Lotta Bökler – “Where are you really from?”

Research Question

Our group has chosen to investigate people’s experiences, thoughts, and opinions around the question “Where are you from- No, but where are you really from?”.

We are five female students in our twenties, in Berlin, Germany, with different skin colors, ethnicities and backgrounds regarding our nationality and where we grew up. Some people of our group were interested in the question because it has always been a frustrating part of their daily life experience. Some of us were interested, because they were faced with this question since they came to Germany as an ERASMUS Student, and felt comfortable answering this question or experienced people being surprised when telling them they’re in Germany as an ERASMUS Student.

I was interested in our topic, as I was born in Germany and have never been anywhere else, except for vacation, but because of my complexion my Identity as a German has always been questioned and challenged by various people in institutions and my day to day life. When exchanging our personal experiences within the group it was really interesting to see, how our different experiences enabled us to have different perspectives on the topic as a group and develop methods and questions we figured might be helpful for our research. Nonetheless, we all had one thing in common: People projecting their expectations about us upon us and hardly accepting, or being surprised by our personal reality and truth. Therefore, we came up with the name “Please meet my expectations” for our research.

Method

As the interdisciplinary tutorial “What does it mean to be raced?” was an autoethnographic research tutorial we had different disciplinary backgrounds and were mostly unfamiliar with the autoethnographic research method. We read the literature our tutor had offered us regarding this method and decided we wanted to do interviews with various kinds of people. Since our group of five people already had various perspectives and emotions towards the topic, we hoped for an interesting result consulting different people on the question. We worked on a question catalog for interviews and planned to not only evaluate the participant’s answers, but also reflect ourselves in the process of the research, as this was supposed to be an autoethnographic research.

Once we came up with a list of questions we wanted to ask each interviee, our tutor offered us to test the questions on her. We figured that our questions did not trigger the reactions we aimed for and caught ourselves being plagued by expectations about other people’s experiences and emotions. We came to the conclusion that we had to be more flexible in the interview process and use the questions more as a guideline instead of a must-do. We aimed for more conversation character in our interviews by being open to everything the interviees might come up with and letting them co-direct and co-create the chat.

In addition to the one-on-one-interviews with heart-to-heart character, we came up with the idea of asking random people on the street the question “Where are you from? But where are you really from?” and (with their consent) taking pictures of their facial reaction to the question. We created an instagram account for this part of our research project with the name @pleasemeetmyexpectations, where we wanted to publish these reactions, and perhaps a quote of these people when asking them more questions.

We figured it might be valuable for our research to also take pictures of the people’s reaction, that we interviewed in a more private setting and add it to our instagram.

Self-Reflection

l. The One-on-One-Interview:

We agreed on all of us interviewing at least one person. I personally chose my best friend, as it was close to the winter break, and I was heading back home to my family and was also visiting her. I perceived my best friend as an interesting informant in the question “what does it mean to be raced?” and especially “Where are you really from?” since I witnessed her being faced with the latter question since our childhood.

When she agreed on doing this interview with me we sat down on her sofa and I asked her whether I could take a picture of her face after asking her a question that might trigger her. She agreed and I asked her where she was from and where she was really from. Since we know each other since I am alive this was a question she knew I knew the answer to which irritated her. After I took the photo of her I explained her more about the topic of our research, and we began the interview. Though I planned on letting the interview be more like a conversation, I really just asked her one question after another and did not manage to create a natural conversation flow. This was because I still held on too tightly to an expected outcome and was irritated when she did not at all answer what I was expecting her to. Throughout the interview I sometimes found myself wanting to answer the questions when I had a different opinion on them.

In retrospective, I think it would have been good if I interviewed more than just one person and especially people I share no daily experiences and history with. I guess I would have fewer expectations about their answer then. Moreover I think by doing more than one interview I would have gotten more practice and hopefully learned how to be more open to the answers and opinions of people. I think it would have also helped me to release the fear of silence and questions running into dead ends, and consequently going more with the flow and impulse of my interviewee.

ll. Taking pictures of random people on the street:

Rebecca, Lisa and I met on a sunny day in university to take pictures from various people in front of the university building in Dorothenstraße 24 and Friedrichstraße. We practiced asking people for their consent and briefly introducing them to our research project on each other first. Afterwards we approached the first people outside. Some of them where in a hurry or not interested in talking to students they did not know, others were scared off as soon as we told them about our instagram page, where we wanted to publish people’s facial reactions. Within approximately twenty minutes we found one woman willing to participate, who gave us consent for publishing her facial reaction on instagram. Afterwards we asked a few more people, but they all rejected us. We tried to come up with ways to present our research to people in a more trustworthy and attractive way but seemed to fail as still everyone was saying ‘no’. After that we figured that this part of our research was not the most important part anyway, and the one-on-one-interviews were more important, and we all felt awfully uncomfortable asking people if we could take a picture of their face for our research project, so we decided to stop.

I feel like in both cases the question “where are you from? But where are you really from?” did not trigger the reactions we hoped to come across with our research. I believe it is because it is a totally different context when you get asked that question in an interview situation or a day to day experience. Trying that question on my best friend was, like I already said stupid, since she knows I know where she’s from. I really resonated with the literature we read in the seminar, especially with Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, but I feel like I did not come up with as many research results as I could’ve. I think if I had let myself have more interview experiences and improve my interview skills and questions our research would have benefited from it. By writing this I figured, I could have included the question “what does it mean to be raced?” in the question catalog, as interviees probably would have interesting and valuable answers regarding this question. Since I had a huge workload from other seminars as well, I did not manage to practically implement my own ideas for improving my way of going about the research.

lll. Result

What I found out with our research is a confirmation of what our group already discovered by exchanging our experiences: Every person has different encounters with racial experiences and the question “where are you really from?”.

In the interview my best friend’s main point was that people should be more sensitive with this question and I really resonate with that. I also saw the importance of her bringing up a situation, in which she tried to find a solution to a problematic experience influenced by racial structures by opening up to people, but got denied her experience by people who were not negatively effected by these structures.

Hearing her experiences did not only help me to become more aware of what I can improve about my interview skills, but also helped me identify a more detailed personal research interest for potential projects in the future. I am really interested in researching the phenomena of people not being negatively effected by racism often feeling uncomfortable talking about racism and/or denying its presence. Consequently, I am interested in the frustration of effected people, which I count myself into, with this experience and ways all people, in all positions in society can open up towards the topic, so we can educate each other and find productive solution together.

Conclusion

I think this seminar “What does it mean to be raced?” was an amazing opportunity to exchange experiences and come up with ideas on how to research phenomena related to racial structures. The autoethnographic approach enabled me to reflect my ethnographic methods even more precisely and reminded me of the importance of being flexible throughout the process of research.