Week 3

The third week of the workshop felt like a breakthrough for my group of four as we began to really dive into the lyrics of our song and pick the direction for our project. This breakthrough came in the form of the beginnings of a song detailing one of the youth’s future road trips across the US. As they move from state to state they disparage everything they come across until they return to bright, sunny California. Reaching this point and having a clear vision for our project was a journey in and of itself and at times felt out of reach, but we were finally able to land on something that piqued the interest of the youth by choosing a topic that one of them was actively experiencing, drawing on themes that they had strong opinions about and embracing humor.

The youth are constantly making jokes, with each other and at each other’s expense and at first the levity in the room felt like a hurdle to get past before we could get into the serious business of writing a song, but over time we came to embrace the humor and find ways to embed it into the song itself. When the youth would shout out a joke, instead of trying to move back towards the project we were working on, our new task was trying to find a way to incorporate the joke, whether as a lyric, or an ad lib, or just some inclusion of a similar idea. By really embracing everything around us, we were able to make much more progress on our song than in previous weeks, and the song feels more honest. It is no longer just a song we are writing about some distant concept, but instead an amalgamation of our experiences as a group.

Today, for the first time we also had a recording device present in session. Having a physical, professional looking device helped make everything feel a bit more real. The shift from recording small thoughts in a phone or trying to write things down on scraps of paper to having a physical and important feeling gadget helped introduce some purpose into our sessions. Now we felt like professional musicians which helped us buckle down and get some work done.

Returning to discussion after our session, the class shifted its focus to viewing our work through the lens of ethnography. This turned out to be a divisive concept, as occasionally it was a bit challenging to marry the deeply personal and relational work that we are doing in session with the study of cultures and individuals in a more academic sense. While Conquergood’s “Rethinking Ethnography” posits a more fluid definition of the term that invokes a more social and on the ground approach, ethnography is still an academic field that personal involvement could muddle. We identified that possibly a middle ground in the way we approach this work might be found by embracing the ethnographical knowledge we can gain by interacting on the ground with communities while maintaining that the core of the relationship one has with said communities exists outside of that ethnographical information collection, as the personal involvement in communities solely for the purpose of study, feels a tad immoral. That being said, when one approaches with the belief that they are working with a group, not simply studying a group they are bound to walk away with newfound ethnographic knowledge about the members of that group.

All in all, this was an exciting week, where we made a lot of progress both in our groups
and in the classroom, and I am excited for wherever week four takes us.

Oliver