1.
Strange Encounters reframes “the stranger or other” not as a stable identity but as a relational position produced in concrete encounters. For Ahmed, everyday meetings like yielding a doorway, exchanging greetings, returning a gaze, pronouncing a name, producing documents, etc. They are never neutral, they are pre-scripted by histories, state policies, media narratives, and ordinary etiquettes. Therefore, who counts as us and who is marked as them is not given in advance but reiterated through small, embodied practices of seeing, hearing, and touching. Central here is “stranger fetishism”, the tendency to pin diffuse historical and structural tensions onto a figure of the stranger, as if problems arrive with an outsider rather than with long sedimented exclusions. On this view, “hospitality” versus “suspicion” is not just an attitude gap; it is a matter of spatial choreography, who occupies inside/outside, who is addressed first, whose accent gets corrected or ignored. Ahmed shows how affective economies such as fear, curiosity, disgust, warmth, circulate in encounters and stick to certain bodies, making some subjects appear “risky,” “teachable,” or “manageable.” Rather than appealing to a vague ideal of “integration,” the book returns change to the craft of meeting: modulating distance, rewriting etiquette, practicing naming and being named to loosen the hard edge of us/them in repeatable micro-moments. The proposal is not a sentimental inclusivity but a political ethics of embodiment: through bodies, sounds, and gestures, relocate welcome and coexistence from slogans back into techniques of everyday life.
2.
This book provides a framework for my Beginner’s Guide to elevate micro-moments—yielding at doorways, nodding greetings, being called by name/misnamed, queueing distance, entering/exiting groups—into theoretical questions: self-introduction is not information exchange, but a “positioning within an encounter.” Through Ahmed’s lens, can I interpret the renaming trajectory “from Helen → Zoya → Ziran” as a shift “from being named to self-negotiation”? Can I read the minor failures and successes in “finding a group/finding work” as the body’s process of reallocating intimacy or strangeness within space and rules? For my tentatively scheduled interviewees Victor and Merlyne, can I probe how Victor was welcomed? and how she welcomes new students (Merlyne), capturing subtle clues through the lens (gestures, distance, gaze, the sound of being called by name). This would weave humor and observation into a theoretical framework, making the film both naturally engaging and academically grounded. Expand on the content in the above paragraph.
3.
This week’s practice day focused primarily on preliminary project preparations. I have completed comprehensive testing of the filming equipment, including the stabilizer compatibility of the DJI Pocket 3 and the low-light performance of the Canon camera. Simultaneously, I conducted test shoots at Temple University Library, with a particular emphasis on fine-tuning the audio pickup of the lapel microphone in high-ceilinged spaces.
I haven’t met Kristina DeVoe yet, but I’ve already booked an appointment with her this week on Tuesday. I will meet her in person in Charles Library.
Additionally, I confirmed the interview schedule with Merlyne, the administrator of the Temple University Chinese Student Association, who will be interviewed.
Reference
Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. Routledge.