Amsterdam Research Interests / Preliminary Questions: Oh so many!!!

Although discussing preliminary interests for our research in Amsterdam was part of the “Environmental Behavior Assignment,” I felt like it warranted its own blog entry. Feelings catalyzed actions, and thus, here we are…
...and the concrete questions are delineated by bold, italicized font.

Idea 1:
The “environmental behavior” exercise accomplished more than allowing me to apply some of the theoretical concepts about which we have been learning in class; it allowed me to think of a specific research area of interest: the coffee shops in Amsterdam. Although they are not quite like the coffee shops in Seattle (!), they serve a similar purpose: a gathering place with features that are “neither here nor there.” By this, I mean that coffee shops (like restaurants and other similar spaces) are neither fully public nor truly private. But it is not only the public/private issue that is interesting. The other fascinating thing about such venues is that they become spaces in which a lot of discussion and discourse take place – in a manner more substantial than conversations on the streets, but more informal than academic discourses. Thus, I would be interested in investigating if, and how, coffee shops in Amsterdam serve as the intermediary spaces for important socio-political and cultural discourses and debates.

Idea 2:
Another area of interest for me in regards to a possible research project is the topic of multiculturalism in Amsterdam. Specifically, after watching Fitna and Submission, as well as reading Murder in Amsterdam, I have become very interested in the issue of Islam in the Netherlands. Now, I realize that this is a very broad interest (and one that probably many students on previous trips--as well as on this one--have possessed); thus, I would like to hone in on the subject of media, particularly the use of media in representing various minority groups. To phrase it in a question: how is Islam portrayed in Dutch media? How are Muslims and Middle Eastern immigrants* represented in the various modes of media in the Netherlands? To investigate this question, I would need to obtain visual and literary media (films, news articles, etc.) and perform close readings of them to see if any general trends seem to arise (particularly, I would be interested to see if the other films are similar to Fitna or Submission, or if there is a diverse representation of Islamic life in Dutch media.)
*This should go without mention, but I am fully aware that the two are not one and the same thing.

Idea 3:
Another interest of mine that was spawned by our discussions of Islamic society in Amsterdam lies in broader terms. As a city that is home to Jews, Christians, and Muslims (and a city that has very peculiar, unique histories of all three religious groups), I think it would be interesting to do engage in research that would allow me to do a comparative study of all three religious groups in the city. Specifically, and in an effort to incorporate the concept of "physical space" that has been so prevalent in our discussions, I think it would be interesting to look at religious buildings--namely, churches, mosques and synagogues--and to attend services held in the various structures, particularly paying attention to the sermons. This would all be done in an effort to answer: What kinds of dialogues and discourses do religious spaces foster or allow that are less prevalent in other spaces? How are religious spaces used by varying religious groups in Amsterdam to address issues of the respective communities?

Idea 4:
I realize that the questions presented in "idea 3" are not easy to answer, pose many hurdles, and necessitate a lot of sensitivity and respect, but I feel like the theme that lies at the core of them --how certain spaces allow for specific dialogues, or how certain spaces, especially cultural ones, negotiate identity and diversity--is quite worthy of exploration. With this theme in mind, I realize that one does not need to only look at religious spaces; one can investigate other spaces of multiculturalism that might be easier to access--like restaurants. Although this may initially seem "superficial", I think there is a lot that a person can learn about the topic of multiculturalism in an urban environment from investigating various ethnic restaurants.

