I took my grandma to the doctors for her annual today. The doctor that we have been with for the last 5 years moved to another office. So today we had a new doctor. I gave the new doctor a brief overview of the last 5 years of my grandma’s medical history. Our new doctor was wonderful, personable, and attentive.

During the entire updating process, the doctor was primarily talking to me because I was translating and I have been the primary overseer of my grandma’s health for the last few years.

I noticed that she was carrying around a new netbook. She was typing my notes in the netbook while constantly referring back to my grandmother’s file that contained her entire medical history being various doctors.

I noticed that the entire time we talked, it was very hard for her to have any direct interaction with my grandma. Her back was faced towards her as the netbook was placed on a stationary built in counter. As she typed the notes, she looked at me and then would periodically turn her entire body around 360 around to smile at my grandma and then immediately turn back to her netbook.

When we were done with the exam, I chatted with the doctor for a few minutes about the netbooks. She said that the office was trialing these netbooks out and had rented them for 6 months. She seemed ambivalent about the netbook, as if it was forced upon her. She said,

“Well I can take it with me everywhere and look up notes on each patient, but the file of the patient’s history still isn’t on the laptop so we still have to pull up files and deal with a lot of papework. It just feels like another thing to carry around and keep track of.”

When I asked her how it affected her interaction with her patients, she said that this was her primary reason for not liking these laptops. She showed me that using the netbook meant that she had to spend more time with her back towards her patients. I asked her if she had tried sitting down and putting it in her lap so that she could face the patient, but she said that was also inconvenient because of all patient history paper file. She then want on to explain that she preferred the stationary big screen desktops on carts at her old office because it was on a table that could face the patient or be moved around within the room.

Post observation thoughts?

spatial layout of material objects matters
I think a big fix in the problem would be the way rooms are designed. Spatial layout of an office/room matters for the introduction of a new technology. Therefore, the reception and usage of a new technology, such as this netbook, will vary across different offices. And it’s cool to think about how even minute furniture and room layouts can make a difference.
In this instance, the only place for the doctor to place her netbook in such way that her physical paper files could also be accessed meant that her face-to-face time with her patient was compromised. Imagine if there was an extra cart in this room with a big computer screen and each doctor could plug in their own netbooks. Or imagine if all the stationary computers in each were networked so doctors didn’t have to keep track of their netbooks. This was a such a great learning moment for me in terms of witnessing how the consideration of spatial layout is especially salient for conducting comparisons in technology usage for a new tool across communities.
This reminds me of the time I spent working in the projects of the South Bronx. I had noticed that the layout of a small apartment that housed 4-8 people would’ve made it impossible for a student to use a desktop computer with broadband the same way as a student in larger apartment or home of middle-high income families.

the extent of digitization of info matters
the mobility of laptops were useful for accessing only recent notes because most of the files had yet to be scanned into computers. For all the promises that mobile tools deliver to professionals in service industries, it’s difficult to take full advantage of these tools when the entire information base of an organization has yet to be digitized. As the doctor had explained, she still had to rely on physical paper files for the patient history. The netbook was only useful for accessing recent visits. I wonder what she would’ve thought about the laptop if ALL patient histories was on it. Would she have sat down and put the netbook in her lap so that she could have more time with the patient?

human connection matters
decreased face-to-face time was the primary issue for the doctor. This was such a great example of when a technology appears to offer more mobility may work to compromise other forms of interactions that may be more valued in a certain social setting.

Mobility as a feature is neutral
There is a lot of excitement across HCI and CSCW for studies on mobilites and how digital tools can complement a more mobile lifestyle. Aside from my observation that most of these studies are on elite Western (usually Anglo) travelers or mobile workers and tend to undervalue informal economy workers who rely just as much on mobility - I think this is such an exciting area of research that has pushed me to bring the concept of mobility closer to lived practices of mobilities.
That being said, I think that it should not be considered a priori that mobility is a “good” or “desired” aspect of X. In the case of the doctor’s office, having a mobile laptop seemed to be novel technology that the doctor was obligated to carry around. Of course it was not an ideal office with patient history files still on paper format and badly designed patient rooms - but that is just the point. Rarely are technologies introduced into ideal or perfect settings. So it’s good to think more critically about the role of mobility for a specified audience and what mobility means to them. In this case, increased mobility of note taking and accessing for doctors compromised personal connections with their patients.

