Big M.A. Project Overview
That pic up there? That's one that one of my informants took while I was getting my recorder set up to interview her. It is going to be my official MA thesis/fieldwork icon.
I LOVE my research. For my Masters in cultural anthropology (with a side of medical anthropology), I got to do 9 months of fieldwork. I went and I sat in on classes on pregnancy and parenting for teens and I interviewed young women that I met in them. In the end, I only did interviews with 14 people - 12 young people. But I feel like I've got years worth of data.
When I started this whole thing, I tentatively titled the thing "Pregnant Teens: Living Lessons from Sex Ed." I was thinking about the ways that pregnant and parenting young people are constructed as (im)moral in the stuff they learn in school. I was thinking about how they became morality tales to those young people who weren't pregnant yet and I was wondering how they felt about the stuff they learned. That's why half of almost every interview I've transcribed is about sex ed.
At some point, I began to realize looking at how young women are pathologized by their pregnancies was ground that had been covered and, while I might have a few interesting things to say on that front, I could do something way more exciting than that. In the interviews, I was hearing young women talk about being daughters as well as being mothers. I was hearing them talk about what it meant to be a mother, as a young person. So my focus switched to looking at age - how it's understood and why it matters for the women I spoke with.
I'm not looking to solve anything, I am just looking to talk about what is important in the lives of the young women. That means looking at their responsibilities, their goals, and what they're doing to keep their lives moving.
Their experiences are massively different from each other. They are Latina and white. They are 14-21 years old. A couple were trying to get pregnant, but most weren't, a bunch of babies were unplanned but wanted, and more than a few were deeply conflicted. Most are living at home, most have relationships with the fathers' of their children. All but one are currently in school or planning to back to school in a few months. There is nothing that I hope to point to as "representative" of an experience of teen pregnancy. Instead, I want to pay attention to some of the different ways that it is lived. If there's one general lesson about the experience of teen pregnancy here, it's that it's not all the same.
I am interested in looking at age for a bunch of different reason. For one thing, no one ever does. I know, crazy huh! When people talk about teen pregnancy, they talk about poverty, lack of access to resources, about lack of desire, about peer pressure - all things that the authors assume you understand are based in age - but they don't do any work of thinking about how age may or may not actually play into that. And age matters. It matters a lot. Not in the same way for everyone, of course, but it does matter. And it needs to be examined. Thinking about kinship rights and responsibilities and "citizenship" (larger group, including state, membership) rights and responsibilities gives some insight into that. And underneath all of this, of course, is a shifting idea of what it means to be a good person.
So I think that's my overview for now. I haven't really really started writing yet, so hopefully this will get clearer. But there it is for now.
I LOVE my research. For my Masters in cultural anthropology (with a side of medical anthropology), I got to do 9 months of fieldwork. I went and I sat in on classes on pregnancy and parenting for teens and I interviewed young women that I met in them. In the end, I only did interviews with 14 people - 12 young people. But I feel like I've got years worth of data.
When I started this whole thing, I tentatively titled the thing "Pregnant Teens: Living Lessons from Sex Ed." I was thinking about the ways that pregnant and parenting young people are constructed as (im)moral in the stuff they learn in school. I was thinking about how they became morality tales to those young people who weren't pregnant yet and I was wondering how they felt about the stuff they learned. That's why half of almost every interview I've transcribed is about sex ed.
At some point, I began to realize looking at how young women are pathologized by their pregnancies was ground that had been covered and, while I might have a few interesting things to say on that front, I could do something way more exciting than that. In the interviews, I was hearing young women talk about being daughters as well as being mothers. I was hearing them talk about what it meant to be a mother, as a young person. So my focus switched to looking at age - how it's understood and why it matters for the women I spoke with.
I'm not looking to solve anything, I am just looking to talk about what is important in the lives of the young women. That means looking at their responsibilities, their goals, and what they're doing to keep their lives moving.
Their experiences are massively different from each other. They are Latina and white. They are 14-21 years old. A couple were trying to get pregnant, but most weren't, a bunch of babies were unplanned but wanted, and more than a few were deeply conflicted. Most are living at home, most have relationships with the fathers' of their children. All but one are currently in school or planning to back to school in a few months. There is nothing that I hope to point to as "representative" of an experience of teen pregnancy. Instead, I want to pay attention to some of the different ways that it is lived. If there's one general lesson about the experience of teen pregnancy here, it's that it's not all the same.
I am interested in looking at age for a bunch of different reason. For one thing, no one ever does. I know, crazy huh! When people talk about teen pregnancy, they talk about poverty, lack of access to resources, about lack of desire, about peer pressure - all things that the authors assume you understand are based in age - but they don't do any work of thinking about how age may or may not actually play into that. And age matters. It matters a lot. Not in the same way for everyone, of course, but it does matter. And it needs to be examined. Thinking about kinship rights and responsibilities and "citizenship" (larger group, including state, membership) rights and responsibilities gives some insight into that. And underneath all of this, of course, is a shifting idea of what it means to be a good person.
So I think that's my overview for now. I haven't really really started writing yet, so hopefully this will get clearer. But there it is for now.