Environmental Behavior Assignment: "Welcome to Caw-fee Tsawk*, No Big Whoop"

So, as you can probably tell by now, whenever I have a chance to make a reference in my titles to something from popular culture—even if the reference is only slightly related to the post's content— I do not shy away from the opportunity.
For this assignment, Haylee, Isaac, and I decided to investigate coffee shops in the U District. Specifically, we wanted to see how the various inanimate aspects of a café (lighting, size, arrangement of furniture, music) affect animate objects—that is to say, how a café’s nonliving elements (both visual and audio) affect the behavior of the people in the café by dictating the implied social norms for the given coffee shop. Thus, to a certain degree, our topic of inquiry builds off a key aspect of Lynch’s A Walk Around the Block, which argues that we need to imbue order into an environment in order to make sense of it, thus essentially implying that there is nothing inherent or natural about various urban spaces; they are constantly constructed and reconstructed by the people utilizing the spaces in an unending dialectic in which subject affects object affects subject...
For our investigation, we looked at three cafés—Solstice, Star Life on the Oasis, and Trabant—the latter two of which we investigated in greatest depth. As our observations focused primarily on the inanimate elements of the café, we definitely employed the kind of research techniques that John Zeisel explores in Inquiry by Design: Tools for Environment-Behavior Research when he discusses the method of observing physical traces. Utilizing various forms of documenting our research, we: 1) listed our observations, 2) took photos of the cafes from various angles (thanks to Haylee), and 3) drew floor plans (thanks to Isaac). Before presenting our findings, I would just like to interject with a comment that is--albeit somewhat obvious-- worthy of mentioning: We did not really hone in on our question until we did some preliminary observing, or should I say, visual research. Thus, we did not enter the first coffee shop with a concrete question in mind. Now, for some this may seem like an obvious and logical process (as can be seen by the way Clifford constructed this assignment ("from your observations develop a research question"), but, I do not think that it really felt intuitive for me to observe before asking a question that would allow me to further observe! Part of me I wanted to enter the given topic (observing coffee shops) with a fully formulated question. However, I quickly learned that, somewhat paradoxically, some research (whether it be via observing or reading or any other 'ing') is required before one can inquire about a place and do more substantive research. Again, this is a fairly obvious conclusion to draw, but it made me value something that I think I have begun to take for granted: the importance of just...seeing.

Part 1: Field Research

Cafe 1: Star Life on the Oasis

List of Observations
· One window
· Classical music (followed by non-classical, but still instrumental music)
· Small
· Barista not visible from many parts of the café
· Medium lighting
· Looks like a house
· Pastel colored walls
· Low ceilings
· Lack of view of the outside
· Entrance is not right near the street
· Quiet
· Max of 2 people per table observed
· Mismatched ‘potpourri’ of furniture
· 4 computers; 19 people
· Hours: Sun-Mon, 9-11; Tues, closed; Wed-Sat, 9-10:30

Photos

Floor Plan (please see Isaac's blog for better resolution)





Cafe 2: Trabant

List of Observations

• Very open; two-story
• More uniform, thematic
• Industrial theme
  - dark colors: black tables and chairs, brown and blue walls
  - a lot of metal material
  - urban photos on the walls
  - “unfinished” floors on the second floor, giving the room an apparently intentional “incomplete” room
  - Piping on the outside of the wall
• Lot of space between tables; like islands
• Dimmer lighting, but many large windows
• Max of 4 people per table observed
• Acoustics – loud kitchen whose noise is even more amplified by the openness of the space
• Bar seating
• High ceilings with large hanging lights
• 12 computers; 29 people
• Hours: Mon-Fri, 6:30-midnight; Sat-Sun, 9-midnight

Photos

Floor Plan

Cafe 3: Solstice

During the time we were in Solstice, we actually did not know that we were going to do a survey of various cafes; the café was simply the meeting place that we designated at the end of our last class meeting. Hence, we did not investigate the café in any great detail. However, I recall a few observations that became significant in light of our subsequent investigations of Trabant and Star Life:

• loud music
• bright lighting
• various places to sit
• next to tables (of varying sizes)
• on a sofa
• near the baristas, on barstools
• Baristas visible from anywhere in the large cafe
• they are in a very central location
• their space reminded me of a stage: well lit, central, visible by the entire audience that it faces
• very urban location
• directly on the Ave.
• near a busy bus-stop

