Progress Notes: Week 12

• Between weeks 8 and 14, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
  • What data did you collect?
  • What is your initial impression of the data?
  • How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
  • What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
  • What are your next steps?

This week, I read chapters from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman, Racial Erotics: Gay Men of Color, Sexual Racism, and the Politics of Desire by C Winter Han, Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Collins. I also wrote the annotated bibliography entries for these books. I think that it could be effective to start Dalton and I’s podcast situating our analysis and findings in a theoretical framework such as Goffman’s. I also am interested in bringing in Collins’ concept of controlling images, like Prof Greene mentioned in previous feedback. However, I have not interviewed any black respondents. Can I apply the concept of controlling images to non-blacks? I think that Han’s book is particularly relevant to synthesizing my interview last week with a gay man of color and am excited to start making connections between interview and literature.

I also conducted an interview. The interview I conducted this week lasted 37 minutes. It’s interesting to see how the interview lengths vary from respondent to respondent. She said that matching with a Bowdoin student on Tinder gives the match pairing a “nudge” so that one person might make a move offline. She also brought up interesting insights as to how Tinder sexualizes people and it is difficult when the sexualized space that is Tinder collapses with typical academic spaces of a college campus (e.g. seeing someone from Tinder in HL). She also talked about how she thinks Tinder is a great way to experience adventures and meet people when in a new city.

I have started to think about how Dalton and I can structure our podcast. I definitely want to begin with a theoretical framework so we can explain interactions and findings within that context. I then want to go into respondent answers and make connections to relevant studies/literature. I’m not sure if it’s more effective to present respondents individually, deep diving into their responses and possibly linking that to salient identity factors, or to group together patterns from interviews. I’m also interested in possibly interspersing Dalton and my own experiences with dating apps on campus, but is this too subjective then?

The next steps are to conduct maybe 1 or 2 more interview and to start transcribing the interviews I have already conducted.