September 19, 2014 - 11:09
Weiyu Yuan and Grace Chung
Esem 029
Encountering others
Project Proposal
Step Up
We have chosen to document our shoe consumption over the next ten weeks. We will be playing with the ideas of stepping on someone as well as walking in someone else’s shoes. We are assuming that we are literally and metaphorically stepping on someone’s hard work when we wear our shoes. We do not know if our ignorance has helped fund child labor. Our goal for this project will be to transition from stepping on the less advantaged and fortunate people to walking side by side with them and hopefully educating others. Also, We will be tracing where the most commonly used materials for three different shoe brands originate from—one universally popular brand: Vans, one high quality brand: Jimmy Choo, and one low quality brand: H&M.
Because we are two individuals from two vastly different cultures, we will take our study further and survey fifty Chinese born Bryn Mawr students and fifty American born Bryn Mawr students. The two questions that we will be investigating are how our shoe consumption can help establish a contact zone between the consumers (us) and the producers as well as opening up a contact zone between Weilla’s Chinese and Grace’s American cultures. Chinese consumers have a different mindset in shopping than that of American consumers. We will attempt to research the psychology of both producers and consumers from both countries. We will explore how each culture’s differing mindset can help expand our interactions with others.
In order to help aid our investigation, we will survey a hundred Bryn Mawr students from China and America. Through our survey, we will figure out what shoe brand from the three brands we studied is the most popular among our two culture groups. With this information, we will attempt to find out whether the brand people choose to buy has anything to do with their cultural backgrounds or on an individual’s encounters. Some questions we might consider are whether people are buying certain brands just because of popular opinion, or for the assumed higher quality. We will also ask each group of students their thoughts and opinions on buying designer shoe knockoffs as well as how much judgment they pass on others just from noticing one’s choice in shoe wear. We will then use our findings to compare and contrast the two groups’ answers.