Part 2: Analysis

Upon gathering all of the information we collected via various procedures, we were able to draw some very interesting conclusions about the interplay of the living and the inanimate in cafes. Trabant and Solstice were both relatively large, spatially open cafes. The people in these two coffee shops talked with higher frequency and in a louder volume, and were more likely to gather in larger groups. And thus, it seems that, as my biology teacher once told me, structure fits function. But we must remember that there is nothing 'natural' about the various structures of cafes; instead, using Star Life, Solstice, and Trabant as reference points, we can observe that cafes possess specific and intentional constructions and arrangements that then imply a certain decorum for each cafe. Just the physical environments of Trabant and Solstice fostered more, and louder, conversations, conversely, Star Life accomplished the opposite with the design of its physical space -- which can be encapsulated by the following anecdote. As Haylee, Isaac, and I were sitting in Star Life -- observing the soft lighting and music, the small tables, and correlating these observations with the lack of noise or group formations, we started hypothesizing that perhaps the physical aspects of this space were affecting the way the people in it acted. Just as I exuberantly, in a volume barely above a whisper, conveyed this to Haylee and Isaac, I received a cold, harsh look from a woman at a nearby table.

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* My attempt to transliterate how Mike Meyers, playing a middle-aged New York woman, says ‘Coffee Talk’ on the SNL skit “Coffee Talk with Linda Richman.”

Something that warrants more writing than can be accomplished via a short-response blog assignment

To Jessica and Clifford: I noticed that I never posted this assignment, so I am publishing the post a bit late.

For someone who claims to be relatively informed about current events, especially those events dealing with multiculturalism and cultural tensions, I am sad to admit that, prior to reading Ian Buruma's "Murder in Amsterdam" and subsequently watching "Submission, Part 1", the film that ended up serving as the catalyst to the murder discussed in the book, I knew nothing about this film -- much less about the reaction it spurred that led to the assassination of its director in Amsterdam. For this assignment, we were to respond to Theo Van Gogh’s 10-minute 2004 film "Submission", and/or a film by another Dutch director that recently (very recently!) leaked onto the net, "Fitna." Now, there is a lot to be said about the films, and a reaction to them is more worthy of a paper rather than a blog post -- as my not-so-clever blog title suggests. Consequently, I treat the digital space here that I employ to talk about the films as merely a crude starting point to a discussion that extends far beyond the world of web-log entries and into the realm of person-to-person dialogue.

To analyze any body of work, I find it helpful (both for my sake and for the sake of the readers) to describe the piece, having the description serve as a launching pad to a subsequent analysis and response to the work. In “Submission,” four stories are told through the monologues of four Muslim women who are played by a single actress wearing a hijab that covers her entire frame, excluding the eyes. The veil, however, is see-though from the chest down, exposing her naked body on which verses from the Qur’an are painted. In the monologues, the women address Allah to express the various ways in which they have experienced abuse from males who claim that the violence is sanctioned by the Qur’an. As they tell their stories of rape, forced marriage, and beatings, graphic images of battered women appear.

Upon finishing the movie, I was in a quandary as to the approach I should take in responding to the film. Should I respond to it as an artistic piece, commenting on how different visual and audio techniques are used in the movie? Or should I respond to it as a political text -- a “political pamphlet,” as the director called it -- and discuss the social and political messages that might be conveyed through the monologues of the four women? Obviously, I really needed to do both because both of these facets are inextricably linked to each other. I will now attempt to combine (hopefully in some coherent manner) reactions to both of these aspects.

My immediate reaction to “Submission” was indicative of my scholarship in the social sciences, a field that has constantly pushed me to think critically -- to do a critical “close reading” if I may (for you JB!) -- of all knowledge and information that is presented to me. The critical analysis that is called upon by various fields in the social sciences -- especially those of anthropology and sociology --bases itself on the underlying supposition that all knowledge is socially and culturally produced. This kind of analytical framework in turn causes one to view any given body of work – whether a social theory, a description about a certain ethnic or cultural group, a historical account of a country – with the realization that the piece is a socio-culturally constructed entity that has been influenced by the discourses and assumptions that have predated it. In fact, to relate this back to our class, we have actually touched upon this concept with Lynch's A Walk Around the Block as well as Lefebvre's The Production of Space (it is quite incredible, I must say, how much of what we’ve covered in our brief time as a class--concepts of close reading, recognition of social constructs, etc.--relate to essential material that I have been exposed to through multiple years of learning! Props to Jessica and Clifford for that!).