One of the ways I thought about this in the past was trying to think about the other end of mobile cellphones as mobility saviours - so what groups wouldn’t want to be as mobile - what situations would mobility as an option not be valued?

What came to my mind?
• cheating spouses who don’t want to be located
• paraplegics
• people who hate cellphones

yah ok this is a totally lame list - I couldn’t really come up with any other groups because I think my problem is that I live too much in a paradigm where mobility is valued and an absolute! I am one of those working professionals who travels a lot and would stop breathing if I didn’t have my cellphone or my laptop on a work day.

ok so here’s some things questions in conclusion:
• How do new technologies affect work flows?
• How do new technologies affect client/patient interaction?
• What are the compromises that are made for a more mobile lifestyle/interaction?
• How does spatial placement of objects affect technology usage?

Useful Links
• Microsoft Research on Health and Wellbing
Ethnography and Healthcare
• Multi-tasking in practice: Coordinated activities in the computer supported doctor–patient consultation. International Journal of Medical Informatics, Volume 74, Issue 6, Pages 425-436. M.Gibson, K.Jenkings, R.Wilson, I.Purves
• Clinician style and examination room computers: a video ethnography. W Ventres, R Marlin, N Vuckovic, V Stewart - Fam Med, 2005 - stfm.org.
• Mapping the integration of social and ethical issues in health technology assessment.
Lehoux P, Williams-Jones B. Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2007 Winter;23(1):9-16.
• Making a Case in Medical Work: Implications for the Electronic Medical Record. M Hartswood, R Procter, M Rouncefield, R … - Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2003 - portal.acm.org

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a technology conference when a white male asks me what I research, and when I say something like “technology use in China,” they will at some point say, “oh man China is  like the Wild Wild West.” I usually respond by saying, “no, it’s not.” And then often they proudly respond with, “ya you’re right, China is the wild wild east!” By then I try to get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.

So here is a more well thought out response that I would like to give the next time I hear this. 

No, China isn’t like the West nor is China wild. During the Wild Wild West era in 18th and 19th century US, expansionists justified the take over of the western part of the US with the belief of Manifest Destiny - that it was America’s mission to bring democracy to the rest of the unconquered west. This is a misleading and pernicious metaphor to employ because it perpetuates a colonial view that those who are not like us and places that we have yet to conquer are unruly. It’s a metaphor simile thats says we are tame, they are wild.

The western part of America back then wasn’t so wild - it actually was filled with hundreds of thousands of Native Indians. It was filled with a complexity of knowledge systems, colonial histories with Spain and Mexico, and ongoing movement of people.

 This space was the “West” for the colonizers with a capital W - a place with its own myths and a place for to carry out Manifest Destiny.  But for the people already living there, it was their place, not the West. It confuses me when we (Americans) glorify the Wild Wild West Era without honoring the people who died during this period. Sure tons of technological feats were achieved. But it was an era of imported indentured slaves (Chinese) and a full slave production in the South that financed the companies that pushed for the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny through the massive genocide of Native Indians (Trail of Tears). American became rich, dirty rich during the Wild Wild West period. And as an America, I’m not proud of how we made our riches in the early years of our empire.  

Employing such a deprecating metaphor simile of the Wild Wild West renders China a place to be conquered, civilized, and remade. It reveals the underlying myths and stories we tell about China  - an unruly land of wild, lawless, people who will benefit from order, rules, and culture, just like how we once envisioned the West as a land full of animals, property, and uncivilized natives. It also frames China as a place frozen in time as people often draw upon China as the oldest and and continuous civilization on earth. The metaphor simile also culls up a way of thinking that not only says this place needs order, but is a worth our time for us to be the arbitrars of order. 

There is a reason why we don’t call Nigeria, Antarica, or Figi the wild wild west - it’s because we don’t see these places as worthwhile markets of investment. 

One of my favorite theorists, Doreen Massey, says that Westerners have a tendency to see space as a smooth flat surface from our own vantage point— a smooth space in which to roll out our ideas, technologies, and policies.

It sometimes seems that in the garadene rush to abandon the singularity of the modernist grand narrative (the singular universal story) what has been adopted in its place is a vision of an instantaneity of interconnections.  But this is to replace a single history with no history…deathlessness.” ( 2005, pg 14 in For Space.)

