Semester Summary and Future Plan As the semester draws to a close, it’s time to summarize progress and plan for the next phase. For the proof of concept, I received valuable feedback from classmates. There was widespread agreement that the film’s sensory narrative perspective is unique, and I will continue to retain my “collage” style …
Author Archives: Ziran Yuan
Blog#12
1. Summary of the article The article examines how professors’ everyday behaviors signal inclusion or exclusion to international students and how these signals shape students’ academic goal pursuits and sense of belonging. Drawing on in-depth interviews with international students at two large U.S. research universities, the authors use a belongingness framework and resilience-based models of …
Blog#11
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, …
BLog#10
1. The article that I read this week, it examines global student mobility trends, the status of the U.S. as a study destination, and the challenges it faces. The article notes that while the U.S. remains the largest host country for international students due to its excellent academic system, diverse institutions, and cultural and economic …
Blog#9
1. Low and Altman laid a crucial theoretical foundation for the field of environmental psychology. This study systematically elucidated the core concept of “place attachment”—the deep-seated connection humans form with specific physical environments across three dimensions: emotional, cognitive, and practical. The authors profoundly revealed the transformation mechanism from abstract “space” to meaningful “place”: this shift …
Blog#8
1. The article delves into the issue of cross-cultural adaptation among Chinese undergraduate students in American higher education environments, with particular focus on the dimension of academic adaptation. The study notes that despite the explosive growth in the number of Chinese international students over the past decade, there has been little scholarly effort to understand …
Blog#7 Reflecting
1. I feel the research progress has reached my initial expectations for the semester. The original goal was multisensory documentation, but I have now found a more profound and specific theoretical anchor. The milestone I’m most proud of is discovering Arjun Appadurai’s theory of “The Social Life of Things” and subsequently developing my own methodology. …
Blog#6
1.This book presents a fascinating perspective: objects, like people, possess their own life stories. We often assume an item’s value is fixed—that its raw materials or production costs determine its worth. But this book reveals that’s not the case at all. The meaning and value of an object are created and transformed through its constant …
Blog#5 Non-Representational？Non-Representational！！
1.Traditional arts and social science have long focused on “representation,” that is, the ways in which language, symbols, and images are used to represent and interpret the world. Thrift argues that this over-reliance on representation obscures a more fundamental and expansive dimension of social life. The core of the world’s reality, he suggests, is constituted …
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Blog#4
1. Academic Article SummaryIn this seminal work, anthropologist David Sutton explores how food and food practices serve as powerful mediums for encoding, storing, and recalling memory. He argues that taste, smell, and the embodied rituals of cooking and eating are central to the formation of personal and collective identities. Moving beyond food as mere sustenance, …