Master thesis | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (MSc)
closed access
“There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”, a Scandinavian saying, illustrating how one could live with and through weather, that is, how to weather. This visual ethnographic...Show more“There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”, a Scandinavian saying, illustrating how one could live with and through weather, that is, how to weather. This visual ethnographic research was a way for me to live with and through the Covid-19 pandemic and the restrictions that it brought in my own country, the Netherlands. I have done fieldwork for almost three months at natural (outdoor) playground Het Woeste Westen (The Wuthering West), a place in Amsterdam where children can play with and in nature both ‘freely’ as ‘semi-organized’ with adult supervision. The study explores how children think of outdoor play as full of opportunities unavailable at home, what children do in the outdoors, and how their experiences shape their thinking about play and their relation to the material world. I have used audiovisual recordings, non-participating observations with interaction and visual elicitations. The result is a thesis in both written as ethnographic film form. The text includes both descriptions of observational video footage as written field notes, and transcribed video footage. The film aims at showing what I have seen and what I have been told by protagonists. My key research finding is that children weather by using the elements in their outdoor play. I argue that weather creates the world that they are in, which impacts how they play. Examples of this are moving more in winter weather to stay warm, jumping and sliding in mud as a fun activity and making fires to get warm and dry after a cold and rainy day.Show less
Master thesis | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (MSc)
open access
WeChat is one of the most used social media in China. While few Dutch people use it, the app remains popular among the many Chinese students in the Netherlands. This popularity abroad evokes the...Show moreWeChat is one of the most used social media in China. While few Dutch people use it, the app remains popular among the many Chinese students in the Netherlands. This popularity abroad evokes the question what this platform has to offer for people living in a different country and how it relates to a sense of ‘home’. Within social media research, a call is made to study social media using a non-media centric approach, focusing on the context in which it is used. Within this research, I study WeChat as used by three international Chinese students, and how they use WeChat to create a sense of home. Through digital observation and film, I examined how participants use WeChat, how they create a feeling of home while studying in the Netherlands, and the connection between these two. Overall, this study found that for a sense of home, relations, materiality, and a sense of security are important, for participants to both adjust to the Netherlands and recreate a sense of the ‘former home’. Their use of WeChat provides a tool to realise these different aspects.Show less