So by saying that China is the “Wild Wild West,” we are assigning it one narrative—ours.  Massey proposes that we see space as a production of relations, as the co-temporal existence of multiple people, competing histories, and contesting forms of knowledge. Space is a process that is continually being remade. 

What is at stake here if we don’t stop thinking of China as the Wild Wild West? Many things - but the most important thing for me is that  how we think about space actually influences how we interact with others who occupy the space. So thinking of China as the Wild Wild West will influence how you interact with Chinese people and institutions and I’m arguing it’s an undesirable way to interact if you really want to create understanding to accomplish whatever your project.

Ultimately what’s at stake is power and domination is understanding because if we imagine the world as places with singular narratives waiting for our discovery, then this serves a colonial project and legitimizes policies that end up harming the people in these places.

Massey says that all space is regulated. So with that being the case, I see that it’s up to us how this happens. And in a globalized world of networked digital technologies, it’s inevitable for dialogues about how a space is regulated to become more public as more of these conversations take place online. As American companies, IP lawyers, entrepeneurs, marketers, technologists make their way to China, I ask you to see China as part of the World Wide Web as opposed to the Wild Wild Web.  It’s a very simple re-orientation in the mind, but it can be very difficult when Americans grown up in a country that believes that democracy is best delivered through free-market mechanisms and is the best way of life. 

update June 9, 2010: Kenyatta Cheese and I were discussing the techcrunch article on how Web 2.0 companies are learning from their past failed attempts in China. Kenyatta made a point that it would’ve been even better if the article said something about the existing, exciting, and thriving web 2.0 culture in China and

“to at least mention that it isn’t unchartered territory — that there are thousands of Chinese web 2.0 companies already competing in the space.” 

I totally agree. 

update June 14, 2010 -  I just Mike Hudack’s blog post - very relevant:

“Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence,” he continues. “This is the destiny of the universe.” — Merely Human? That’s so yesterday. NYT (via idlaurenn)

This quote pissed me off more than anything else in that article. What hubris! I can imagine a European explorer saying the same of the New World centuries ago. “Ultimately, the entire planet will become saturated with Western European intelligence and culture and religion. This is the destiny of the planet.”

Yes mike I totallllllly agreeee! pisses me off to to read this quote from Raymond Kurzweil of Singularity at this Google funded talk. This kind of thinking will be the topic of my upcoming talk that I’ve giving at The Humanities conference. 

ok one more blog post on something that informs thought process (again Kevin this is your fault!)

I read lots of books from economic geographers and communication theorists about the effects of new technologies on society. Many theorists agree that digital tools cause spatial and temporal disconnects, shifting the way we experience everyday life. Within this group are scholars who propose widely popular and cited phrases about time and pace.

Some examples:

• David Harvey says that this creates “time-space compression.”
• Manuel Castells claims that the global IT workers in the tech industry are increasingly located in the “space of flows,” the distributed geographic digital networks that mediate virtual communication.  In such a society, “places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network” so that the structural logic that runs a network society is not based on places (pg 443).
• Even the economists agree but they tend to have a more positive take. George Gilder (2000, Telecosm: the world after bandwidth abundance) believes that global diffusion of telecom will emancipate people from face-to-face relations.
• Frances Cairncross (2001, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution is Changing our Lives) doesn’t see distance as a limiting factor in social interaction.     

Essentially, what these authors claim of digital tools are the same claims that we have heard about all preceding technologies from trains to telephones to the cotton gin to cars - technologies compress space-time. They create confusion, chaos and overload. 

There seems to be a great sense of urgency on the affects of our new digital time. This urgency is borderline fear and fetish of a new so-called compressed space-time experience where daily life at increasing at speeds so fast, so FAST THAT WHAT? What will happen??? We will explode!!! And now social media is killing us! Info Overload! 

Paul Virillo, a theorist on speed, politics, and wars, is very concerned about time-space compression and outlines a possible future of time concussions:

What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. The specific negative aspect of these information superhighways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding alterity (the other), this disturbance in the relationship with the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this non-situation, is going to usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy……For the first time, history is going to unfold within a one-time-system: global time. Up to now, history has taken place within local times, local frames, regions and nations. But now, in a certain way, globalization and virtualization are inaugurating a global time that prefigures a new form of tyranny. If history is so rich, it is because it was local, it was thanks to the existence of spatially bounded times which overrode something that up to now occurred only in astronomy: universal time. But in the very near future, our history will happen in universal time, itself the outcome of instantaneity - and there only.