So, having stated all of this, let me resume what I was trying to express in the first sentence of the previous paragraph: my immediate reaction to “Submission” was that it conveyed images and messages that partook in a larger discourse, that of Orientalism -- a discourse that has been used by Western powers to “make sense” of the East in order to better control it. The film views Muslim women though the lens of Orientalism by showing a very monolithic, stereotypical image of the Muslim woman: the oppressed, introverted, mysterious woman. In this way, such an image creates an “other” that is backwards and may even be viewed as uncivilized. All of this, obviously, has very dangerous and demeaning effects that take away from the complexity of Islam and those who identify with it -- thus essentially drawing one big stroke across all of Islam. Having said this, I realize that the film can also be interpreted to merely depict the stories and experiences of four particular women. Also, I am not saying that all of these “repertories of Orientalism” (as scholar Edward Said calls them) are systematically and fervently conveyed in the film – unlike the repertories utilized in “Fitna” that more directly, through gross generalizations and fear-mongering tactics, blame Muslim culture ("Islamization," as the film refers to it) for being anti-progressive and dangerous. Furthermore, the former film was not completely produced by Westerners, as it was written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a self-proclaimed ex-Muslim, Somalian-born Dutch citizen. Nevertheless, the film is still produced in a manner that pins the morality and progressiveness of Western society against the backwardness of Islam. This is clearly seen by the way the director uses the image of the nude body,with verses from the Qur'an written on it, that is seen through the translucent veil to symbolize the emotional and spiritual vulnerability and exposed condition of the women. Indeed, the imagery used to convey this message is striking and unique, but it all falls under very Western views of art and does not respect the fact that the way in which the message is conveyed can be offensive to some -- which reiterates the power structure in which the Western hegemonic thought is at the top.

However, now, allow me to oscillate back to the other side of the debate and comment on the humanistic sincerity that exists in the film. Albeit everything critical that I said about the film, it seems to present a genuine tension between deeply-rooted faith and undeniable personal emotions. In their intimate talks with Allah, the women are seen as being truly conflicted. This grounds the issue in very real, human terms, leaving the issue somewhat open–ended (but, obviously not so much since at the end of the film the last woman finally concludes, “Now that I pray for salvation, you remain silent as the grave I long for.”) Nevertheless, the final taste that the movie leaves in my mouth actually takes away from the humanism and dignity I have discussed. All four monologues are spoken by the same one person wearing the full length, black hijab. This in turn has the effect of essentially combining all of the women and their specific stories into one monolithic Muslim woman, thus ultimately conveying the message that all Muslim women are the same. The woman that was forced into an arranged marriage is the same woman who was raped by her uncle is the same woman beaten by her husband is the same woman who receives lashes for having premarital sex -- they are all seen as the same, and thus the assumption is that all Muslim women are subjected to such misogyny.

