Conducting international fieldwork provides significant value for dissertation research in various disciplines. Panelists will share information, guidance, and lessons learned related to planning, preparing, and conducting fieldwork overseas. Topics include factors shaping field site location(s) and/or partner(s), handling the logistics of fieldwork, data accumulation and protection in varied contexts, models and practices of in situ collaborations, and planning for and getting acclimated to living and working in a new environment and culture.

Moderator

Chris Barrett (Dyson School)Panelists

Emily Dunlop (Government, A&S)Samantha Lee Huey (Nutritional Sciences, CHE)Stacey Langwick (Anthropology, A&S)***

Grad Chats: Conversations on International Research and Practice is a series hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies to support graduate students with interdisciplinary training and planning around conducting international research.

Spring 2023 Schedule

From Plan A to Plan B: Designing Research for a Changing World (Thursday, February 16, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G02)Beyond the IRB: Ethics and International Research (Wednesday, March 29, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Best Practices and Challenges in International Field Research (Thursday, March 30, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G02)Finding a Research Focus through Creative Writing (Tuesday, April 18, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Travel Health and Safety Awareness for Conducting Research Abroad (Tuesday, May 9, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)

The Portrait as/in Ethnography: Work in Progress Screening and Discussion of These Days, These Homes

Jenny Chio is a cultural anthropologist and filmmaker at the University of Southern California.

Learn more about Professor Chio at http://www.jennychio.com/

Abstract:

What are the ethnographic and filmic possibilities of the portrait?

These Days, These Homes is a work in progress film project centered on the lives and homes of two rural Miao women in 21st century China. As an ethnography, the work behind the film explores domesticity, gender, and development. As a film, the praxis of documentation, conversation, and composition attempts to harness the potential of the portrait as a mode of critical knowledge-making that recognizes the incompleteness of all representational forms as well as the foundational relationships (and obligations) structuring all ethnographic encounters.

These Days, These Homes preview: https://vimeo.com/jennychio/tdthpreview

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Performing & Media Arts; The Department of Asian Studies; the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies; and East Asia Program. Thank you!

Xinyu Guan (Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology, Cornell University) leads this workshop.

Eighty percent of Singapore’s population lives in apartment blocks constructed by the Housing Development Board (HDB). Guan's talk examines how state-constructed housing estates in Singapore function as a site for the production of Asianness.

First, Guan examines how HDB neighborhoods are cast as quintessentially Asian, as opposed to Western, spaces, amidst the turn to neoliberalism and the debates over culture in 1990s Singapore arguing that the casting of HDB neighborhoods as Asian spaces recruit HDB inhabitants as everyday enforcers of the moralized boundaries between citizens and non-citizens, and between good and bad Asians.

Second, Guan explores ethnographically how HDB neighborhoods function as a site for the production of a Sinocentric form of Asianness. He considers how migrant and nonmigrant bodies are racialized and interpellated in these spaces, in accordance with their embodied linguistic performance of Chinese languages. Further, Guan discusses how Singaporean HDB inhabitants construct new meanings of Asianness vis-à-vis these migrants, whose labor keeps the HDB neighborhood running.

Finally, Guan's talk illustrates how his ethnographic and historical perspectives enrich theorizations of Asian urban modernities and neoliberal authoritarianism in the wider region.

Introduction by Chencong Zhu (Co-chair of EAP-GSSC and Ph.D. student, Anthropology, Cornell University)

Biography: Xinyu Guan is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. His research examines state-constructed housing and the everyday micropolitics of migration and sexuality in Singapore. A Fall 2020 EAP Hu Shih Fellow, Xinyu works at the intersections of Southeast Asian, Indian Ocean and East Asian worlds, and engages questions of postcoloniality, urbanity and citizenship from critical trans-Asian perspectives.

This workshop is organized by East Asia Program's Graduate Student Steering Committee (EAP-GSSC). The GSSC workshop is open to the public but RSVPs are encouraged. Please contact eap-gssc@cornell.edu for RSVPs and questions.