(Before I start, no… Not crack) Coca-Cola (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I woke up feeling great, and the first half of the day wasn’t too taxing. There was an auditor lurking around, and apparently untrained foreigners shouldn’t really be working, so I spent a lot of time sitting and making notes. It was perhaps even a bit cooler than usual, due ...
Well it’s been a while! Another year has passed at University, which means it’s time for my next adventure. And this time I’m in… Well, you can probably guess from the title of my next blog: Occidental in Oriental To find out more, click on the link just above, and just as before you are very welcome to follow me, ...
Hi folks, Sorry about the lack of contact. I’ve just taken a much-needed mini break, which involved a good deal of shopping, walking up rather large hills, shopping, eating monumental amounts of delicious food, shopping, relaxing on quiet, sandy beaches, and, um, more shopping… It’s been lovely, but it is now about time to return to why I’m here in ...
A Canal in Colombo This is just a picture of one of the many little canals running through Colombo. I haven’t taken any photos of these canals, as I’ve only ever passed them in the car, but they all struck me as being very pretty, with grassy banks running down from little wooden houses with corrugated rooftops. There are always people ...
My recovery nap today was rudely interrupted by Mrs G, returning from work. Both she and Baba G have the habit of shouting somebody’s name repeatedly, whether or not that person is in earshot or not, and even though from my bed I was shouting back ‘Yeeeessss!!!’ she obviously hadn’t heard me, so I hurriedly jumped out of bed and ...
In Colombo, Rat, Ratty and Mouse took to entertaining me whilst I was working. This I could tolerate; they were quite amusing. Cockroaches, on the other hand, I struggle with. I could hear some scuffling noises in my room yesterday evening, and I thought, ‘Oh, a mouse!’ But then I paused, and listened. Whatever it was, it was moving at ...
Once a month, or rather, every full moon, Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka celebrate Poya Day. It’s a national holiday, so lots of places are shut for the day, including the factory. If I was in Ampara, I might see the empty factory floor, the machines sitting quietly, the fans immobile. But I’m not in Ampara. I’m running days behind ...
Down the line… Driving through the countryside, a common sight is to see the railway winding its way along the side of the road, weaving in and out of trees and villages, and criss-crossing over the road as and when it pleases. I glanced down one line to see first a cat, peering across the sleepers, a dog a little ...
Before I tell you all about today’s research (it went well), I thought I’d tell you a little about some of the weird but not always wonderful snacks I’ve been fed whilst at the factory, mostly during tea breaks. Chunks of Jaggery (Essentially, chunks of slightly peculiar tasting sugar. Or rather, ‘a concentrated product of date, cane juice, or palm sap ...
All four participatory mapping groups are complete, although I do still have another week in the factory (after a short ‘break’ in Colombo – hopefully some more interviews and meetings with some NGOs and researchers), so I could do some more when I’m back. Interestingly, I’ve called in Chamila’s help to arrange the last two sessions, and although up until ...
My first task of the morning was to head out to a village near Thirrukovil, to the Centre for Peace Building and Reconciliation. It wasn’t easy to find, as it was in a little building concealed by palm trees, but once there I held a really interesting focus group with some of the staff members. I’ll write more about this ...
One of the most unnerving things is when you can hear the whining, whizzing, whirring sound of a nearby mosquito, but you can’t figure out where the little b****r is; even worse is when the main question going round in your head is, “is it outside my bed net, or inside…?” Tagged: mosquito net, mosquitoes
If Sinhalese can be used as a metonym for Sri Lankan, then where do Tamils and Muslims fit in? Tagged: identity, Muslim, nation state, national identity, Sinhalese, Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan, tamil
JAYATISSA, JEYARAJ AND JACOBINISM: DEBATING ‘SRI LANKAN-NESS’ IN POST-WAR SRI LANKA (via Ground Views) Photo courtesy Sri Lanka Guardian Much is being written nowadays about post-war Sri Lankan identity and the challenges of unity in diversity, among which are well-meaning interventions extolling the virtues of building a modernist, inclusive Sri Lankan… [Please click on the title of the article ...
A rural scene I thought it was about time to pop one of these up. For those of you who’ve come across to this blog from my Bangalore blog, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to do a sketch! I know I said I’d try but I’ve just been too busy. Today was a day off for the packing ...
It’s been a long and difficult afternoon of napping and thinking, napping some more, thinking a little more, and writing. But I feel it’s been useful. I started out with a mind map: The ‘What Am I Doing?’ Mind Map And then moved on to write up ‘The Situation’: • A large employment site, employing multiple ethnicities: Tamil, Muslim and ...
…But they’re certainly not going badly. The little schedule I made for myself the other day has not been diverged from too dramatically, and the next couple of days are set to be relatively fruitful. So far, I’ve done the following: Arranged a meeting with the Sri Lanka Centre for Peace Building and Reconciliation in Thirrukovil tomorrow morning – this will ...
I’ve now completed two participatory mapping sessions with groups of workers at the factory I’m researching. The aim of the maps is to understand where and when workers of different ethnicities come into contact with people of other ethnicities. In a district where Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese reside, it is surprising to see that so far, the only time my ...
I just spotted this on another blog [The Hampshire Feminist Collective: 'The legacies of Orientalism and the exoticizing of women']: “The brilliant Emi Koyama once said “There’s no innocent way of being in this world”, meaning that no one, not even the most enlightened among us, can exist outside of history, outside of the legacies of colonial violence that shaped the ...
Before diving in and talking about this, I should probably first explain what on earth I mean by my positionality. I mean, how I am perceived by the participants of my research. I mean how I perceive them. What pre-existing factors are influencing the relationship between me and my participants? I need to be considering how things such as my ...
