Initial Proposal for "my new york"

This proposal is reissued from the project’s proposal in Participatory Research class:
My map for this class will be about the International Students who come to study in New York and their experiences of the city. These students will be selected among the ones who have some kind of interest in artistic expression (in any medium). One of the research goals of this project is to look at the definition of International Students in the participants’ own terms, which will be crucial in defining the group’s potential to define social and political goals. My own definition of the terms either the immigrant or international student are broader to incorporate cosmopolitan ideals; however, this project gathers its participants who are defined by their educational institutions definition as International Students. This institutional definition is giving the group some social and political rights which different groups of immigrants lack (illegal immigrants): but even being international student has a limited rights as “legal aliens”. This project will use ethnographic, phenomenological methods to discover the common themes arising from each participant’s narration of their experiences. My personal interest in the project started with my intellectual curiosity about different ways of representing the narratives of the other and my desire to overcome the problems of representing the “other”. The topic evolved from my interest in New York as a network of different social groupings. Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project” was my influence and his study of “flaneurs” is especially important within this project. “Arcades project” looks into 19^th century Paris through literature, ads, arts and the architectural form “arcades” to show the social, cultural, political and economical configurations. Benjamin studies a sociological group “flaneurs” within these configurations and he uses “walking” observations to make his points. Michel de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life” is also studies “walking” of people as a political expression of the individuals and how people turn “places” into “spaces” through creating meaning and relationships. Certeau’s concept of “space” and “spatial stories” made me think of my own experience of the New York as an immigrant (international student) and I made this film within a collaborative project with my friend Ulrich Stark:  http://spatialstory.wordpress.com/ . This process leads me to define the importance of studying the “space making” practice of the immigrants who are the “outsiders” inside the city. The initial step of the project is to ask the participants to take me to a tour of a place in the city that is “meaningful” for them ;so this research will have an information on participants’ choice of “spaces” (meaningful places) and the “meanings”  associated within there. “Space making” is also about collective identity and collective memory inscribed spatially. My political position about immigrants is the emphasis of “cosmopolitanism” of the cities against the limitations of the nation-states. This project will try to achieve empowering the participants through exploring subjectivities and their positions within the society.  Derrida and Hannah Arendt points out being “immigrant” should be considered within the concept of “hospitability” as every member of societies might lose their own membership to their own communities. This project will be a first step for me to explore different modes of being immigrant for my future projects. I would like to expand my knowledge about the topic of media, immigration and the city by doing a literature review. The project will discover the themes with the participants through two steps: first it will elaborate Sarah Pink’s experimental method of “walking with camera” and then it will involve semi-structured, in-depth interviews with the participants (these initial two methodologies will be referred as the “field side”). The first step will start by asking the participants to create a 15-30-minute tour of a “meaningful” place (space) that is important for their experience of New York. These places might be important for having personal experiences, political reasons, cultural importance and many other reasons that I want to explore. Pink’s method is also about reading the “walking” of the participants as Benjamin and  Certeau explored in their work. Walking with camera conveys “sensory apprenticeship” to the researcher and it narrates “the centrality of experiencing body to place” and “the gathering power of the place” (Casey referenced in Pink’s article). This will be useful to understand the positioning of the participants within the city sphere and their meaning making. I will walk with the participants in this process in their own rhythm and I will be present in their “space”.  “Temporality” is also important layer for me to explore. I want to try to understand the time experience of the participants by being in the same time with them (the concept of “coevalness” of Anthropologist Johann Faber). The possibility of political action lies within the concept of coevalness that the group could understand their aims in the present with collaborative effort. The second step of this initial exploratory process- field side is semi-structured in depth interviews, which aims to cover the narratives of the participants’ experiences of New York in more detail.  These interviews will focus on differences and similarities of their life in New York and their home city (struggles, opportunities…) as to help them discover their political demands. Immigrant identities are defined through their spatial configurations of being inside and outside certain places (in this case New York).  The basic notion of getting familiar with a city has a political connotation that works through forming networks within it. My map might be useful to lay out these networks by focusing on the personal experiences to find the politics of spatial engagement with the city. Digital side and workshop will be used to analyze the material that is produced on the field side. Participants will give feedback on the representation of their own narratives and the others. This project wants to challenge the positivist connotations of the map making. Even though, the map will be made on GIS . Project’s map will use different layers on that general map to convey the complexities and even unrepresentability of the participants’ experiences. Aside from the field material, I am planning to use participants’ own creative works or their documentation to the map. And I will create a blog, which will use collaboratively decided documentation of the facebook discussions (if participants do not want to share some of their post on the facebook page it will be left out in the blog). In the designing process, I will ask the group to think about different uses of the map as Guy Debord’s Psychogeography experiments for the audience and I will try to technical side of having comments of the audiences onto the map in some way. At the end of this research process, there will be a blog, a map, sound and video materials of the experiences, a workshop. These elements will be integrated with each other and my analysis of the research will also be accessible in these channels. My researcher role in this project will be shared in this way, but the end results will be more reflective of the collaborative process.
Resources:
 
1. Bachelard G. The poetics of space. Boston: Beacon Press.
2. Bender T. The unfinished city : New york and the metropolitan idea. New York: New York University Press.
3. Benjamin W. The arcades project. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.
4. de Certeau M. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
5-Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography(1955)
6- Dicks, B., 2006. Multimodal ethnography Qualitative Research.
7- Pink, S., 2007. Walking with video. Visual Studies 22, 240-252.
8- Emerson,R.M.,Fretz,R.I.,Shaw,L.L.,1995. Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. University of Chicago Press,Chicago.
9- Murthy, D., 2008. Digital Ethnography: An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research. Sociology, 42(5), pp.837-­‐855
10-McTaggart, R., 1997. Guiding Principles for Participatory Action Research, in:Participatory Action Research: International Contexts and Consequences. SUNY Press, pp. 25-­‐44.
11-Hamid Naficy, Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politcs of Place
12-Russell King, Media and Migration: Constructions of Mobility and Difference
13-A.Aneesh, Lane Hall & Patrice Petro, Beyond Globalization: Making New Worlds in Media, Art and Social Practices