"WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE RACED?"
A Research Tutorial at Humboldt University of Berlin
"What Does It Mean to Be 'Raced' – An Autoethnographic Approach" is a research tutorial at Humboldt-University of Berlin. The research team consists of nine students from various disciplines and cultural backgrounds. In this tutorial, we use autoethnography as our research method to explore the unspoken facets of raced experiences. Autoethnography is "writing about the culture from the 'I' perspective." (Adams 2015) This qualitative research method has gained more and more recognition amongst sociologists in the last decade because of its emphasis on the researcher's positionality and the element of story-telling in our experiences.
We have three sub-projects in the winter semester 2019/2020:
Race in Dating: "Race in Dating" explore how racial factors shape people's dating lives in various contexts and how modern age dating harbours wildly stereotypical behaviours and assumptions that we rarely talk about.
Meet My Expectation: "Please meet my expectations" is a project where the question "where are you really from" is investigated in a field research. How do people respond? How does this question make people feel? With interest in the natural response to this question, we went out on the streets to try and capture this response. Here we present photographs of diverse people and one-on-one interviews about experiences related to this question.
Being White: “Being white” is a field research project in which we try to explore the relationship between people of colour and white people. The role of white people as a norm and their privileges in the society is questioned, and the impact of racism is being discussed.
In our research into raced experiences, we learned that story-telling shapes our understanding of events and influences our perspectives. Nothing is further from the truth than to assume that people with similar background will automatically make similar experiences. At the end of the day, it is not about which category we are put into, but about the lives, the struggles, and the hopes that happen around these categories.
Check out the blog posts to read more about our research and feel free to write us for feedback!