Let's Take A Long Walk, Around the Blog, After Dark

For this assignment, we were supposed to select a blog entry from one of the previous Amsterdam programs and analyze it utilizing ideas about the social construction of space as delineated in Lynch's A Walk Around the Block as well as Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space. For my selection, I chose to investigate and meander through the digital space of Demi's first blog entry (from 2006) entitled, "A Little About the Little Ol' Me." As I will discuss in this post, the main deliberate construction of space that I noticed being used by Demi was the embeddedness and specific positioning of photographs - which we can think of as 'visual text' - within the typed text. The interplay of visual and typed text in turn creates a digital space which the author found conducive for the discussion of her "Little Ol'" self.
Looking at the blog entry for the first time, I immediately noticed the juxtaposition of the first paragraph to a photo of Demi and three of her friends at a Huskies game. On a simple, but essential, level the photo serves as an enhancement to the text right next to it that discusses Demi's social and academic life as a student at the UW. Yet, there is more that is conveyed by the picture and the manner in which it is positioned within the blog post. The photo does not appear after the first paragraph. Rather than the photo appearing below the typed text, the text surrounds the picture. Since there is no text to the right of the photo, the photo isn't exactly in the center of the post, but it certainly takes up most of the space, allowing only a few words per line to appear to the left of the photo. When the text appears in such a narrow column to the right of the picture, after reading each line, one is forced to look at the picture as if it were a continuation of the words -- as if, after reading the last word of every line, the photo continues the thought of the typed text. The lines of the paragraph do become longer, but only after we reach the end of the photograph. Thus, as the typed text encircles the picture, it is as if the text becomes the picture's frame, thus seeming almost secondary to the photo. The usage and arrangement of the photo within the typed text consequently shows that the picture is telling just as much of the story - if not more - as the "traditional" text. However, as I have stated before, the picture cannot really be viewed as something that eclipses the text since it is in fact part of the text! As Jessica conveyed in our second class meeting, images should be regarded as a textual form that warrants close reading just as much as literature and writing in general. I fully agree, JB.

Oh, and by the way, if the reader has not figured it out, my title for this post is an ode to Jill Scott's "A Long Walk," a song I was listening to as I was typing this entry. If you are so inclined, you can hear the song, and watch the video, below. Incidentally, on the topic of the construction and use of social and urban space, much can be extracted and pondered over from the video's unique cinematography. Enjoy neo-soul at its finest:

And now, for a close reading...

On the heels of a class session dedicated to learning about and engaging in the literary (and what can also be visual) process of close reading, our first homework assignment for the pre-departure seminar was to conduct a close reading of a recently received e-mail message. Due to laws and ethics regarding privacy, we were not to post the e-mail message. But -- and I think Jessica and Clifford, our two class instructors, would agree -- aren't the effects of sharing our close reading with a public (by posting it on the internet) compromised by not showing the original piece of writing that we are trying to analyze?! For that reason, I will (slightly) steer away from the original assignment and perform a close reading of a Facebook wall-post message, which, by its nature, is not in the private domain since it can be viewed by countless of people at any given time. With that lengthy introduction, I now present the original message:

It was good to meet up today! At least I didnt get caught in traffic this time (which I really did by the way! and you can tell JC and LW that) =P
I'm planning on coming back up to SEA one weekend this quarter to surprise my mom -- I'll let you know if I make it up.

For this particular close reading, I will break the passage down sentence by sentence. Here goes.
It was good to meet up today! - Using the phrase "meet up," the reader can deduce that the encounter that my friend and I had was not random; hence, we were "meeting up," instead of "running into" each other. And, by the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence, the reader can can infer that my friend was probably very excited about "meeting up" with me.
At least I didnt get caught in traffic this time (which I really did by the way! and you can tell JC and LW that) =P - The reader is now informed of the fact that something unexpected and unfavorable had previously happened that made that event less "good." The reader also learns that that "JC and LW" did not believe whatever caused the unsavoriness of that event. Furthermore, a close reading shows that the writer of the message has designated me as the mediator between him and "JC and LW", urging that I tell JC and LW that he "really did...get caught in traffic" that previous time. Finally, although the writer might have been typing a section of a chemistry equation with the last two characters of the line, this was probably not the case, and the reader is expected to recognize that an equals sign followed by a capital P represents emotions of a happy, jovial, joking, or laughing state.
I'm planning on coming back up to SEA one weekend this quarter to surprise my mom -- I'll let you know if I make it up. - The final sentence of this message allows the reader to realize that the writer is presently somewhere south of Seattle, since the person is "planning on coming back up to SEA." To make this conclusion, however, the reader must also realize that the writer is not returning to the sea, but rather to SEA(attle).