Now when I need to find some sanity in all these calls to deconstruct grand meta-narratives of  super-modernity’s time-space compression - there is one woman that I always call upon, the amazing Doreen Massey. She is freaking AWESOME. I worship her brain. I put her in the cloud with Donna Haraway. Donna and Doreen  - solid.

Doreen Massey’s work is in many ways a response to a deficiency in spatial theory to account for practices and conceptions of place beyond elite individuals who can jet set from one time zone to another and effortlessly relocate and disassociate from places. Many of the compression-space-time scholars theorize broadly about a very elite and narrow experience of life with digital tools, of which Massey avoids doing.  She is one of the key thinkers who deplore universal accounts of place as bounded and fixed across social relationships and the dichotomy of place as bounded and space as open. 

For Massey, even if a place appears to be bounded, she argues that this place is located in a grander scheme of space that is constantly in flux.  She employs the concept of “power geometry” in insisting that the production of place and space be examined across class, gender, nations, cultures, economies, and race, and that this analysis  must be examined together in relation to the flow and movement within one place and in relation to other places (1993).  For Massey, places are constantly in flux and reflect hybrid forms of power and culture, and to see it any other way would gloss over the mobile, imaginative and unpredictable practices of everyday life. 

Doreen Massey reminds me why I do the research that I do with who I do it with. Massey always has a great sense of justice and power infused into her work. Working in low-income or marginal communities isn’t exactly sexy and I don’t produce research that affirms what Western tech companies want to see or hear. But I have tons of fun and I believe in the importance of my work because it addresses uneven distribution of power and resources.

Massey is so awesome that I’ve cut some of my fave sections out of one the most beautiful essays every written by a geographer - A Global Sense of Place in Reading Human Geography (1997). Someone has put her essay up here - download while it’s avail!

I’m just going to let Doreen do her thing now - these are several excerpts that I can’t even cut up - every word is beautiful. But the essay really does need to read in its entirety so that you can see the narrative she traces. If you end up really liking her, I suggest that you also read For Space. It’s another deeply thoughtful meditation on space and place.

Now I want to make one simple point here, and that is about what one might call the power geometry of it all; the power geometry of time-space compression. For different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also
about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.

In a sense at the end of all the spectra are those who are both doing the moving and the communicating and who are in some way in a position of control in relation to it  - the jet-setters, the ones sending and receiving the faces and the e-mail, holding the international conference calls, the ones distributing films, controlling the news, organizing the investments and the international currency transactions. These are the groups who are really in a sense in charge of time-space compression, who care really
use it and turn it to advantage, whose power and influence it very definitely increases.

On its more prosaic fringes this group probably includes a fair number of western academics and journalists - those, in other words, who write most about it. But there are also groups who are also doing a lot of physical moving, but who are not ‘in charge’ of the process in the same way at all. The refugees from El Salvador or Guatemala and the undocumented migrant workers from Michoacan in Mexico, crowding into Tijuana to make a perhaps fatal dash for it across the border into the US to grab a chance of a new life. Here he experience of movement, and indeed of a confusing plurality of cultures, is very different. And there are those from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Caribbean, who come half way round the world only to get held up in an interrogation room at Heathrow.

——-

This is, in other words, a highly complex social differentiation. There are differences in the degree of movement and communication, but also in the degree of control and initiation. The ways in which people are placed within ‘time-space compression’ are highly complicated and extremely varied.

——-

But this in turn immediately raises questions of politics. If time-space compression can be imagined in that more socially formed, socially evaluative and differentiated way, then there may be here the possibility of developing a politics of mobility and access. For it does seem that mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power. It is not simply a question of unequal distribution, that some people
move more than others, and that some have more control than others. It is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people. Differential mobility can weaken the leverage of the already weak. The time-space compression of some groups can undermine the power of others.

———-

Many of those who write about time-space compression emphasize the insecurity and unsettling impact of its effects, the feeling of vulnerability which it can produce. Some therefore go on from this to argue that, in the middle of all this flux, people desperately need a bit of peace and quiet - and that a strong sense of place, or locality, can form one kind of refuge from the hubbub. So the search after the ‘real’ meanings
of places, the unearthing of heritages and so forth, is interpreted as being, in part, a response to desire for fixity and for security of identity in the middle of all the movement and change. A ‘sense of place’, of rootedness, can provide - in this form and on this interpretation - stability and a source of unproblematical identity. In that
guise, however, place and the spatially local are then rejected by many progressive people as almost necessarily reactionary. They are interpreted as an evasion; as a retreat from the (actually unavoidable) dynamic and change of ‘real life’, which is what we must seize if we are to change things for the better. On this reading, place
and locality are foci for a form of romanticized escapism from the real business of the world. While ‘time’ is equated with movement and progress, ‘space’/’place’ is equated
with stasis and reaction.

