Blog 4: Podcast questions & Brainstorming

For the podcast Notes on Camp, the goal of the podcast was to show what the camp culture is at Greenwoods and Lake of the Woods, as well as what camp culture is in general. I believe this was a good example of an ethnography, as the sources interviewed and observed were all campgoers. The interviewers did a lot of just observing, watching the campers conduct their activities and then later asking them questions about what their camp experience was like. The majority of the podcast comes directly from the campers. Most of the talking from the interviewers is asking questions or describing events observed that the audience cannot see due to the audio-only nature of podcasts. The podcast was ordered by "notes," or subtopics. In this way the interviewers were able to focus on a single aspect of camp culture rather than simply throwing all of camp life at the audience. This functioned well to keep the reader interested as well by breaking up the stories of the Lake of the Woods girls with stories from other sources.

In How to Become Batman, the person being profiled was Daniel Kish. The focus of the podcast was on his experience as a blind man who could "see" and how our expectations limit other blind people from "seeing" as he does. Though the podcast was a profile on the unique experience of Daniel, it also focused on the overarching question of how our expectations contribute to the behavior of individuals. This is similar to how all of our essays must be about one central critical question, so this podcast was a good example of what we should be writing. Most of the podcast is told by Daniel or the other blind people interviewed; the hosts mostly discuss what they learned from Daniel and asked questions of him. What most stuck with me from the podcast was the portion about the lab rats, and how their performance in the maze was influenced by the "smart" and "dumb" labels assigned to them. I kept thinking about that during the entire podcast, and with each example that Daniel talked about I thought of how I may have been unconsciously been contributing to the way that blind people and other disabled people conduct their lives.


I had this entire section written out, and then Blogger had an error in publishing that deleted everything under the cut, so forgive me if I am extremely short and perhaps a little frustrated in this section.

The groups I am interested in interviewing are genderqueer people, people who do not fit their stereotypical gender role (such as female athletes or metrosexual gay men), or people who fit their gender role a little too well (extremely feminine women or hyper-masculine men). If I were to do a profile, I know a number of trans people on campus that I know very vaguely from only one or two conversations. Regardless of group, I have one question that I am interested in having answered: what hobbies did the person engage in when they were younger, and which hobbies or interests did their parents encourage? I think that what their parents encouraged them to do when they were younger may have had an impact on their gender identity today.

If I were to observe the athletes, I would want to know if they interacted with their teammates in a masculine or feminine way (the sort of friendships they had, the actions they engaged in to show support or encouragement, etc). I would ask them if they would describe themselves as feminine, masculine, or somewhere in between. Since sports are often considered a masculine interest and female athletes often forgo typical feminine interests such as makeup and fashionable clothes, I would hope to use their experience to help show the relationship between their gender identity and their gendered activities.

If I were to observe the extremely feminine/masculine people, I would want to know if they were conscious of their hyper-gendered mannerisms and if they made a conscious effort to continue these mannerisms, or if they were natural. I would be curious to know if they had any hobbies or interests that didn't fit their traditional gender role. I would hope that their profile would help to shed light on the relationship between gendered mannerisms and appearances.