Coming Back
Hello again.
I haven’t been posting this much to the blog mostly because I’ve been busy doing tons of other stuff: some important for my studies, others simply just fun. Since I last posted, the COVID-19 pandemic has turned our world upside down, I did a year and a half of virtual teaching and learning, I rode 257 miles in Vermont this past month, and I’ve started on what generally feels like my dissertation fieldwork. This has been, and will be until further notice, digital - I will not interact with humans face to face during my fieldwork unless I can secure funding to travel to Dar es Salaam. Today, I was told by the good folks who run the Fulbright DDRA fellowship that my work requires a more cohesive research question, as well as a more fleshed out research methodology. This was, mind you, after they told me they were not funding my project. Another loss - are all graduate students this familiar with being told no? It feels like I sit atop a mountain of mistakes and failures and have ornamented this mountain with a few trinkets of success.
Anyway, I wanted to write out what I’ve been doing these past three months since I’ve been ABD since June. Outside of conducting a freeform, albeit interesting course of music and religion, I’ve been trying to interact with the social media world of bongo flava. At first, this just meant keeping up with various music outlets that I knew were important in the world of bongo flava, but it has transformed to creating an entire ecosystem of online spaces where I can interact with Tanzanian music, politics, and news. Because bongo flava is a multimedia world, I started with Instagram as my main entry point. My major goal was to figure out what someone who was interested in bongo flava would look at and see every day on the feed. Slowly, I realized that I would need to expand to more media outlets to map out a larger picture of an imagined life on bongo flava social media. Today, I have professional researcher accounts on twitter, instagram, boomplay, whatsapp, and tiktok, and I am doing my best to explore all of them on a semi daily basis.
For now, the work is slow, and interacting with social media every day is much more about understanding the platform that is designed to be human-like, versus interacting with actual human beings. I’m not sure if that makes sense…really what I’m trying to say is that social media is human-like, not really human. Speaking to 3,000 followers at once, all the time, is not a particularly regular way of interacting with other human beings. But, I’ve learned that there are no problems or mistakes in fieldwork - just different answers than what I expected. Gotta keep my mind most open.
I’m going to try and write more of these - helps sum up how things are going and forces me to make a few conclusions which helps provide other avenues for research. Hopefully these help!
More later.
