A Slightly Different Research Process… | The Friday Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

Well, given how late my last Friday Update was, it’s not actually been that long since I was last writing to you all! And, with me having spent most of that time with my head down writing the next video, it’s not been all that eventful. Nevertheless, I wanted to share some thoughts on how the process of writing this video has differed from usual…

Usually, when I first begin work on a new project, I head to Google and seek out a good “introductory” text. For my last video, this was a book called The Public Sphere: An Introduction; for other projects it’s been books from Oxford University Press’ Very Short Introductions series.

Sometimes these books are good; sometimes they’re terrible! Either way, my knowledge before writing a video tends to be a bit “potted”: however much I know about a topic, it’s usually the case that my knowledge isn’t all that methodical and there will be blind spots in my understanding. Forcing myself to go back-to-basics on the topic in questions helps me to ensure that, even if there are certain aspects of a topic I’m not going to discuss, I’m at least aware it exists.

As I discussed last week, for my next video, I’m doing a rhetorical/discourse analysis of both Matt Walsh’s transphobic documentary What is a Woman? and a bunch of reporting on trans issues from the British media. As such, the process has been quite different.

I’ve certainly been doing a bunch of contextual research. I’ve spent considerable time mapping out the key events in the UK’s current transphobic moral panic and have returned to some old notes on the tense relationship between trans people and the media (particularly Shon Faye’s excellent The Transgender Issue). Nevertheless, it’s been interesting to have begun work on the project by primarily watching lots of news clips and reading lots of much shorter (and mostly journalistic) articles, rather than my usual starting point of spending a week or so with my nose in a massive book!

The real positive, however, is that this has allowed me to begin getting words on paper for the script much, much quicker than I usually would. I’ve already got around 2,000 words locked-in (although I will likely edit these down at some point) which is always nice to have so early on!

And outside of work?

Given that it’s only been a couple of days since I last wrote to you, I’ve not had time to get up to much! Nevertheless, I did go the British Fireworks Championships the other night. These have happened in Plymouth, where I live, for a long, long time and are very much a favourite event of lots of locals. I popped down with some friends to watch the displays which were, as ever, pretty impressive. One used 450kg of gunpowder which, whilst I’m no expert, definitely sounds like a lot!

This weekend, I’m off to do a Tough Mudder obstacle course which, after a couple of years of persuading, some friends convinced me to sign-up for. Whilst I’m quite good at running these days, I still have zero upper body strength so I’ve no idea how well I’ll do. If you don’t hear from me next Friday, it was obviously enough to finish me off!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

I thought I’d leave you with a recommendation for a YouTube video this time around. The other day, I stumbled across a video on the excellent People Make Games called The Games Industry Is Failing the Working Class. Written and presented by Sam Greer, it’s a great look at how working class people are under-represented across the video games industry.

It echoes a lot of realities I used to engage with when doing scholarship around class and the arts and makes some great points about the manner in which discrepancies in who is empowered to make games effect the stories that get told within them.

You can check the video out on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Xz6NyOaP5xg

Or on Nebula here: https://nebula.app/videos/people-make-games-the-games-industry-is-failing-the-working-class/

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!