Reflection on ARS

This course has been helping me preparing my senior thesis before getting into senior year.

As I started to gather the ideas, we started with bringing in ten objects that is always around me. They were rings, necklaces, card, perfume, hand cream, earphone, hairband, watch, key and notebook. All of them were connected to me, my body. At this point, body does not only mean as in physical body itself but also including mental/emotional connection. As in the idea of me saying body is not just as physical body but also body shapes, races, thoughts, mindset, and own identities. At first, when I had to bring objects and gather images about those, I did not know how I am going to expand the idea or how this will help me. But since thesis is my work, starting from something around me helped to make it more personally.

I made myself a mind map rooting from the question of ‘what does body mean?’ I thought of body as evidence of aging, tool of socializing, tool to be happy, but ultimately I thought that body needs to be in comfort condition and we should be able to be comfortable with any types of body without any regulation/discrimination. Comfort of body is coming from perfect protection in any condition and situation, which means ‘no discrimination’

As I going forward to find the answer of these questions, I wanted to find the representation/example of ‘unity without discrimination’ that is in our world now. And I believed ‘Olympic’ is the one. This is because the purpose of the modern Olympic games is to promote peace and unity within the international community through the medium of sports. I expanded my idea of Olympic to several ways, such as body shape change, doping test, deselected countries.

After that we started to do ethnography research and I was quite not sure where it goes. I think the timing was bad that spring break was coming up and women’s strike event was on the day we get direction that I was not sure how to articulate the questions or how to make relations between interview or site visit. I got better understanding or start point after doing it and talking to professor but I still need to work on it.

I want to learn and make more way that I can make my thesis having important message but not too heavy sounds.