Week 3 – Presentations. . . 💭

My Presentation

This Monday, we had to present our chosen topics to the class. It was quite nerve-wracking, but as I got into these topics (which I love btw!!!), I eased into it. It was 8 minutes per presentation.

As established in my earlier blog posts, the topics I chose are:

• Hair Braiding
• Ball-Jointed Dolls
• The London Underground
• Nightcore

Hair Braiding: It was my first topic, and one I’m particularly passionate about because I grew up with it, and it is deeply ingrained in my culture. If I decide to take this topic further, I want to explore the culture surrounding it, including superstitions/beliefs around braiding.

Ball-Jointed Dolls: I’ve loved this topic since I was about 13 years old, and I love how intricate the process of creation is of each doll, especially OOAK (One of A Kind) dolls, which are personalised to each owner. If I were to explore this further, I would like to talk about the history, culture and expand on the one of a kind topic.

London Underground: Having grown up in Greater London, the Underground was always something of fascination, and I thought it would be a cool topic to focus on! If I were to explore this, I would expand on the culture, weirdness and people who frequent the tube.

Nightcore: A fun, energetic music genre! I’ve loved this since I was a kid as well, so I wanted the delve into how it came to be. If I were to expand on this, I want to talk about how it came to be and how it makes me (and other people feel).

Here is the full video if you’d like to have a look at the presentation with all the slides. As a note, there was sound and videos used in this presentation, but they don’t play.

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Feedback

We used the nodenogg.in site to give feedback to our peers. My presentation went well, and I had a lot of interesting feedback that I could apply to my research on the different subjects. I loved the responses I received, and everyone was really open to my topics, adding some commentary and questions that provoked further study/intrigue. Here are some of the feedback/questions I liked from the nodenogg.in for each subject:

• Hair Braiding:
  • Braiding of hair vs. braiding of other things? (rope, etc.)
  • community connections and culture
  • cornrows to hide food and mapping out routes, interesting secret languages
• BJDs
  • really draws attention to the idea of humans as ‘jointed creatures’. How does this affect our perception of ourselves?
  • Really popular in Japan, Korea and China, I have one if you want to do some research on it
  • fashion dolls ? could connect to braiding aswell ?
• The Underground
  • have you seen people running/doing parkour to race the underground trains?
  • underground as communal liminal space
  • Why are certain underground lines more or less deprived than others?
• Nightcore
  • Would you maybe make your own nightcore music?
  • How did Nightcore affect early 2000s culture?
  • nightcore could also be compared to changing vinyl speeds (maybe vaporwave too?)