interview: pick random people I encounter at public places (mainly restaurants and department stores and museums) and ask them if they are interested for a short interview since this research is not restricted to any specific group

Bibliography: maybe related to some other research in the field of visual symbol, functionality of public space, gender psychology, gender equality awareness etc.

Resources collection and sorting: many versions of toilet signs that are still in use

Potential findings:

The mainstream toilet sign’s appearance

Both the value and flaws of the current version of toilet sign design

Public awareness of the link between toilet signs and mass perception of sexuality

Potential way to improve the signage of toilets

Further elaboration:

I choose this topic because it covers a wider range and deeply roots in gender issues which I care a lot (instead of the fetishism one, which you like better, sorry :D) and there’s no need to deliberately pick specific participants. I’m curious about how many people would think that toilet signs need to be updated as the gender affirmative movements develops, and how many think that is not even a problem. In an ideal situation, the proportion of male and female participants should be close to 1:1.

Some questions I would like to ask:

I worry that I may have some premises when I come up with this idea, since the toilet sign is related to everybody including me, especially that I’m a female. Actually I put forward this topic because I think most of the current toilet signs are biased more or less which makes me sick, so my overall attitude is negative. Is this OK to study something when you already have some views about it? Would my unintentional hints or emotional position influence my interview participants? If so, how can I try to stay neutral?

When it comes to interviewing LGBTQ people, how to avoid offending them when asking questions about toilet, biological sex and psychological sex, and gender cognition? Because I’m afraid I don’t know enough about them.

[Last modified: October, 1 2024 05:57 PM]

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