There are some serious inadequacies in this argument. There is the question of why it is assumed that time-space compression will produce insecurity. There is the need to face up to - rather than simply deny - people’s need for attachment of some sort, whether through place or anything else. None the less, it is certainly the case that there is indeed at the moment a recrudescence of some very problematical sense of
place, from reactionary nationalisms, to competitive localisms, to introverted obsessions with ‘heritage’. We need, therefore, to think through what might be an adequately progressive sense of place, one which would fit in with the current global local times and the feelings and relations they give rise to, and which would be useful in what are, after all, political struggles often inevitably based on place. The question

is how to hold on to that notion of geographical difference, of uniqueness, even of rootedness if people want that, without being reactionary.

There are a number of distinct ways in which the ‘reactionary’ notion of place described above is problematical. One is the idea that places have single, essential, identities. Another is the idea that place - the sense of place - is constructed out of an introverted, inward-looking history based on delving into the past for internalized origins, translating the name from the Domesday Book.

These arguments, then, highlight a number of ways in which a progressive concept of place might be developed. First of all, it is absolutely not static. If places can be conceptualized in terms of the social interactions which they tie together, then it is also the case that these interactions themselves are not motionless things, frozen in time. They are processes. One of the great one-liners in Marxist exchanges has for long been, ‘Ah, but capital is not a thing, it’s a process.’ Perhaps this should be said also about places, that places are processes, too.

Second, places do not have boundaries in the sense of divisions which frame simple enclosures. ‘Boundaries’ may be of course be necessary, for the purposes of certain turn of studies for instance, but they are not necessary for the conceptualization of a place itself. Definition in this sense does not have to be through simple
counterposition to the outside; it can come, in part, precisely through the particularity of linkage to that ‘outside’ which is therefore itself part of what constitutes the place. This helps get away from the common association between penetrability and vulnerability. For it is this kind of association which makes invasion by newcomers so
threatening.

Third, clearly places do not have single, unique ‘identities’; they are full of internal conflicts. Just think, for instance, about London’s Docklands, a place which is at the moment quite clearly defined by conflict: a conflict over what it past has been (the nature of its ‘heritage’), conflict over what should be its present development, conflict over what could be its future.

Fourth, and finally, none of this denies place nor the importance of the uniqueness of place. The specificity of place is continually reproduced, but it s not a specificity which result from some long, internalized history. there are a number of sources of this specificity - the uniqueness of place. There is the fact that the wider social relations in which places are set themselves geographically differentiated.

Globalization (in the economy, or in culture, or in anything else) does not entail simply homogenization. On the contrary, the globalization of social relations is yet another source of (the reproduction of) geographical uneven development, and thus of the uniqueness of place. There is the specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations. There is the fact that this very mixture together in one place may produce effects which would not have happened otherwise. And finally, all these relations with and take a further element of specificity from the accumulated history of a place, with that history itself imagined as the product of layer upon layer of different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world.

How can ethnography in a digital world capture culturally embedded practices and discourses that are specific to communities that are no longer place-based? What are the future routes for a field that has been traditionally rooted to a bounded sense of place? How do we identity not only when our field work begins, but where? I try to provide some preliminary answers in this field paper. 

I argue that several often-cited theorists of digital culture provide insufficient and misleading directions for conducting ethnography in a digitally mediated world. These theorists end up producing a dichotomy that assigns culture to place and ICTs (along with capital) to space. David Harvey, Paul Virilio, and Manuel Castells (to name a few) are exemplary of this type of theory building. They create a dichotomy where culture is tied to the local and the bounded, while capital is associated with global and the mobile.

The consequences of assigning the local to the immobile is that this leads to a divided ethnography—an ethnography of spatial flows versus an ethnography of fixed places. Working within this typology means the an ethnographer of marginalized communities has already pegged their field site as part of the invisible, oppressed, and fixed locales that exist in contrast to the global elite. This dichotomy forces ethnographers into a methodological cul-de-sac that is buttressed by theories that already support its outcomes—theories that reify spatially bounded and marginalized locales. What Appadurai (1996) had urged for ethnographers to avoid is being repeated—bounding culture to local places. Except for this time, global flows of technology are attacking local culture.  

But these theories depend on a binary of digital haves and have-nots. The haves are always the elites located in space of flows and the have-nots are always located in fixed places. Castells and Harvey do not attend to the complexity of a digital world where affordable access to digital tools is less of a problem than access to information. In Harvey’s “space-time compression,” Castells’ “space of flows” and Virilio’s “universal time”, capital’s global and technical flows obliterate the poor, the technology have-nots, and the local. The marginalized are located outside of these new global flows of capital and power that are facilitated by technology precisely because they do not have access to these technologies . 

I review several ethnographies of marginalized technology users that resist this type of divided  ethnography. I distinguish two different types of ethnographies: 1.) those that embrace  offline and  online field sites, and 2.) those that have restricted their field sites to only the online or the offline. Ethnographies of the former locate internet-related practices as embedded in a larger matrix of practices. Where as ethnographies of the latter treat digital-related practices as a wholly unique and bounded world. This difference in theoretical positioning had radical implications for how a researcher identifies a field site and uses ethnography (Hine 1998: 140).

Ethnographers can be attentive to the unproductive conceptualization of digital users that I have identified. I suggest that we examine Michael Peter Smith’s (2002) and Jenna Burrell’s (2009) methodological proposals for an updated version of multi-sited fieldwork and the emergence of the mobilities paradigm. I then close the paper with a reflection on why ethnography still matters. I explain that ethnography is needed for grounded theory building and to give a face to techno-utopic accounts of technology use that tends to discount marginalized communities. Ethnography reveals social processes that come along with ICTs that would otherwise be difficult to understand. I end the paper with Paul Willis’s discussion on the ethnographic imagination.

list of citations

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I’ve been writing up my field exams over the last few months, trying to cram what should be 1-2 years of reading and writing into a matter of 3 months. Field exams (or what others call oral exams) are part of the long process of getting your phd in the US. Prior to defending your prospectus (which grants you the permission to do dissertation field work), you have to pass the field exams. This process is different in every department.

For me, I  had to essentially write two thesis on two relevant fields to my dissertation research. I chose ethnography and urban sociology. The abstract above is from my ethnography paper. I plan on fleshing out some of the ideas from this paper for my prospectus and eventual dissertation. But that would suck if anyone has to wait that long to read it! So I’ll be posting different parts of my ethnography paper into several blog posts over the next few weeks. 

The next step is preparation for the orals exams. This is where I “defend” these field papers in front of my committee. They ask lots of questions - I try to answer…they ask more - and yes that goes on for a few hours. AFTEr I pass my oral defense, then I spend a few more weeks writing my prospectus in preparation for my prospectus defense. The prospectus is where you outline your field work plans. THEN I’ll be off to china! 

Here’s a link to the abstracts from my ethnography and urban field papers with a full list of citations for both papers. 

______

As an aside - being new to academia, I thought that my department would just rationally waive this step considering that I’ve done more years of fieldwork and presentations around the world than most graduate students. But apparently 4 years of being in the field does not excuse me from the rules! I think that they still thought I was joking when I asked if I really had to do this. 

I’m happy to say that I’m finally done! I’ve been on a strict 15 hours/day 5,000 words/day schedule for the last 3 months. It’s now over. Thanks to a special writing buddy, a lovely coffee shop down the street from me, a great doggy, and friends who took care of me and came all the way to see in brooklyn - I was able to get these done! I am proud to say that I didn’t leave my neighborhood for these few months - didn’t even buy a metro card! 

______

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press.

Burrell, Jenna. 2009. “The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research.” Field Methods 21:181-199.

Castells, Manuel. 2000. The rise of the network society. Oxford ; Malden, {MA}.

Harvey, David. 1991. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Reprint. Wiley-Blackwell.

Smith, Michael Peter. 2002. “Power in Place: Retheorizing the Local and the Global.” Pp. 111-130 in Understanding the city: contemporary and future perspectives. Oxford, UK; Malden, MA.

Virilio, Paul. 2007. Speed and politics. Semiotext(e).

Willis, Paul. 2000. The Ethnographic Imagination. Polity.